- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
... (or a BMW) is the fact that Mac owners are compelled to beat back arguments against the One True Computer, and are blind to any possible limitations of the One True Computer. There is a total and complete suspension of all critical judgment.
That's why you don't get a push from Mac users for Apple to sell their OS to run on commodity hardware. Gates didn't make computers cheap; Taiwan and the free market and a huge worldwide PC base did that. They're not permitted to think that Jobs is getting fantastically wealthy charging a 100% markup for the same hardware that everybody else gets a 10% markup on.
To suggest that is to come up against the huge brick wall of Faith. And anybody who's ever tried talking a die-hard Bush supporter down from their weird, fact-free "reasoning" knows how pointless an exercise that can be.
So go on. Give Jobs huge amounts of your money, and I'll choke back my revulsion and give Gates a good deal less. But if you start selling all your other worldly possessions in order to make Jobs happy, you might start to rethink just what the "Mac community" is all about.
Just a suggestion.
BTW, someone a few letters back suggested that Macs are the ONLY computer you can make money owning. That may be the single stupidest sentence I've seen all year, as many of us making our livings on PCs can instantly attest.
