I’m sure some irate Mac fans have already fired off angry emails, based upon the deck for this editorial alone, but hopefully the rest of you will at least get through this background stuff first.

In April of last year, I bought a Macbook Pro as my new notebook. Note that this is hardly my first Apple computer. I grew up on Apple IIs, back in the days when you had to add an 80-column card to ’em! I was one of the few holdouts using an Apple IIgs when the rest of the world had gone to DOS and Windows PCs. Even after I got my first 286 PC, I frequently used the Macs my mother had in her home (she was a teacher at an elementary school that was Apple-based). So I’m no Apple noob-—this was just the first one I had bought for myself, for frequent use, in a long time.

Recently, a reader named David e-mailed me, saying he found the article from my guide on how to replace the hard drive in a Macbook Pro. He asked, simply, “A year later, what do you think?” Fundamentally, I stand by my initial impressions: There are plenty of things OS X does very well, and better than any version of Windows. There are also some really boneheaded things. But honestly, the thing I hate most about using a Mac are the Apple fans. The old song and dance about the Steve Jobs worshipping, sycophantic, “thank you sir may I have another”, na-ture of the Cult of Apple is true. And while it certainly does not represent all Mac users, there are enough bad apples (pardon the pun) to spoil the bunch. Continued…