Omaha's quite nice, actually! Beautiful downtown. I could be really happy there. Unlike Phoenix. But I'll stay in Silicon Valley until I have a reason to move.

No. I'm aware that she never said "I can see Russia from my house". I'm aware that she appealed to a certain segment of voters. I'm aware that many of the knocks against her were unfair and not based in reality.

But she's still SOFAKING STUPID. I'm not sure what kind of kool-aid you have to drink to ignore this fact.

That is true, that apple has an incentive to make the new OS not work on old hardware. I have a 2006 Mac Pro (first model with Intel chips) that ran me ~$2800 back in August 2006. It's still chugging along great, doing my video transcoding work when I ask it to do so -- albeit not as quickly as a brand new machine, of course.

I don't use it much anymore, but it still works fine, as does my Dell monitor I bought at the same time.

The Mac Pro is not capable of running Mountain Lion. That's a bit of a bummer, as I like having all of my machines on the same OS. However, I don't use the system a lot, and Lion will work fine on it. It's 6 years old. I'm sure in another 2 years I'll stop using it entirely, but 8 years is a pretty good run.

Cygwin is also more Pile-Of-Shit compliant than OS X too. You are probably correct when it comes to proper behavior of Unix code; all I know is that, in day-to-day use, Cygwin sucks ass and has countless problems.

And yes, I've used it on and off on the rare miserable occasions where I was not able to have a Linux or OS X system provided by my employer -- a couple of years in 06-07 standing out in my mind the most.

well then it also means that $cost for a Mac is change-between-the-couch-cushions trivial.

Actually, I agree with that, in the sense that, when I need a new machine, I buy one without any deliberation.

But it's NOT true in the sense that I can buy a new one every day.

I understand needing to accommodate her choices, but it's worth pointing out that there are no single-button mice or trackpads on Apple products anymore. The trackpad itself is the button, so two fingers is a right click. Same on the standard mice they distribute with desktops.

I've got a new laptop with Lion and bought a magic trackpad for desktop use, I'm really loving the gestures.

Carry on.

Um, basically anything you would run on OS X either has a Windows-style installer (in other words, utter shite) or as a drag-and-drop which is the way things USED to be more often in OS X. This also means delete the icon when you want to uninstall, and you're done. Sadly things are moving a bit more in the Windows installer direction, where you specifically need to run an UNinstaller to get rid of some applications.

Anything you need to build on the command line is likely something you simply cannot get in Windows (without dealing with Cygwin or some such hack), so it counts in favor of OS X, not against it.

I'm sure there are features that are missing from Outlook for the Mac, but 99.9% of users would never notice. I sure as hell don't know what's missing.

Microsoft Entourage was more hit-or-miss, but that's been around since at least 2004, and at least it let you sync with exchange.

Turbo Tax runs on OS X natively, and has for some time. I'm not sure if I'm misreading you here, and you're anti-Mac. But the fact that you mentioned other Mac/Linux compatible software leads me to believe you're open to OS X and just didn't realize TurboTax runs on it.

I'm sorry, how are WinSCP and Putty anything but the tools of absolute last resort? They're both, quite frankly, absolutely terrible. So is Cygwin. If you spend any time dealing with Unix, I don't see how a Mac isn't the better choice, unless you're also a corp IT person who needs to deal with Windows servers.

Because we like being paid for our skills, not for the skills of the average drone. Unionization is great if you're lazy and don't like working.

Last 2 jobs have bought me Macbook Pros. Most tech companies are Mac friendly these days. If they're not, you can usually still expense them. I'm not interested in being a sysadmin somewhere that things that Windows is an appropriate tool for the job of working with Unix systems -- it's simply not, it's a huge handicap.

I haven't used Windows for work since 2006 when I had an ill-fated attempt at working for an accounting firm.

At my current job, though, I have VMware Fusion with Windows 7, so that I can run one thing: VMware vSphere client. Funny that VMware is so intent on driving their customers into their competitor's arms (Microsoft).

I don't find it necessary to re-hash why using OS X is so nice for working with Unix systems, or why I choose closed-source over open-source. That ship has sailed, I used Linux on the desktop from 1995 to 2002. It's not worth the effort to me; the cost of the Mac hardware is fairly trivial, and I'm not interested in the ideological arguments.

As part of the public, I agree with this plan to not overspend to cover extremely rare contingencies.

This is why I don't have hotspare houses on 3 different continents.

no, it actually is, in fact, funny.

They were dead when Apple stopped shipping systems with them. And they merely shifted the burden to the user who had to buy a USB floppy drive. So it went from standard to optional. Note how when I word it that way it turns into the more graceful method you think PC makers used.