I was bored the other day, so I decided to solve one of the greatest mysteries of our times: why do so many people think that Macs are "just better," when in fact OS X and the hardware upon which it runs are increasingly identical to other platforms, and when Macs with few exceptions run the same exact set of productivity applications? Most of the answers on the Internet to this question were clearly written by people who have not yet finished elementary school, at least as far as their adhesion to the conventions of standard written English would indicate. Once in a while, however, you do come across a Mac user who can spell. One of the more grammatically sound and comprehensive outlines that I found of the "Macs are just better" platform is available here. Titled "Macs are Better," the essay focuses specifically on why Macs are so superior to Windows and everything else for "graphic designers." Unfortunately, the author of the essay is an incompetent fascist. So I thought it be useful to point out some of his errors and bigotries below, by responding to specific extracts from his paper:

Unlike competing graphics production platforms on the market today (platforms based on Windows, Windows NT, or Unix), Macintosh is the only desktop platform specifically designed for graphics production.

First of all, if OS X was designed "specifically...for graphics production," then it's presumably not ideal for anything besides graphics production. Yet you could find a thousand idiots, especially on a college campus, who will tell you that they bought a Mac because it's "just better for word processing," "it's just better for listening to music," "it's just better for browsing the Internet safely (even though in reality Safari is a sieve when it comes to security)," "it's just better for blowing tons of money on stuff I don't need," et cetera. If Macs were designed specifically for graphics production, how can they also be so ideal for these other tasks? The idea that a Mac is somehow magically more suited to graphics production is a figment of Steve Jobs' imagination, and nothing more.

Second, anyone who knows anything can tell you that OS X is in fact a Unix-based operating system, which the author cites explicitly as an inferior graphics-production platform. After Apple fired him in the 1980s, Steve Jobs, instead of doing work himself, ripped off the computer scientists at Berkeley by jacking their Unix kernel to build an operating system that, when Apple finally took Steve Jobs back, became OS X. All of these Mac-touting idiots should do a little reading on Wikipedia and realize that their operating system is not very special; it's just a BSD with a lot of useless proprietary overhead. When Apple says, "Think Different," what it really means is, "Think about how to steal an open-source operating system produced by academia and, through clever marketing, sell it to people for way more than it's worth."

The Macintosh G3 and G4 platforms run significantly faster than the fastest Pentium systems, a critical issue when working with multi-megabyte Adobe Photoshop files.

Indeed, the G3 and G4 run so fast that Apple abandoned them in favor of Intel chips a couple years after this garbage was written.

Adobe Photoshop, which our graphic designers use for the majority of their work, runs more smoothly on the Macintosh platform than on Windows platforms, and "appears to be visibly slowed down by Windows memory management."[4] Memory management is better and more customizable on the Macintosh, allowing the user to easily and quickly allocate more memory to an application for memory-intensive graphics tasks.

I wasn't aware that graphic designers were also experts in low-level operating system functions. Apparently knowing how to point and click your way around Photoshop qualifies you to analyze the performance of memory registers under kernels whose source code has never been seen by anyone outside of Microsoft and Apple. Moreover, the whole point of a Mac is that virtually nothing, and least of all "memory management," is customizable, because Steve Jobs thinks that he knows better than you what you want. The only way to control how memory management is done is to use an open-source kernel like Linux, which this fascist probably never heard of.

Macintosh systems allow printing directly to any available printer, a trait that will free the graphics department from its dependency on the often unreliable LAN print server.

Newsflash: this is no longer 1982. Any operating system can print to whichever printer it feels like. You don't need to sell out to Steve Jobs to be able to use printers other than the "often unreliable LAN print server." This is another example of the subversion of reality by Apple's marketing campaigns.

Better graphics design tools available than on Windows

Where do people dream up garbage like this? OS X and Windows run the SAME EXACT GRAPHIC-DESIGN APPLICATIONS. Just because Steve Jobs has tried to delude you into thinking that only a $3,000 Mac is capable of editing a photo doesn't make it true. Steve Jobs lies.

More responsive mouse tracking—a critical factor for graphic productivity

Yeah, because every thousandth of a second that you have to wait for the cursor to be redrawn really cuts into productivity, even though no normal person can tell the difference.

Improved productivity in real-world graphics and publishing applications (Windows NT is almost 30% slower, and Windows 98 is almost 50% slower than the Macintosh platform).

What an idiot. Sure, Windows will run graphics applications and anything else a lot slower than a Mac if Windows is running on old hardware and the Mac is brand new. Vista on a quad-core processor will probably almost run faster than my Xubuntu on a ten-year-old Pentium III, too, but that doesn't make Vista faster than Linux. You can't make comparisons unless the hardware is exactly the same--which was impossible when this was written, since it wasn't yet possible to install Windows on a Mac (and Steve Jobs has spent his lifetime making sure, through legal and technical means, that no one can run OS X on anything besides the overpriced, unstable hardware sold by Apple).

Increased software proficiency, resulting in better quality and more creative work

If the Mac and the Windows machine are running the same exact productivity applications, how is the software of the Mac going to be more "proficient" than that of the Windows computer? Why can't these fascists get it through their heads that Adobe Photoshop is Adobe Photoshop, whether you run it on OS X, Windows or wine?

[A Mac environment will] attract the most productive and talented employees, because the best designers use the Mac platform

This is an archetypal example of the absurd egoism of people who buy Macs. Owning a Mac isn't your ticket to graphic-design excellence; learning how to be a good graphic designer is. In Macland, talent might correlate with the amount of money that you spend on grossly overpriced computers and software catered to the four-year-old mind. In reality, talent is not actually tied to consumerist activities, despite what so many marketing departments would like you to believe.