William Neuheisel

Apple has become quite fashionable lately. I’ve been openly talking about ditching Microsoft Windows for some time now, and several of my friends keep trying to convert me to a Mac. Fortunately, however, I’ve found a much better alternative to Microsoft: I switched to Ubuntu about 2 months ago.

I won’t deny that I’ve been tempted once or twice to buy a Mac; their products, of late, have a lot of great features and pretty good design. There are some major deal breakers for me though.

• Chiefly, proprietary lock-in.

Open source matters. As does freedom from DRM. These are more than just personal preferences for me; they are basically moral issues. In this sense, buying a Mac would be a deal with the devil. Microsoft is certainly a wretched sinner in this department, but Apple is Satan. To have the privilege of running their software, I am forced to buy their computer with their peripherals, to buy music on their store to play only on their music player, and only after it calls home to check in with their DRM system. (oh and I get to give them more money to be locked in to all of their products) Only recently did they deign to allow us to run another operating system on their machine.

Ok, I can grant that Apple makes pretty good products now (and admittedly, partly because of this tight integration) but they haven’t always. What happens if/when they start to suck again? What if more products go the way of their single-button mouse??? Are you telling me that the company that introduced this revolutionary device can’t see fit to add one more frickin button?

I choose Ubuntu because not only is it a GREAT operating system, but it gives me the freedom to use my system the way I want. I would pay more for that, but the kicker is, it’s free!

Oh, and I know this might be knit-picky, but for all of the reading I do on my computer screen, I don’t think I could deal with Mac’s inferior font rendering.

And finally, I would eventually be driven to madness by the never ending slew of products with names consisting of a generic word preceded by a lower-case i.