Completely mad reasons to support Apple and Mac

So the new online only PC magazine decides to celebrate 25 years of the Mac. This makes a fair amount of sense because the Mac did after all, introduce the GUI to general personal computing, and also because PC Magazine needs all the corporate support that they can get (why do the cynical reasons always come to mind whenever Apple comes up). To make an Apple product look good in PC Magazine, the writers and editorial board write articles describing their wonderful experiences with the Mac. The crazy thing is, the Mac is praised as ACTUALLY WORKING with iTunes!

But here's a great argument for Macs: If you have an iPod or iPhone, you need one. iTunes won't make your Mac run slow or conflict with your database software.

In a seperate article, he details further.

Then in 2002 , my wife got me my first iPod. It "worked" with my homebuilt PCs with FireWire cards, but there was something…lacking. I had to reformat the iPod way too often, and iTunes was a resource hog on the PC. I had to get a Mac so that I could have some stability in my music player. I was back to an Aluminum PowerBook G4, first a 12-inch then a 15-inch. The Intel transition of Macs happened in 2005, and now I carry both operating systems everywhere I go: a MacBook Pro that runs both Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard.

And this is written by no less than the Lead Analyst for the Desktops team at PC Magazine Labs! Even a technical expert, and indeed a technical expert cultivated by tech companies, has to put the term 'worked' in quotation marks when describing iTunes.

Should I mention at this point, that I HATE, HATE, HATE, Quicktime media player and its hellspawn iTunes?

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Quicktime, and what appears to be about a quarter of an operating system that comes with it, is the most invasive program that I have EVER run across, with the PARTIAL exception of pure malware.

People have been wondering lately why Steve Jobs is so emaciated looking. His problem is simple. The poor man simply installed iTunes/Quicktime on a PC while touching the back of the computer, or otherwise making a connection. The body of Steve Jobs is not Apple proprietary, and who would imagine that being made according to God's standards was good enough?

Now all this might be taken to imply that I disparage Apple and the Mac. To the contrary, I think that any system that can inspire loyalty against the prevailing Wintel quasi-monopoly AND inspire loyalty DESPITE functioning so poorly with Wintel products of any sort (I assume that Quicktime and iTunes will work properly on a Mac) , must have something going for it! I must admit to a certain amount of puzzlement as to what exactly this IS, but there must be something.

Any time that I have used a Mac, I have been annoyed by the unique path required to make any adjustment. This is actually praised in the PC Mag Widows vs. Mac point-counterpoint article. To quote "Windows has too many ways to do things". This strikes me as very odd, since virtually everyone has misplaced something at home, and then been forced to spend a disproportionate amount of time hunting for it. I fail to see how replicating the "lost it and I need it NOW" experience is desirable. Perhaps a Mac person out there can tell me what the special ingredient is. Oh, and yeah, I know about Vista.
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Vista SUCKS!

Anyway, having complained about Quicktime/Itunes, I should list a couple of programs that might help if they don't work for you. First item is a substitute for Quicktime; the QuickTime Alternative. This program is supposed to be a replacement for Apple's compu-cancer, and it is updated on a regular basis. In the past at least, it did not necessarily work as well as a person would like, but it doesn't have to. It isn't as invasive as the real thing.

The second program that I would recommend, if you want to remove Quicktime from your system would be Revo Uninstaller. QuickTime likes to leave chunks of itself on your system when you remove it, and if you run Revo on a more thorough setting, it helps to strip the invasive, interferes-with-other-programs monster from your system. Running the thorough clean takes time, but it is worth it!

Unfortunately, by the time you detect that you really have a problem, there is a good chance that you will already have tried to uninstall Quicktime, and have discovered that the removal was ineffective. For this problem, you might try CCleaner. This useful utillity will remove garbage of all sorts, not just that left by QuickTime/iTunes, and though I have yet to come across a program that completely undoes the damage of 'Apple's revenge', this will often solve the problem.

Finally, there is an old program that might or might not work; QuickTime Killer. This 2005 era program was designed to stop QuickTime from placing itself in the system tray as an autorun program. As of this writing, you can still download the program, but I have never used it, and for obvious reasons, I do not wish to infect my system to test whether or not it will work with the latest versions of QuickTime. If you are trying to tame QuickTime, but can't remove it, you might try the program.

Since so many people have had problems with Apple's media-invader, I would be very happy to hear any other suggestions, or means of removal. You can of course, put your experiences in the comments, but I also would be happy to publish a guest post if someone wants to write one.