[TriLUG] Macs ... I just don't get it

[Chris Hedemark]

I know there are a number of Mac fans here, so I'm hoping they might
tell me what I'm missing.

I'm in the market for a laptop pretty soon, and will have about $1500 to
$2000 to spend.  I went to the Apple Store today to check out the
various portable Mac offerings and left very disappointed.  The fastest
one I saw was only 800MHz.  I know, I know, 800MHz on PowerPC cannot
directly compare to 800MHz on Intel.  Or so the argument goes.  I left
tonight feeling like an 800MHz Duron (which I do have here) is a faster
processor than an 800MHz PowerPC.  Nothing scientific, just the
seat-of-the-pants-ometer.

The web browser on the first Mac I touched crashed hard bringing up
http://www.apple.com

Other tasks on other Macs took some time to get started.  Even on the
$3,000+ titanium mac laptops the overall feel was sluggish and
unresponsive.

The user interface was unintuitive and in some cases pretty inconsistent
(like the iMac that was running Photoshop and had no clear way out). 
Yes, a familiar UNIX prompt was available if you dug for it and some
familiar applications were there.  But all in all this did not feel as
nice as running KDE or Gnome on similarly clocked x86 hardware.

I'll never get used to the one mouse button thing either.

What am I missing?  What is the justification for spending twice as much
on a computer that is half as fast?  I'm very open minded to non-x86
hardware, as evidenced by all the sparc stuff surrounding me at the
moment, but I'm not going to buy it just *because* it is not x86.

The guys at the Apple store kind of shrugged off my observations and
didn't care to show me what I was missing.