Eric,

Welcome to the all Apple family. Lord if I knew what a ride it would be, I would have sold my car and ate 'mac' and cheese for a year to load up Apple stock when the iPod came out.

My best friend is a huge techie - owns a Bang and Olufsen franchise - told me 8 years ago to go with Macs only - it took me a few years to get what he was saying - You get what you pay for -

Bought my first iBook 5 years a go when I got fed up with my Dell laptop - after 5 times sending it back I ended up slamming my fist on the key board necessitating a new laptop. :mace: My friend went to the Apple Store with me to get the new iBook. That lasted 4 years with only a new battery to buy in that time.

When the desk top died, we bought a Mac Mini and followed by iPhones for both of us. Last year I bought the new MacBook Pro in aluminum to get a dual-core processor on my laptop. I did have an issue last weekend with the touch pad on my MacBook, so I made the appt with the Apple store and the dude at the Genius Bar immediately knew the problem. He fixed it on the spot - needed a new glass piece under the tracking pad. 45 minutes later I was out the door, problem solved.

So yeah I am with you on sticking with Apple - so long as they don't forget that it is quality over quantity that got them this far. If they start working for 'market share' their quality will suffer and then their price point won't be justified anymore. Let's hope they don't forget what makes us stick with Apple despite the price.

Now if only I could still buy Apple stock for $7.00 a share.

Bleh. Dell... I've had nothing but issues with them at my old job, and heard nothing but similar issues with them from others. I'm glad I have my Apple products...

Now to get my iPod touch 4g

I don't have any particular issues with Apple products, just with the company.

Their products are, imo, over priced. And that as you mentioned they are extremely restrictive with how they allow people to use their products.

So when the iphone antenna debacle broke, Steve Jobs got an email from a disgruntled user, pointing out that if he held his phone a certain way, it dropped calls.

Steve's response: "Hold it differently". What an arrogant response to a problem that (come on) you KNOW they knew about and deliberately released a flawed product anyway.

Apple consistently breaks old versions of software when they update theirs. There's no concern for the user community with regard to if they're affected. If you don't like it, then either don't upgrade or don't buy an Apple. Otherwise whip out your wallet because you'll be needing to pay for some upgrades.

Apple's control over their developer community is legendary, but really goes over the top when they tell developers that they can no longer use middleware to develop software, because Apple wants to control that. The app store is a walled garden, and Apple can and will, at whim, pull your apps out of it if they duplicate any current or future Apple functionality.

Apple's message is, consistently, "screw you" to both developers AND users. I don't get why people put up with it, but we do - I have an iphone4 and I have a mac mini. The mini has a terrible graphics card and has been relegated to being a fancy slingbox, basically. The iphone4 has great things about it, but I'm in the walled garden, that's for sure.

And it's not going to get better. The success of the ipad and the iphone will dictate how the MacOS will evolve in the future. Do you think it will be more open? I don't. I think the walls of the walled garden are going to get higher.

I'm glad others have had good experience with the "genius" crowd at the Apple store. Mine has been terrible. My mac mini, has been repaired there 4 times. I know it had a bad motherboard. It took 4 visits (one each for the RAM chips, another for the power supply, and another to FINALLY replace the motherboard) before they would replace it. All 4 times they wiped the OS and reinstalled it for no reason.

I think that no matter what, anyone that uses a computer needs to keep this in perspective: No one at Apple has your best interest at heart. It's all about making dough. Apple has learned to play their audience, right down to when Steve needs to put on the black turtleneck.

Just don't drink their Kool Aid, is all I'm trying to say.

If you weren't able to dual boot Windows OS on your Mac, would you still be buying Macs?

I had a hard time getting past: . "I relied on my iPad(since that replaced my windows based netbook) and my iPod touch for everything". That's pretty impressive considering little functionality there is to be found on the iPad. Out of curiosity, besides work, what do you use your iPad for?

But I'm not here to hate on Mac products. It's when we used when I when I was in grade school, so I get the appeal of them, and your well aware of the downsides.

We should make a Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux thread in the lounge for any arguments over the different OS'.

I don't have any particular issues with Apple products, just with the company.<br /><br />Their products are, imo, over priced. And that as you mentioned they are extremely restrictive with how they allow people to use their products.

While they are restrictive, I find it to be a good thing, kinda. I'm used to the openness of well open source, and being able to download a program that's community supported, but at the same time it's a pain. Look at android for example. There's a central app store like apple, but the main android os has been forked to each carrier, meaning that your not running the same android os on a verizon phone that you would, for example, be running on a sprint or tmobile phone. This has lead to major arguments in the open source community and the handset alliance.

Also the price is a bit high, but the same time it's generally because the products are higher end then other computers. My eMachine computer cost me 299.99 but had low end parts. I ended up replacing or upgrading parts on it that made it up to par to a Mac. My Mac mini has a lot of high end parts and works beautifully, the graphics card that the Mac uses is on par with the one I used to replace in my desktop (and that went for about 200 bucks). So with a Mac you really pay for the quality of the parts (and I'll admit the name too lol)

Eric