Josh, fashion is a perfectly acceptable reason to buy something, and iThings are definitely fashionable. They are also high quality, but making the leap to "highest" quality is just a lie. Like technogeek said, the Samsung Galaxy SII really does have a 50% faster processor than the iPhone 4s and when he posted that the iPhone was still yet to be released. That is exactly the point. Beyond that Android apps are excellent. We've been playing with the EMIT app as a replacement for the excellent AirVideo app that was available only for iOS and so far it works great!

We are not Apple fans mainly because of their cult-like followers, not because of their products. They are usually a very low common denominator when it comes to tech savvy but consistently want to go head-to-head on technical debates and will say anything (read lie). Just the other day Matt got in a bicker with a guy who proclaimed that Samsung's faster processor meant "nothing" and that proved that Matt doesn't know what he's talking about. With quotes like: "You've falling victim to the megahertz myth" (yes they typo like crazy too) ... or "It's unfortunate that the blind is leading the blind." ... Then proceeded to compare dual core processors to single core processors despite the obvious fact that both devices have dual core processors, then talked about architecture of which he was clearly ignorant of any architectural advantage in iOS. Those who are not "blind" are well aware that iOS at its guts is not that different from Android (SUSv3...darwin Linux 2.6...android) ... and one does not have to be "blind" to know that neither will have any "architectural advantage" that will render 50% GHz increase meaningless. However, fanboys will proclaim it as though they were experts. The apple "geniuses" just prove their own ignorance, and become something similar to the Iraqi Information Minister. We hate liars, and Apple has capitalized on these liars.

I'll repeat what Matt already said, Steve Jobs was brilliant, but he was a brilliant marketer, and designer, not an inventor, and his programmers are not the best, in fact they have a lot of trouble getting things right the first time, sometimes more trouble than the OpenSource community, and even Microsoft.

Apple does not produce enterprise applications. They have no high availability server products that remotely compare to Microsoft or Linux. Fanboys are armchair critics. They don't know what they are talking about in 90% of cases, and the 10% that do know what they are talking about don't get involved in the propaganda and often roll their eyes at the nonsense they see flying around.

There are folks that think it's worth paying sometimes twice the price for what amounts to a desktop sculpture. That's the genius of Steve Jobs in action. The Mac vs. PC commercials (Coolness vs. Geek) that's Steve Jobs in action. However, you can be sure there are geeks at Apple or it wouldn't "just work".

Steve Jobs created a chasm that divided "geeks" from his fashionable followers. He polarized the computing community instead of bringing it together. He did this for profit, plain and simple. A type of profit that I personally have been unwilling to extort. Perception is profitable, but it requires a level of deceit that some of us are unwilling to stoop to. Convincing someone that their product (that does basically the same thing as other products) is worth twice as much as others charge is deception. Some ethics are difficult to determine, but telling the truth is not.