I'm not especially a "fan" of either, as in "fanboy." The "coolness" factor of Apple is of course hyperbole. The "Microsoft makes crappy software" is extreme in its own right. I tend to work at the command-line level at work most of the time, whether in Unix (HP-UX) or Cisco IOS. But at home I want to spend most of my time pointing and clicking at my leisure when using my confusers. So everything serves their purpose. Compu-politics holds no truck for me anymore. I started out as an MS "hater," considered Macs the computer for people to stupid to use a real machine, and was an open-source jihadist. Years of experience plus I suppose maturity has made me much more pragmatic. Whatever gets the job done is fine with me. Couldn't possible care less anymore about the rest. Plus, guess what? With a little trial and error you can make all the frickin things work together in perfect harmony, thereby maximizing the best traits of all of 'em. So the heck with it.
As far as the AppleTV goes, I guess I'm intrigued by where they intend to take it. All things being equal, I think they plan much bigger things for it than what is being promoted initially. And it could be huge. This is their foray into your living room, and you know they aren't going to stop at simply streaming/caching media from iTunes. Just watch. There are big things coming from the likes of Apple and Google and such. Big Media just doesn't have the imagination to move things forward. They think trying to apply a pre-Internet business model to post-Internet media is the way to go. So maybe I'm wasting my money, maybe not. Oh well. It's my money, call me a fool if you will.
