Yeah, the biggest problem with Apple is that since they sell a complete system, they get the whole blame if everything goes wrong. It would be helpful to know whether this was a hardware or software problem, whether it was Mac OS X (modern and solid) or MacOS 9 (elderly and fragile), etc.

Anyway Arnold, you're beating the worng dead horse. The Mac market is niche, elitist, and generally better looking and more intelligent than the predominantly Windows market. We are the people you should look to for inspiration. You should beat up on the Linux crowd. They're the ones who actually think they are entitled to gobble up Microsoft market share.

-Brad

Your Windows experience is unusual. I can't count the number of relatives and friends who have had to completely reformat their hard drives because Windows had become unbootable. Moreover, several of my tech friend are constantly reinstalling Windows (not literally, of course).

As for the Mac, I've been using Macs since 1994 and I've never had a major crash. I had a hard drive fail once in a 10-year old Mac but it was from the horrible Amelio era.

Oh and what's more, I've never had a virus or worm *ever*. I don't have any spyware anywhere on my computer and I have spectacular uptime.

As for Windows, I think that they didn't have their act together until Windows 2000, which I find to be the first Mac comparable version out there. Comparable to OS 9, that is.

Dear Mr. Kling (and other Mac-philes):

I realize that I'm entering into a religious argument here but, well, fools rush in, etc.

1. It's a lot easier to be stable with a closed system.

2. The reason there are fewer Mac-specific nasties is not any inherent virtue of the Mac or inherent vice of Wintel. It's simple ROI: more disruption per hour invested in development.

I'm for diversity. There are applications for which a Mac is the best choice, application for which Wintel is the best choice, and applications for which Linux is the best choice. We need more diversity not less. Computer monoculture is risky just as agricultural monoculture is risky. In diversity there is stability for all of computing.

I use a Mac at home and a Windows system at work. My needs are very modest and both options are fine. And yes, I also have had little trouble with a Microsoft product in the last five years. Perhaps I'm just lucky? I suspect that far too many people judge Bill Gate's offerings by their experiences in the relatively distant past.

The problem with single user reports of OS troubles is that with millions of users out there for any one OS you can always find one guy who has a series of hardware or software errors just by bad luck. I'd want to see some more rigorous comparison of Mac OS X vs NT/Win2k/XP before reaching any conclusions.

I have owned over a half-dozen different macs since 1985 and they all still work, none of them have suffered from any problem other than the occasional crash. Now that I run OS X, a system crash happens maybe once a month if not longer.

I have always been a Windows user until the last two years when my workplace persuaded me into a Mac (iBook, OSX). I really have not been satisfied. The OS has been fine in terms of crashes, but I can't find the kind of software I need to run on Mac. Plus the iBook has had two vicious hardware failures in under two years.

As far as Windows crashes, more unscientific theory is that people who don't know how the Windows OS works tend to crash it more often. But I guess the same would go for car engines.