 I have been racking my brain today. I've been thinking, been thinking a lot. I've been trying to think of one single justifiable reason for a person to use either macOS or any Apple products. And, you know, maybe I'm just not smart enough. Maybe I'm just, I don't have the wisdom. But I cannot think of a single one. No offense. But I just cannot think of one. Now, let's start, let's start this way. Linux people like me are divided into two general categories. There are the people who hate Mac, but they really hate Windows. And there are people who hate Windows, but they really, really hate Mac. And I am definitely of the latter category. Because I can think of some reasons that you might want to use a Windows machine. I mean, I ultimately don't, you know, want to rationalize, you know, I don't want you to use one. But, you know, if you want to play a full screen video game, I can understand, you know, taking advantage of the better support that you have on Windows. You can play a lot of these games on Linux, but it's easier to do on Windows. So I can understand having an alternative desktop for doing something like that. Same thing, you know, if you, of course, lots of people have jobs that require some kind of proprietary software that's written only for Windows. Okay, I understand that. But that said, those are the reasons you might want to use a Windows machine. I can't for the life of me think of any reason to use macOS or to use an Apple device. Now, and I can additionally think of many reasons to not want to use Apple devices or macOS. Let's get into it. Now, first hardware. Apple makes deliberately debilitated hardware that is planned to be obsolete. There's a lot of planned obsolescence. You know, a lot of people will realize, oh, look, there's a new iPhone. Suddenly, all of the software or all of the hardware that, you know, the last iPhone is no longer compatible with all of this new software. It's not because there's anything principle behind that. It's because you are deliberately disabled from updating your phone when they want you to buy a new one. Okay, just basic things like that. Or, for example, let's take actually repairing your hardware, right? So if you have a Windows machine, if you have a normal computer, it doesn't have to run Windows. I have a ThinkPad running Linux. Now, if something goes wrong with my ThinkPad, let's say I accidentally pee on the keyboard or something like that. It's happened before. I'm not proud of it. It's happened. I pee on the keyboard and, you know, I want to replace it. Well, it's no big deal. I send out for a $10 keyboard on eBay. I unscrew my old keyboard, replace it. That's it. That's all I have to do. Same thing with the screen. Same thing with anything else. Okay, everything's easily replaceable. If I don't know, if I haven't replaced something, I can look it up on YouTube. It's super easy. Now, Mac devices, on the other hand, are built to be difficult to modify. You're not supposed to make any kind of changes or repairs. Now how specifically? Now, for example, Apple devices you may or may not know have special screws in them that normal screwdrivers cannot unscrew. It's not flathead. It's not Phillips head. It's, you know, their own special thing that's supposed to be difficult to unscrew because they don't want you going in there. And that's not because, oh, we just, you know, we're interested in the user. We don't want them to, you know, mess anything up. No, no, it's because they don't want you to fix things. If you're opening up a computer, you know what you're doing, more or less. The other thing is, of course, Apple has these licensed dealers. They want to constrain the number of people who can modify these kind of devices and how that results, of course, is there's a more constrained market. It's a lot less competitive than, you know, a repair industry for Windows machines. So that makes it worse for you. As well, you're paying more for the same or the worst product. Okay, so now the reason, of course, people have Macs is sort of an issue of social signaling, right? There, you know, there's a certain brand that you are buying. Like when you get a Windows machine, some, you know, and go to Walmart and get whatever. There are all these different brands. They're all competing. They all look different. But if you get an Apple Mac, they all look the same. They're all totally uniform. And they're supposed to be like that because you are buying into a brand and nothing else. You're not getting anything special. You're buying into a brand. And that's, you know, that's sort of the point. They want to advertise, not the hardware being better because it's not. They're trying to advertise that specific brand. Now, correlated with the hardware issue is the kind of mentality, which isn't a mentality. It's a strategy that I think is taken deliberately by Apple. And that is the fact that Apple software and hardware sort of conspire for you. They conspire to take over more and more of your life. Okay? So if you get an iPod, for example, do iPods even still exist? I don't know. But if you get an iPod, whatever, they want you to use iTunes to sync with that. They make it difficult to use other software. And in fact, iTunes works in a way totally different from other MP3 players when you sync it with, you know, an iPod or something. Right? So normal MP3 players back in the good old days, they worked like any kind of USB device would. You'd drag and drop your songs in whatever way you want. You can customize it. Usually when you load them up, you can also sort them by artist or whatever. That's fine. Okay? iPods aren't made like that. They store data in a very special way, special in the like bad way, of course. In that they, the iPod only wants to show information the way it wants to and nothing else. Right? So you can't sort things by folder directory. That doesn't exist. Okay? And the thing about these kind of Apple devices is that they're all on their own wavelength because they want Apple wants it to be more difficult for you to actually use the products. They want you to have to, if you get an iPhone, they want you to also have, you know, a Mac book or something because they're supposed to sync with each other better by making it more difficult for you to interface with other programs. They don't want you using any other music player other than iTunes or everything sort of