[JJ_SO]

Apple devices are nice and safisticated, but I find Apple cult quite silly.  Especially groups camping at the store front impatient to see the new and only electronic device...

Is that still so? I mean, when did Apple come up with the last really exciting stuff? Long time ago... today it's more the kids of the campers for the first iPhones, no?

Apple cult is no more silly than defending Windows or come up with a word like "copy cats" and meaning Apple of the Jobs era. I have no problem with "Apple was not the first with a cellphone" but calling that brick of a Nokia communicator the first smartphone is plain ridiculous. None of it's owners kept it after the iPhone came out.

There was also nothing Apple copied the Mac Mini from, nothing with this form factor and performance. At the time I came to Apple this Miniwas driven with a PowerPC CPU. I remember being daily in a training center with new "state of the art" Tower PCs keep on crashing because Adobe did such a poor job when they gave there Illustrator and Photoshop apps 3D simulations. At home I used the Mini to scan slides in high resolution, work on 30 open TIFs and waiting for a crash which never happened. At that time I knew how to (mostly) avoid complications on Windows NT and this little bread box kept on processing, no matter what I threw at it.

No more viruses, no more nights spent to set up a crashed system. What I spent on it came back in more time for the stuff I earnt money with and no time to pamper an unready, unfinished system. No more incompatibilities of soft- and hardware, a system ready to use without wasting days of work to customize it. At the end of the day my investment in Apple stuff turnt out to be less expensive than what I spent on Windows stuff before.

I sort of became an Apple fan for 6-8 years, then I realized after the death of their visionary CEO Apple just chew on his ideas and copying their own ideas over and over.