Tuesday, 22 October 2002

Steven Den Beste of the U.S.S. Clueless reveals the secret behind his amazing volume of blogging output: He's using an Intel Pentium™ processor! Yes, the Intel Pentium allows Steven to blog almost twice as fast as those deluded Mac users, who are hobbled by the technological inferiority of their crippled Mac machines.

Or something like that. I think Neal Stephenson said everything that needs to be said about Mac bigots vs. PC bigots, and I think John Dvorak first noted that pundits have been predicting Apple's imminent demise for almost 20 years now. Steven joins a long list.

Okay, I can't leave it completely alone: Steven's diatribe that starts with "In hardware, Apple has been a follower in nearly every regard for the last five years" is amazingly myopic, especially given Steven's background. Um, Steven? Meet 802.11, the technology that's doing for CDMA 1X what Clark Gable did for men's undershirts. Guess what company brought it to market? How about those FireWire ports on the back of your digital camera? USB?

Apple and the PowerPC chip may (today) be losing ground to Intel's relentless effort to self-fulfill Moore's Law, but that in itself is not the Seventh Sign. Apple still has the advantage of being the only major player in the computer industry who controls both hardware and software, which means they can avoid chicken-and-egg problems with introducing hardware and software support for a product or technology. Dell or Gateway couldn't do this and make it work with their machines out of the box.

Steven may be a good engineer (or not - I really can't say), but his critique of Apple is misguided—one might as well argue that the Ford F-150 pickup truck is technologically superior to a Volvo C70 convertible, so anyone driving the Volvo is a deluded moron.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 5:25 am. comments.