It is like some strange holiday for Mac people. Some new Apple products got released and every LiveJournal I read and every IM I receive has something to do with their new overpriced products. (Yes even the new cheap thing is overpriced. Go look at what kind of Dell you can build for 500 USD, and if you time it right you will get a flat panel monitor free with that.)

Now it isn't that Macs are bad machines. Quite the opposite. I like a nice RISC processor as much as the next guy. And they had SCSI long before the x86 architecture did. Despite this superior engineering x86 machines have come a long way in terms of using standard sane components. Though as a computer scientist I cannot help but remember that at some level all universal Turing machines are equivalent.

I even like the style over substance philosophy. Beauty is an important selling point for many people and Apple deserves to charge more for the extra design work that went into their machines. The thing that bothers me most about Apple is that they market themselves as a bastion of free thought fighting against the evil empire. Remember the "Think Different" advertisement campaign where they used famous revolutionaries and intellectuals to market their computers?

It is not a secret that I am a Linux person. I hate the evil empire too. But in this case the enemy of my enemy is my enemy. Obviously all right thinking Linux types are for freedom of information and open standards. With regards to these ideals Apple gets an F. A system with proprietary software AND hardware is not the bastion of free thought. Apple has other litigious and super proprietary tendencies. For instance they sue their own fan sites for "divulging trade secrets", they send cease and desist orders for Linux desktop themes that "look like" Aqua, they charged users of IEEE standard number 1394 for using the term "FireWire", and they flash iPod software to prevent the playing of songs from the RealNetworks music store. Not very friendly.

In short, Apple Computer has good engineering and excellent marketing, but I cannot bring myself to pay their markup when I have reason to believe that they will take that money and go sue an open source project out of existence.