conspires in a way to get you to use the same stuff. And of course it's a little ironic, isn't it? It's a little ironic that, you know, Mac used to be, you know, you remember the commercial, right? When, you know, the girl is running up and she has a mallet or a hammer. I don't remember what it is. And everyone's watching Big Brother and then she throws the hammer and it breaks the screen. Oh, wow. So if you buy a Mac you're like a rebel and you're against the system. Well, now you all have computers that look exactly the same. Now you have, everyone does everything in the same way. I guess some people have different desktop backgrounds. But everything, you know, all computers are identical, totally replaceable. It's expensive to replace, but they are totally replaceable. And all of the actual choices that you have are constrained. And that's part of the plan. It's part of the plan. It's part of the plan, okay? Because they want to control you. I mean, and don't get it wrong. Don't get it twisted. Windows would like to control you the way Mac does. Mac simply is a brand. No one wants to be in on the Windows brand. No one cares. People have bought Windows machines because they work or because they're used to them. People buy Mac machines because they want the brand. They want to participate in this. And again, it's a slippery slope. You buy one expensive overpriced Mac device. You're going to be buying more if you want them to sync well. Now, here's a dumb argument people say. This isn't so much of an argument, but it's like a justification of the existence of Mac. People say something like, oh, don't, oh, Luke, well, here's the thing. You might know a lot about computers or, you know, Billy on the street might know, you know, he might be an elite, you know, he's a hacker or something like that. He knows a bunch about computers. But, you know, there are lots of dumb people that need a computer that just works. It's nice and simple. And Mac is that for a lot of people. Now, I don't buy that argument for a bunch of reasons. Okay? First off, you got to put yourself in the shoes of a normie. You got to start thinking like them. Now, when they use a computer, they don't, you know, they don't really care about operating systems. They might be abstract if they've fallen for advertising. But what they want, what they want is big buttons, big logos on the side that have their browser and all the programs they use. And they want those big buttons there and they want to be able to click on them and they want a program to come up. And if the program takes too long, then they must have a virus. Okay? That's how normies think. I mean, we're talking about, we're talking, when I say normies, I'm talking about people who don't even know how to do private browsing. Like you go to their web browser, you go to their URL bar, start typing something in and all the porn they watch comes up. We're talking about that kind of normie. Those kind of normies, those kind of bottom of the barrel normies, they don't care about the difference between Windows and Mac. Both of them are equally usable. It doesn't matter. Any kind of Linux desktop environment, Ubuntu Unity or Mate or anything, they're all equally usable as long as you've got the big buttons you can click on. Okay? And most people are doing stuff in the browser anyway. So it doesn't matter. Now, as it comes to the Mac being idiot-proof thing, first off, as I said before, Mac stuff is made to be difficult to repair. It's made to, you're not supposed to, whether you are dumb or smart, you're not supposed to be able to fix your stuff or change your stuff or do anything. Okay? Now, the thing is, Mac is not idiot-proof. It's actually smart person-proof. It's smart person-proof in a couple of ways. They make it deliberately difficult for you to customize things. You cannot easily change stuff about your graphical environment in the way you can. Even of Windows. Windows doesn't have that much, but you can still shift things around really easily. You can get your own setup. When I use Windows, I used to, you know, do something like that. Mac is, you know, nearly impossible to do that kind of stuff. You have to really know the system. And, you know, people who want to have their own, have their own sort of wavelength in their own machine don't have that ability in Mac OS. Because again, you have to do everything the Mac way. And the Mac way is infuriating. Okay? So, it is not idiot-proof. It is smart person-proof. And that's sort of the problem. And that's the point. They're making devices that are, that you cannot improve, that you cannot actually make your own. They're supposed to be a product. Okay? They're supposed to, and they're selling a brand. Now, what does a brand come down to? Last and not least. Okay? What does a brand come down to? It comes down to a kind of social signaling. Okay? Now, most people in the country still use Windows machines. And they will continue to use Windows machines. Okay? But where I live, I live at a university. I live and work at a university. And most of the people I see, who are going to be upper-class people, you know, all of them, everyone I know who doesn't use a Linux machine, uses Mac. Okay? All of them. Actually, there's one token Republican in our department. He uses a Windows machine. Everyone else, besides me, of course, and a couple of the people who actually do computer stuff have Linux machines. But Mac is the norm in my socioeconomic class. And that pisses me off. Well, maybe it just pisses me off being here. That should be what I say. But what I mean is, Mac is a way, Mac has just become the brand of a particular socioeconomic class to differentiate themselves from the unwashed masses. That's all it is. You can't, I think everyone sort of understands that. There is a status signaling aspect of Mac. Because when it comes down to it, it has all the hallmarks of conspicuous consumption. You are buying a product that is worse, that is more inhibited. It is always showing how Mac it is. It's always showing its well-known form. You're always supposed to know that it's a Mac device. And that's sort of the problem. It has all of these things. They all conspire. And when it comes down to it, there's no rational reason, apart from social signaling, to use these kind of devices. So that's all I wanted to say. But it's nothing you don't already know. So have a good one.