Apple: Not as cool as I thought it was.

Back in days of yore, I hated Apple products. Schools got 'em cheap, they ran OS9, and they were prone to crashes, program errors, and just seemed to add misery to an already miserable experience. Later came the iBooks and iMacs, designer colours, mice that you could remove the panels from and switch them around to annoy the library staff, and laptops that had built-in carrying handles and looked strangely like a toilet seat. This is where I think the Mac craze first started; once the iMacs released, they took the clear plastic with silver backing and some sort of clear, bright colour and applied it to anything electronic. But they still sucked. In fact, the only amusement I remember getting from them was using the "snapshot" function and leaving the notice that the image had been saved to the clipboard up until the computer got impatient and started talking to you in its clunky, vaguely-female voice.
And this dislike of them continued throughout high school, until my senior year. I was talked into taking a Visual Technologies class (which is just a fancy way of saying "graphic design") by my art teacher, whose husband just happened to teach the class. I spent the majority of my first semester at odds with the teacher due to the fact that I disliked Apple products (at this point, white earbuds were everywhere, whether they had an iPod or not, and that only added to it), and he was definitely a big supporter of them. After a while, I'd found that OSX was ideal for graphics work (after nearly losing a huge Photoshop file while saving on my PC), and decided to get one. And, lo and behold, I received my awesome new PowerBook G4 sometime later, and had the privilege of showing off the top of the line in Apple laptops (at the time). It's obviously an antique by current Mac standards, but it does its job (and I had it before they were cool xP).
And so began my quest to turn others over to Mac computers (probably influenced, at least in some part, by Hawk from Applegeeks). First my friend Alex got onto the bandwagon, then several other people. However, this was after they decided to go from this:

The PowerPC G5 processor, to this:

The Intel Core 2 Duo processor. With this atrocity came the built-in webcam and a lowered price, making Apple computers much more affordable than they'd been in the past. This served as a foundation for the popularity that Macs have achieved today. And now, not only are they powered by the same shit that a regular PC is, but they all come in the shiny aluminum finish. Add to that the lack of anti-glare screens and the promise of being "made of all recycled materials", and I'm starting to see that they aren't a niche market anymore. I can get a PC that can do graphics work just as well as any Mac can, and it won't get viruses if I just leave it disconnected from the internet. So, they're not that great anymore; as soon as I get the money, I'm gettin' one of these bad boys:

The HP with Voodoo DNA Blackbird 002. Seems my like of Apple products is a cyclic thing... maybe one day I'll think highly of them again, but as long as they keep putting out this sort of crap:

Doesn't everyone's digital camera already do digital video anyway? What the hell is the point? It's a friggin' mp3 player; play mp3's on it.

Well, whatever... I've still got these:

And I don't see Apple gettin' into the iGoth scene any time soon.