Re: Overpriced trinkets
For a lot of people it's not the money they can't afford that keeps them at arm's length from Apple. It's the wasted time and working around non-standard and crippled-by-design aspects.
Yup. You really have never been near a Mac. Mine talks to a Linux box, another Mac and a Windows server. And frequently mounts a couple of secure WebDAV services via a VPN. It also happily runs LibreOffice and OpenOffice, it compiles Open Source code in a terminal session and regularly acts as an X11 display for processes running elsewhere. Only NFS is a dog, but I've never had much success with NFS so that may just be me. I even have a version of MS Office on the machine in case some idiot sends me an docx of xlsx file (*), and I frequently piss off people on Windows by sending their Visio files back with much better looking design because Omnigraffle Pro just makes that easy. In short, I haven't come across any of the incompatibilities you claim - could you be more specific? Or have you not actually used a Mac yet for more than 24h?
Second, iIf you mean by "crippled" the absence of a need to start rooting for HOWTOs to identify the correct resource that needs to be messed with before a program or a desktop can actually do any practical work, than you have another description of "crippled" than I had in mind. I find it beats the living crap out of Windows, and is a far nicer way to use Unix than Linux. That's my personal opinion, of course, but it comes from practical experience.
And some people are just embarrassed to be associated with bling.
True, but I don't have the kind of ego that needs others to agree with me, so that doesn't interest me in the slightest. Easy. If association matters to you you still have a bit of growing up to do IMHO. Or need help.
(*) Personally, I would be grateful if the NSA would crack that file format, because MS clearly cannot. If the NSA can allegedly hack high grade crypto, it would be a nice gift to the tax payer if they figured that one out instead. (/rant)