Bites. Stinks. Pure garbage. Junk. Pick a euphemism. I count the works of Apple nothing but skubalon (google: Philippians 3:8 + skubalon).

Before Mac-Geekdom retaliates with sworn allegiance to Jobs and hire a PC programmer to launch a DOS (denial of service, MCF) attack against my UNIX server, note the apple marks on my hand: I am a Mac user. Both in home at by trade (graphic designer). I am also a PC User. And a Linux user. Rest your head Mac-Geekdom: I brought asprin.

I’ve been using a mac a long time; maybe before you. I cheered it on when it and the Amiga butted heads, vying for control in the graphic design workplace. I was blown away by the power of the IIsi and knew things were gonna get crazy when I heard about the Quadra. I stood proud as the Powermac unveiled its awesome 500 megabyte (gasp!) hard drive and when the Clone Wars started I knew Apple would only get better.

But they didn’t. Oh Apple, how far you’ve fallen. Here’s 10 reasons why Apple is Skubalon.

10. Programs. Apples latest games are Quake 4, Sims 2 and World of Warcraft. Those are awesome games that came out about a year and a half ago. Here’s a fact: any program that I can buy for my Mac I can buy for my PC. Here’s another fact, every program that I can get for my PC I may not be able to get for my Mac—not this year anyway. And by then, the (inevitable) new OS will render them inoperable.

9. The Auto-Quit Feature. Apple is so sleek you don’t even have to quit out for the program to shut off. Heck, you don’t even need an error message. Three cheers. Honestly, I would love to see this as an ad right after Apples’ virus joke. For the record, there are Mac Viruses but hackers don’t bother making a ton of them because there is no satisfaction in attacking 2% of the computer marketplace with a virus to make a machine unstable if the machines come unstable out of the box.

8. Widgets. Tiger is like working in a cartoon. You think about a Sandwich on a Thursday and suddenly hundreds of little color circles and boxes jump up and start munching away at your CPU speed.

7. Restarting. Fact: every computer crashes. Millions of mathematical computations running on a single (or duo) central processing unit and backed up by a couple of memory chips, you’re going to have hiccups. My PC crashes about once a month. I live with it—the machine is (after all) on all the time. My Mac, on the other hand, has a million crashes every day. Apps crash, finder crashes, some weird Chinese/Arabic name thing crashes leaving me with a button that says “Si” and at the end of the day I have to shut it down so I can give it a fresh start the next day.

6. Ridiculously Overpriced. Same Os, new features and decimal number (ie: 10.3.9 to 10.4.0) shell out a hundred books. Need a new machine? Drop $1600. Look, it was fine back in the day when each Mac came with high end stuff like a SCSI drive that spun ridiculously faster than the standard IDE drives—but today these Macs ship with the same junk that is in standard pc. Pop it open and you have tons of parts from Toshiba, Motorola and Intel. Basically you’re paying $1600 for a Dell in a nice case. And don’t wave the Mac Mini in front of me as if it’s the answer to the Payer’s Prayers. You burp and it overheats. Speaking of which—

5. Overheating. The machine’s fan starts to scream if you have a post it note sitting next to it. Mac overclocked their CPU’s without supplying proper cooling. If you’re eyes glazed over let me interpret what I said: I witnessed the loss of 17 iMacs in one week because they were too hot. Apple’s response? “Sorry, that’s (i)Life.”

4. The Community. The fanatical ad-worshipping community of self-important wannabe-computer-users who can’t figure out how to plug in a toaster who think they are designing a website when they use photo-book and think they have a life because they organize it all on iCal yet weep whenever the thing has a huge Darwin crash. The poor yet willing-to-shell-out-$1600-on-a-piece-of-history sycophants who congregate in dark blogs or forums praising Apple’s latest macbooks while ignoring that they can’t touch the thing because it’s hot to the touch. Oh wait, there’s an unnamed firmware update for that. Ignore the clicking noise.

3. The End of the Clone Wars. Competition with Powercomputing and Motorola forced the Apple Empire to grow by edging up processor speeds and hard drive space. People danced, glasess clinked, stocks soared (family invested) and a bright Apple shaped future shined on the horizon. Until they brought their heavy heal down and refused the clones the right to produce any new architecture. Motorolla ran away with a defiant fist and Powercomputing merely gasped with Apples heavy corporate foot on its writhing chest. Thus ended progress.

2. No Pro-User. Give me advanced options, people! Look, I want a computer that lets me remove a font without navigating to four different locations. I want a computer that allows me to configure general preferences without going to specific aps. Hey Steve, just because you want the machine simple doesn’t mean you have to close the door on the advanced stuff—we’re not all morons.

1. Closed System—Still. Let’s say you’re a gamer and you want to upgrade your sweet gaming Mac. Let’s ignore the fact that there are no games if you’re a true gamer. You say “I’ve just gotta’ get the latest CPU and for that I need a new motherboard”. Not going to happen. You might as well have bought a laptop. At least, during the Clone Wars, you could do some CPU upgrades. Now, with the amount of change, you can’t do anything except buy a whole new system. So take you’re Apple Time Capsule and put it under your desk for the day you can finally build a girl robot.

Saving grace is that no one reads this site.