Apple - Believe the Hype?

I blame the whole thing on my brother. Not that he was directly responsible for implanting the evil gnomes that ate my Macbook's hard drive and broke up the normally placid relationship between my Mac and my iPod, but the whole thing starts with him.

Let me backtrack.

I'm a recent convert to Apple. I came to computers rather late in life, in my late twenties, but I eagerly made up for lost time when I opened the lid of the battered third-hand Toshiba Satellite laptop I'd inherited, with its nipple pointer, blinky screen and detachable CD-ROM drive. I put my whole life onto the thing and spent every spare moment I had engrossed in how it worked, how I could make it work for me. For the next eight years and three computers, PC's were it for me. Macs were for those nerdy folks who wore knitted caps and smelled like patchouli, lounged around in the neighborhood cafe and never seemed to have a job. What did I need a Mac for? I sang that song until the umpteenth virus nibbled away at my hard drive and the millionth spyware ad splashed itself across my screen. I'd reformatted and reloaded Windows so many times and lost so many files, I considered just going back to those black and white composition notebooks I'd filled with teenage angst in high school. Until I saw my brother's iBook.

I was blown away by its elegant design and graceful interface. "Nobody writes viruses for these things," my brother confided as he showed me the video he and his girlfriend had recently shot and edited. That was all I needed to hear. Suddenly, those knitted caps in the cafe appeared to be onto something. They'd been smarter than me the whole time. Well, not any more.