If you're a normal person—and by normal, I mean, anyone who doesn't know what the Turing Test is—then you should only buy Apple products. Seriously. Sell your Windows PC, Crackberry, or Android phone right now. Why? Because, by comparison, non-Apple products frankly suck.
Why Apple products do not suck.
Well, for the average user, I mean. For the kind of person who just wants to tweet about their lunch plans, post a cat video link to Facebook, reply to some emails by replying-to-all, surf the web's many phishing sites, and upload pictures of themselves doing keg-stands. You know, the average person.
For those n00bs, Apple is Nirvana and Steve Jobs is rightfully the Messiah. They offer the experience that normal people expect from electronics—you plug them in, and they just work. Sure, you're “locked-in” to their system, but that's like locking people into only driving a BMW—it's not that bad a situation. Likewise, Apple products are certainly worth the extra money—I cannot stress this enough:
It. Is. Worth. The. Price. (Sorta.)
Ironically, it's thanks to Apple's well-designed hardware and software that I'm no longer a “normal person” (go ahead, ask anyone). Whereas Windows® computers punish users for experimenting—with crashes, Blue Screens Of Death and other random software bugs—Apple computers reward curiosity by revealing cool, new functionality. And that positive reinforcement led me to go deeper and deeper into geekdom (and further away from dating).
Sure, there are some things you can't do inside Apple's walled tech-garden. But normal people rarely hit those limits. Normal people just want shit to work (a novel concept to the folks at Microsoft). They just want to be able to do things with their devices, not to them. And Apple makes that easy, peasy. With each product they release, Apple proves that computers don't have to be complicated or difficult to use.
Apple is now, perhaps more than ever, “the computer for the rest of us.”
And that's why I have stopped buying Apple products. Thanks to Apple, I now know enough about computers to not need them anymore. (And they don't need my support anymore.) So now, I'm all about open-source: I now use a Motorola XT720 (a decision I now WOEFULLY regret) running Android 2.1 Android 2.2 and my dual-boot Macs run Ubuntu about half the time. I've even hacked my first-gen AppleTV to run Boxee. All just for the “fun” of it.
However, if messing around with computers doesn't sound like fun to you, then you only have two real choices: Go Apple or go Amish.
