I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a Mac Pro with two 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processors and 6GB of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, Warcraft will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Safari is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 2x 2.26Ghz 8-core machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.

Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

The share price is only down a small amount, which can be attributed to normal market noise. This is actually an indicator that the iPhone is performing (over 500,000 sold) just about where financial analysts expected it to. If it had outperformed expectations you'd see huge abnormal gains, and if it had underperformed you'd see enormous capital losses. These two scenarios can still occur as more information comes out about the iPhone's sales, but for the moment it appears that analysts predicted sales fairly accurately and began pricing their estimates into Apple stock from when the product was first announced.

Personally, I short sold (bet against) a large amount of Apple stock last Friday. I feel like the iPhone has been over-hyped and the Apple loyalists are influencing the share price more than they should be in a relatively efficient market.

For those who are more risk averse than I am, it's potentially a bad security to be holding at the moment. Large fluctuations in share price are certainly possible in the coming weeks if analysts turn out to be wrong in either direction.