Found your problem there. You're obviously using windows.

This is slashdot, so I'm not surprised you'd be unable to make a conclusion that requires you to think about things in a light other than white or black. I'll spell it out for you. What Apple's good at is not necessarily always coming up with an original idea, but at making an idea or feature actually easy to use. Let me repeat that, so you get it. They're good at making technology easy to use. Got it? What good is a device or application that has every feature you could imagine or want, yet no one understands how to use it, what the feature is, why it matters to them, or how to find it? The current state of user interface on windows and linux is so bad, that Apple probably doesn't even have to try that hard to make something that isn't crap in comparison. So rather than looking down upon every person you feel isn't capable of "dealing" with the complicated windows world, consider most would rather their computers just fucking work. Hope that helps.

If only there were some alternative operating system / computing platform that had DVD support out of the box and was easy to use.

Oh well... </me goes back to using his macbook pro>

It's interesting to compare how long it takes to process one unit on different platforms at http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/stats/platforms .html

Alpha/Windows: 8 hr 16 min
i386-unknown-openbsd2.5: 11 hr 27 min
i686-pc-linux-gnu-gnulibc2.1: 12 hr 06 min
alpha-dec-osf3.0: 13 hr 08 min
i686-pc-linux-gnulibc1-static: 13 hr 50 min
Macintosh: 28 hr 13 min
Pentium/Windows: 48 hr 59 min

It seems windows is faaar behind all kinds of linux, but also the macs, so it's not the more graphical client that the win-users (I guess mac-users get a graphical client too?) get, which slows the chewing down. Must be the os.