Recently John Chow posted on his blog that Apple may suck but they have good ads.  I am a big John Chow fan and his blog is one of the few that I read almost daily however Johns post just doesn’t hold water. The only issue here is that John doesn’t say exactly why Apple sucks so I don’t know if it’s about the hardware, operating system or the company but in any case it still doesn’t matter.

Now I’m sure John has a good reason for telling the world Apple sucks but I have to disagree. I am writing this post proudly on my 24″ iMac which I think is the best computer I have owned and it is my second iMac.  John is right however that Apple ads are cool which is why Yahoo has had Steve Jobs talking to them about innovation and vision so they can  better challenge the goliath Google.

I don’t want to turn this into a Apple vs Microsoft vs Linux because that is just stupid. What I will say however is that for me, the Apple computer is better than any other computer I have owned hands down! I have been using computers for 20+ years including Apples and PC’s in desktops and laptops, running Windows, Tiger/Leopard and even different versions of Linux and Apples latest computers are as good or better than all of them.

I wanted to address a few of the points raised in the reader comments on Johns post about Apple sucks.

IMO mac is complete Rubbish, even when you compare software that suppose be so easy to use on mac its way behind, flash is one example. anyway windows is far from perfect but mac is waaaaay further

Have you ever owned a mac? This person says that Mac is way behind on software pointing out Flash as an example. That is total rubbish! I have Flash running on both PC and Mac and they both run the same for me. Maybe you should ask why Adobe used three macs at a recent developer conference I attended!

It’s not Apple computers that I hate but more Apple users. In general a bunch of stuck up, arrogant (wow my Apple is ace) toss pots in my opinion.

So I guess this person has met every single Apple user or this is just a gross generalization.  Sounds like you have some of those traits yourself.  I haven’t had the same experience with all Apple users!

Apple products look great but are geared towards newbies and those who prefer style over substance. How can you seriously function with just one mouse button…I don’t get it

Apple products are for newbies? Take another look at the Adobe conference photo above, I doubt they are newbies! You might also want to tell the thousands of Ruby on Rails developers around the world that they are complete newbies since most of them use the mac too!  You can get multi-button mouse from Apple but even I’ll admit the mouse scroll wheel isn’t that good.

I don’t like Mac. It gave me too much trouble long time ago and that was the reason I still don’t like apple products.

I think now is a good time to give them another go! Things have changed… alot!

Now don’t think I’m bashing all other computers because I’m not. I prefer Macs, friends of mine like Windows, and some prefer Linux. How different do you think the comments would have been if John said he loved Apple?

Boy have I been waiting to get my hands on Apple Mac OS X Leopard since I first saw it previewed at WWDC almost two years ago. I’ve waited so long that it was almost underwhelming once I installed it but didn’t take long to get excited about looking into the new features.

The new features are pretty subtle as OS X Tiger was a great OS as it was but the new features in Leopard make it that much nicer. I like the look of the doc icons which reflect off the reflective surface they sit on. This alone made me switch from hiding to dock to showing the dock.

I really like the stack icon which lets you dump files you keep dumping onto your desktop into so you keep your desktop nice and tidy. iChat with the background video effects is really cool and means you can set it up with a custom or default video background loop and don’t have to worry about the mess you might have lurking behind you whilst your talking with friends and colleagues.

There are only a few minor issues that I have noticed running Leopard. I have two iMacs, one being a 2nd generation G5 PowerPC processor which is about 3 years old and the other is a the newest iMac Intel Core2 Duo. The G5 loaded Leopard just as seamlessly as the Intel Mac however some of the features on the PowerPC G5 don’t work.

For example the background effects for iChat aren’t available on the G5. I thought I might have got the latest version of iLife with the Leopard install but this is not the case. I have a MySQL database installed on the system and found that it cannot be started from the system preference panel so I needed to start it up from the terminal window. Also on the G5 PowerPC I couldn’t get the new feature quick look to work but I haven’t really played with that much so maybe I just need to figure out why it’s not working.

Overall though, Mac OS X Leopard is a sweet operating system and if your still using Microsoft windows, now is a good time to jump ship and enjoy the switch to Apples best operating system yet.