Mark Pilgrim, the writer and programmer behind the Dive Into Mark blog, recently published a list of things he bought this weekend, including a Lenovo (IBM) ThinkCentre M52 with an IBM staff discount. As he notes in his Bye, Apple post:
Astute readers will notice that this marks the end of my 22-year love affair with Apple. I actually went to the local Apple store this weekend -- checkbook in hand -- to decide between the new Mac mini, MacBook, and MacBook Pro. I walked out without buying any of them. Bye, Apple. Thanks for the memories.
Naturally this created a minor storm in the local teacups, and he returned to the topic in When the Bough Breaks to explain what pushed him over the edge. Partly it's because he's using open source products that are better than Apple's limited offerings (Safari, iChat, QuickTime. iTunes, iPhoto etc) and partly because he wants to keep his data for 50 years, not have problems with Apple's proprietary formats -- even if that's just metadata. For example:
I loved iPhoto until my iPhoto database got corrupted one day, and I lost all my ratings, keywords, and albums because that information is stored in an undocumented binary black hole. Yeah yeah, I know about AlbumData.xml. That has its own problems, and in my case it was already corrupted by the time iPhoto noticed.
The resulting debate currently stands at 81 comments, many of them interesting.
Incidentally, the Bye, Apple post says Mark bought "a real fucking keyboard, which I found via links from other bloggers. OK, technically it's called the Customizer 104/105 Black." However, you don't have to switch to get a usable keyboard for a Mac: there's the Matias Pro available in the UK from MacHeaven. (But that may not be a solution if your crappy Apple keyboard is in your notebook....)
