You must be a troll. Don't talk down Apple hardware or software especially after just one month of use. Talk business tasks. Name a task and then compare the platforms for what they will do to complete the task. Talk business planning and forecasting. Talk budgeting and financial record keeping. Talk communications and publicity. Compare the platforms. Remember, the platforms are just tools. Pick the one that does the job. I've found room for both platforms since I have a variety of jobs that need doing.

OTOH, it's possible that Fred is just happier with Windows and that's fine. It's unlikely he's going to get much sympathy here -- I'm sure there are any number of Windows-centric forums would be more supportive -- and it's likely to do little good to try to convince him that the Mac is anything but an "expensive toy" so maybe we should all save our collective breaths.

Fortunately, with Boot Camp, that Mac is a perfectly fine Windows PC. I'd suggest he run it as such.

Ah, then maybe you're new at this. The idea is this: You choose to participate in a forum where people are enthusiastic about their Macs. You take a contrary position, which is fairly aggressive. How did you expect people to respond to your post?

"Gosh, that Fred, he's got something there. I think I'll dump this Mac and get a PC!"

No, what you got is pretty much what one would expect.

So yes, that kind of baiting is known as trolling and those who engage in it, trolls. Accepted practice is to not feed the troll in the hope that those who enjoy such diversions will find more bountiful grounds for their entertainment.

My hope is that you're not intentionally trolling and simply expressing an opinion likely to be greeted with, at best, skepticism.

Fred, no one with any sense wants to engage in a Mac versus PC argument. It's pointless and does nothing but stir ill will.

And that's what we're trying to avoid here. Ill will generated by someone who appears to be trying to stir the pot. If you don't care for the Mac, there are plenty of places on the Internet you can gripe about it. But your opinions aren't going to receive a big welcome here as those who come to a site called MACworld generally have positive feelings about it.

So enough, please. If you have questions about the Mac, there are any number of people who would be happy to help you with it -- me included. But if you just want to gripe, please do it somewhere else.

Hey, Fred. Congrats on your iMac.

You're more than welcome to talk about whatever you want to, but exercise some common sense.

When you go to the zoo and fling poop at the monkey cage, just what exactly do you expect the monkeys to do? And what do you expect the zookeeper to do with you afterwards?

Again, welcome to the party. Got questions about your Mac that aren't loaded like rock salt buckshot, we'd love to help you out.

Fred, I think you've been captured by the trap of edge cases: you list a whole number of things that (I believe) most people don't care about or aren't using. For instance, I've been using Windows since version 3.1, even though I'm mostly a Mac guy. I always have at least 1 or 2 working systems for testing or other work (typically a desktop and a laptop). RIght now I have a Dell laptop designed to work with Vista that I'm quite pleased with; I have seen none of the trouble with Vista people report because the laptop had all the minimum configuration needed and was never upgraded from XP.

But I've nearly never had specialized USB software that wasn't interchangeable with a Mac. Right now, I have scanners, hard drives, flash drives, a spectrum analyzer, and other gear that works just as well under Windows XP and Vista as on a Mac. So when you say that Fusion won't work because of USB devices, I have to say you're an edge case (a case in which you aren't part of the mass of people) because you've got something particular that's a problem. (Also, I don't know if you've encountered Boot Camp, which is native Windows booting from a Mac. This is needed for some kinds of tasks, especially particular hardware that lacks Mac drivers or that can't be shunted through virtualization in Fusion or Parallels. Microsoft and Adobe both have some software that they specifically recommend or require you to use Boot Camp with because virtualization won't cut it.)

Also, when you make a statement like this, it's hard to take you seriously: "There's just not as much software available for the Mac, and the paucity of freeware and shareware seems to be even greater."

I've heard this for years, and with the exception of very specific high-end software for specific vertical industries, like financial markets or healthcare, or very specific utilities, I've nearly never found that to be the case. I don't need 15 freeware FTP clients (although there are probably that many for the Mac) when there are five that are terrific. (On the Windows side, there are 2 or 3 really great FTP clients that I know of.)

This is part of why you're getting labeled a troll: it has been true at different times in Apple's history that critical, useful, and entertaining programs just weren't available on the Mac. Now, I'm hard pressed outside of certain games and certain technical software to make that case. I'd love to know what you're not finding; in fact, by noting that, you'll get a lot of help from this forum.

