Steve Jobs -2011

To be fair, I don't think Apple machines re any harder to service than otehrs of approximatly the same age. OK, there are no official Mac scheamtics, but that's true of other machines to, and they're not that hard to reverse-engineer. Modern stuff is going to be very dificult to fix, no matter who it comes from. I have no liking of Apple products : I regard them as being difficult to do anything useful with (my esperience is that they make easy jobs trivial and diffiuclt jobs impossible). I don't care _at all_ for the hardware design of the machines I've looked at (Apple ][ and early Macs). I don't like that fact that they rarely, if ever, follow standards. I don't like the very odd disk format of The Apple ][, for example I don't like the fact that early Mac OSs didn't have any form of command line I don't like the fact that there has to be only one way to do something. That was supposed to simplify the Mac user interface, it drives me mad. I find the 'gesture based' user interface of some modern Apple products to be very clumsy. I don't like the way Apple ties you in to their products, software, etc. If I buy a computer, it's mine, to do what I like with and to run whatever programs I like on. I don't like the way they make things hacker-unfriendly -- hard to open cases, no expansion slots, no proper documetnion, etc. So, no, I am not going to be buying any Apple product. But I am also sorry that Steve Jobs is dead. I do not wish illness or death on anyone. -tony