On the plus side, they things they do make well are EXTREMELY shiny

I'm typing this from the Psychology computer lab, as I've just come out of my Visual Search practical. It wasn't exactly thrilling, so I'll spare you the details - I was just interested to see that, just like the Stereoscopic Vision practical last term, we used old Power Macs to run the experiment. And when I say, old, I mean pretty darned old - these things are a good ten to fifteen years of age, which is seventy to a hundred and five in dog years, or about eighteen million in computer development terms.

I'm not a big user of Macs - my only non-Windows experience thus far has been brief attempts at understanding what on earth Linux is all about - but I've been pretty impressed thus far by these old machines. The Mac OS takes a bit of getting used to - idiosyncrasies like dragging the floppy disk into the wastebasket when you've finished with it make absolutely no sense at first, but I suppose it's roughly as sensible as clicking "Start" to shut down. Still, it looks nice, particularly little touches like the flickering when you select something, which looks very Hollywood. The hardware's good too, with perfectly reliable mice (who really needs two buttons, anyway?) and lovely clicky keyboards. Plus, there's the bonus that because everything was made by the same company, it's almost always going to work.

So why, WHY, in the name of all that is sensible, did they put the Power button right below the floppy drive? At least two people in my class accidentally switched off their computers when they thought they were ejecting the disk. Likewise, why make it impossible to reach the desktop without clearing away window after window? And why build in elements to programs that mean you can't edit things, even if you could ten seconds ago, with no explanation at all?

It's worth noting that Apple still does stupid stuff like this - I'm never going to buy an iPod until they make the batteries user-replaceable and widely available, for instance. Likewise, their anticompetitive love affair with DRM, crippling your music files and making them playable only on their hardware, is a marketing decision that seems to have absolutely no basis in the wants and needs of their customers. Even in their newest stuff, such as the iPhone, you'll find these problems - another non-replaceable battery, a deal tying you to only one network service provider, no user-installable apps except for those made by Apple, despite the phone otherwise running a full version of Mac OS X.

Weird, really. Maybe the key to finally putting a knife through Microsoft's cold, merciless heart is not so much increasing one's cleverness - there's clearly plenty of that around - maybe it's actually a case of getting rid of the rampant vein of sheer mad stupidity running through the centre of one's whole operation. Until they do, I don't think I'll be taking a bite of the Apple any time soon.