The lamest excuse for buying an Apple product is the one about Microsoft being an evil corporate giant. So what do you do instead? Go and buy a product from a company with an even worse track record when it comes to tying its customers in to proprietary technology. Apple are conning you all into paying over the odds for their ordinary products. Apple laptops would not last five minutes if actually used for any real typing. The tying of iTunes to the iPod is far more of an Anti-trust violation than MS's bundling internet explorer with their OS. Apple will sue at the drop of a hat.
Mac OS 9 was shit, and if you think otherwise then you're obviously an idiot, whose opinion can be safely ignored. A bit like our arts editor, Simon Coggeshall who loves Macs. OS X is still quite shit, despite its BSD core. Most of the effort has been expended on shitty visual effects such as spinning icons and animation of window closure. Windows, of course is shit as well, but Windows users at least have the good grace to admit this and are able to have a good laugh about it. Mac users get angry, but then maybe that's because they've had to pay so much money for something which is not as good as it's hyped up to be, and for which there's very little free software you can download. Many Mac users who claim to have encountered few problems have invariably done nothing more taxing than leaving the machine switched off on their desk where their equally technologically ignorant visitors can see it.
I suspect that the keyboard, etc, is not supplied so that people might buy the box and replace their PC, using the existing peripherals. It will be interesting to see if Job's plan to try to win over some converts from the MS Windows world will work. Many of them may well wonder why they've just spent several hundred quid, and are now unable to do half of the things they used to because there's no easy way to download and install freeware applications. This is not so much about praise for Microsoft, but more about the tiny, limited appeal of the world of Mac OS. They may also discover that they simply don't take to the Mac's OS, and that familiarity may well turn out to be Window's trump card. Most people will just want to use e-mail and surf the web. Not many of these people are going to be so stupid that they don't soon realise that the Apple machine is unable to do this simple thing any better than what they already had.
A cheap Mac is not necessarily a good idea for Apple because a large chunk of Mac devotees like them simply because they are stupid enough to think that "overpriced equals better". The PC owners, who have been more careful with their money, may not be so gushing about the machine's virtues once they actually start using one. They may find that they already have all the market share they're ever going to get for computers, and would be better concentrating their efforts on milking their small but insanely loyal bunch of followers.
Our office is divided on the topic, with Simon and Gilly in the Apple camp because they like the look of the computers, while Binge and Marbles like Windows XP because they like gaming. Wiggy on the other hand still refuses to give up his ancient, grimy Amstrad PCW8256, and is truly terrified of such an advanced peripheral as a mouse. He doesn't use the internet, and his insistence on using teletext instead has more than once paid off when our WAN connection has gone down. Personally, I like Linux, and the other staff call me the name they do because they think it's funny (their idea, not mine). I don't care. Neither do I care if people think Linux is not as good as Windows or Mac OS, because I know that it is much better, for me anyway. Of course it's your money, so if you want to spend it on a Windows box or a Macintosh, then it's entirely up to you.