That iProduct parody is so close to the truth its disturbing. With Apple fanatics no wrong can be done by the company.

Its ridiculous... Apple introduced a $100-$150 mp3 player with no display. Then they advertise that like its a feature. Its unpredictable! You don't know what song is coming next! Then there's that Apple Mini which people are going nuts over because its small. But it costs $500, slower than a comparable desktop Mac, and it doesn't even come with a keyboard and mouse, let a lone a display. Apple must think quite lowly of their market to expect people to fall for that. And the funny thing is that they will fall for it, because their eyes glaze over every time they see a new Apple design, which isn't really innovating at this point but reapplying an existing look to other products.

Don't get me wrong, Apple has some great looking products. But thats all they have. They may have been daring to take a generic looking PC case and turn it into a nicely crafted work of art. That, however, isn't innovation.

Apple doesn't innovate. They take existing technology and market it as if that product is the first ever of its type. I guess they seriously expect people to disregard the fact that there are already dozens of other products doing the same exact thing.

As for their computers, Apple isn't responsible for the innovation there either. The PowerPC processor was designed and manufactured by IBM. This is the same IBM that in 1984 Apple rebelled against in 1984 in that famed television advertisement. Mind you that IBM has been making processors for Apple for years.

Sure, Apple had a part in customizing that processor, but its essentially the same processor IBM uses in other applications. As for the other components, most of it is generic, off-the-shelf parts. Their video cards are unspectacular, somewhat outdated, by PC standards, ATI video cards. The top of the line G5 comes with a Radeon 9600 XT with 128mb. The top of the line video card, which you can find in many PCs today is the x800 with 256mb. The most unique bit of hardware in a G5 is the motherboard, which isn't saying much. Even the cooling system for the G5's is adapted from existing PC technology. However, you're charged 50%-100% more for a Mac. For what? A fancy case?

Then there are those benchmarks. A Mac is twice as fast as a PC of equivalent speed! Isn't that amazing! Thats funny, I have a PC at home and a Mac at work and a 1ghz Mac is no faster than a 1ghz PC. In fact, there are things that PCs do faster. Adobe has admitted that Photoshop runs better on a PC than a Mac. Macromedia Flash absolutely performs better on the PC. So much so that many Flash developers are moving over to PCs.

The Mac's IBM PowerPC processor should have the advantage in that is uses RISC archetecture. That means it performs fewer instructions per clock cycle. However, software needs to specifically take advantage of that hardware. And it just doesn't come into play most of the time. If you're serious about performance you should be getting high-end workstations like Silicon Graphics machines, anyway.

So where do those benchmarks Apple uses come from. Well, it turns out that Apple heavily skews tests in their favor. Actually, they have an outside company do the testing. And while Apple doesn't have it, that company provides all the testing methodology. I read an interesting article about a year ago, which I can't find now, where they tear apart Apple's comparisons. Essentially, Apple severely cripples the PCs to ensure slow performance. And they run the Macs in a special developers mode, which is impractical for the normal user but boosts performance in specific applications. So they skew test results, and come up with these ridiculous claims of performance which are all false. Get any magazine where they compare a PC and a Mac and the Mac consistently loses, and badly at that.

I'm not even going to get into all the problems that Mac OS X has. The system itself is very stable, but everything else seems to suffer because of it. Its like the system does everything it can to save itself. You'll be working and the computer takes it upon itself to close the application. Sometimes you go to save a file and it crashes in the middle of the save! So much for saving often. It handles files in really strange ways. If you're copying files to or from a fileserver, and sometimes compressing files you run the risk of ending up with 0k files. Sometimes, just opening a file is enough to corrupt it, like happens with QuarkXpress. And it has all kinds of ridiculous problems with fonts and drivers. These are all common problems. They aren't unique to me. I know many designers, and different companies on different generations of Macs who've all encountered these problems. And thats not counting what I've read on forums.

Quality control is a big problem with Apple. It's been widely reported that iPods had serious problems with batteries. However, Apple charged people $80 or so to replace those batteries. My friend had an iPod about a year and a half and the thing failed. Their computers have been plagued by a number of problems over the years. The thing Apple products have going for them is that they're nicely built. Their cases are very well constructed. The premium paid over a other hardware, however, doesn't justify the price. And quite a few competitors offer products just as good if not better.

Don't give me this nonsense about hate or envy, or whatever else you what to believe. Too many Mac lovers carry this kind of elitist attitude. This way they don't have to face arguments and criticisms head on. You like Macs, fine, I have no problem with that. But don't try to tell me that Apple products are somehow superior.