As others have noted, you initial post is quite antagonistic. Therefore, it stands to reason that such a post on a Mac enthusiast’s forum would result in you being labeled a troll and handled accordingly, particularly as most of your points of argument have little to do with the platform.

Ease of Use

It is very easy to sit here and state that OS X is no easier to use than Windows after you have been conditioned to work the Windows way over the however many years you have used Microsoft’s operating system. Few people come into the computing world from a clean slate and if a person is conditioned to work counter to instinct, that which should be intuitive no longer shall be. As one of my prior chemistry professors liked to say, “Knowing how to do something the hard way does not make it the easy way.” You are used to doing things the way Microsoft wants you to and, due to inertia, resistant to OS X because it is different.

When Windows 95 was introduced on many levels it paled in comparison to the original Mac OS (from 1984) because in order to be different Microsoft failed to follow many of the basic tenants of good GUI design. Apple pretty much got things right out of the gate and as a result, even with the OS X migration the Mac OS has been more evolutionary over the past 24 years than revolutionary. More features have been added over the years and OS X gave Mac users a better kernel under the hood, but little has changed in the way that you interact with the Mac OS.

So yes, in the past 13+ years, Windows has in many respects caught up to where the Mac OS has been for quite some time. As a dual platform user, I could easily write an entire post about the operations in Windows that are either non-intuitive or require more steps than is necessary. But, one clear example of the former is the need to go to a Start menu to quit using one’s computer. Nothing about that is intuitive, people have just been conditioned to work that way. In the case of the latter, creating new folders using contextual menus in Windows is a two-step process. First you have to find ‘New’ in a desktop contextual menu, as it is often not the first item listed, then you have to select ‘Folder’ from a submenu. ‘New Folder’ is always the first item in contextual menus within the Finder on a Mac.

Entourage

Entourage is Microsoft’s software and therefore any complaints you have about this mail client should be directed at Microsoft and not Apple or the Mac experience.

iCal

OK, this is Apple software, but it is also preinstalled freeware. If iCal does not suit your needs then you can easily find or inquire about a replacement.

MobileMe

I never used .Mac or its current replacement MobileMe, so I cannot say much here beyond the fact that it has been noted by others that it is not up to par.

Fusion

Again, this is not Apple branded software and it has nothing to do with the Mac experience. Fusion is virtualization software allowing you to run a second operating system from within the Mac’s native operating system and that is an extremely complex operation. As such, it is a miracle that it works at all. If you have strong direct hardware requirements, virtualization is not the route you should be taking and that has nothing to do with Apple as Apple does not develop or market virtualization software.

Word

Again, this has nothing to do with the Mac. How any Microsoft product stacks up on the Mac compared to its Windows counterpart is solely up to Microsoft. Microsoft has repeatedly chosen, to not pour the resources into their Mac Business Unit to insure that the Mac version of Office has exact feature parity with the Windows version, sans those features that rely on platform-specific technologies. As the largest and wealthiest software developer on the planet, there is no legitimate reason for Microsoft to not only make sure that their software has feature parity between the Mac and Windows versions, but they should also offer most, if not all of their applications for the Mac. Microsoft has chosen to do neither.

Microsoft alone made the conscious decision to halfheartedly implement VBA in previous versions of Office:mac, and Microsoft alone made the decision to drop VBA support from Office:mac 2008.

Limited Software Options

This point alone was enough for people to view you as a troll. As Glenn_Fieishman stated, Mac users have been hearing this bilge for a long time and it is straight out of the book of FUD in the anti-Mac bible. The number of applications that exist to perform a certain task does not make a given platform better than another. What difference does it make if there are 200 applications available to perform task A in Windows if 197 of them are crap? As Glenn has already stated, no one needs to have that many options when only a small few are even worth bothering with.

I would rather have a few good options that I can research in short order than a myriad options that takes for ever to search through just to wind up still not finding or selecting good software. As an individual user, I seriously doubt that there is any task that you are trying to accomplish for which Mac software does not exist. The exception, as again Glenn already noted, is software for very vertical markets where the Mac has never had a foothold.

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In all, you have been using a Mac after a month or two after using Windows for years. Coming here and bashing the Mac by referring to it as an expensive toy before you have even had adequate time to learn the ropes is not going to earn you any friends.

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“Cannot run out of time. There is infinite time. You are finite. Zathras is finite. This is wrong tool.” 2.3GHz Power Mac G5/8GB/2x1TB HDD/OS X 10.4.11/30-inch ACD, 60GB iPod (Color)