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But really Apple pretty much created the bandwagon.

Exactly my point. Apple jumped on a bandwagon, repainted it tangerine (or in the case of the iPod, gloss white) and said they invented it... and everyone believes it. They created the hype. The hype that everyone needed "an iPod" (as a general term for portable players)

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The market was stagnant until the 1G 'pods came on the scene. Heck one of the real problems is that none of the pretenders can do all of the 3 parts well: 1)Must-have design 2)Cool features and 3)MARKETING!

Apple got lucky in timing... that tech reached the point where it was a good time to toss away audio CD players, and MP3 on disc players in favour of audio on RAM players. As for the 3 parts? Must have design? It looks like my digital thermostat. Cool features? What ARE the cool features of an iPod? And marketing? Well, that's what makes dudes get a Dell, and everyone to pay a 200% premium to have their laptop look like a V-Tech kids learning centre.

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And please don't tell me you buy into the "it's success makes it suck" crap.

No, its design makes it crap, it's success in spite of repeated design flaws says more about the Apple marketing strategy - the entire first run of Nanos had screens that scratched - with no protective coating on them. That should have made the iPod synonymous with Ford's Pinto. Apple was slow in even admitting a problem to users that were looking at frosted and cracked screens, that should have brought out the torch-light mobs. But no.

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As far as computers go some people make the mistake of assuming I am a militant towards or against one platform of another. Nope. Like 'em all, as far as what they can do for me.

That's the difference, I'll be the first to point out problems with any platform and I've been through a lot - everything from CBM Basic V2 to BeOS to Solaris to Windows - they all sh*t the bed somewhere... but most don't get a second chance - BeOS was going to be awesome, but it died. The Mac supporters just seem to cheer for the retarded kid no matter how badly he does. You seem something similar in processor camps (Intel vs AMD) but it's just not the same as the all-encompassing Apple can do no wrong chant.

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And believe you me there is no such thing as a perfect OS. Any of them. OS X could be. Stability of Unix, Mac GUI and ease of use. All it needs are the ba-jillions of periphs you can get on the PC plus all the high-end games and power apps. Maybe OS-X86 will be the one true OS that brings balance to the galaxy.

Or brings about Revelations... the draw of *nix is its adaptability. The hardcore nerds love to recompile kernals to make them 0.01% smaller and 0.02% faster and then brag about it in IRC channels. Anyone with a day job or even a good quality hobby isn't really all that interested in that. So the kernal's hidden away under the mask of OSX, leaving only the well-documented *nix drawback of "not playing well with peripherals", which, granted, is a small problem with Apple, since they control most of what add-ons go into their machines, you don't pick from a who's-who of nobodys when it comes to network card, sound cards and the like. No "happy green mainboard for sokket 7 proscesser" motherboards floating over on rafts from the east.

For a good example of why I'm not sold on OSX - I launched a brand new sports facility with a "world-class" closed circuit feed last year. Apple put together the non-linear edit suite to certain specs. Out of the box, the system would not L&C (log and capture) footage over 5 minutes in length without a complete OS crash... ie: pull the plug out of the wall. Took them 2.5 months for their techs to fix the problem. Spectacular, guys.

Bren R.