Shiny, and white.

General, Reckons

Apple are a marketing company, most of their products are the same as what’s available on PC, in some cases utterly identical and cheaper, so what Apple sell you is "style" and "a whole lot of shiny white paint" they also still pretend to sell you "easy," which is a complete lie, but never mind, ‘cos they’re now really really good at marketing their shiny white boxes.

They even get to me sometimes, the Imac G5, for example, isn’t original, there are other ‘everything behind the screen’ machines, but: it’s lovely, and while you could have an ‘okay’ PC with dual 19" LCD screens for the price of a single 17" Imac G5, but its amazingly less of a price shock than was the norm even just a couple of years ago.

However, the coolest recent hardware from Apple is the new mini mac, it’s much more versatile than the Imac G5, however, even this isn’t really that original – there are plenty of cheap and cheerful tiny case options for PC users – thing is, they’re mostly not as hot as the mini.

The MP3 players, though… I really can’t imagine the drive that some people have to buy the over priced over rated Apple branded MP3 players, I don’t have the drive, so I think you’re all fools, and yes I’m sure you do like your Ipod, it’s nice to be able to carry around a lot of files, but I do this with portable hard drives, bigger than any Ipod, and a third of the price. But who in their right mind would buy the new Ipod Shuffle? It’s a flash based mp3 player, just like the non-Apple world has been enjoying for years. Why would you bother? (It was an obvious move for Apple, of course: it’s the only portion of the mp3 player market they don’t yet 0wn, and I suspect it’ll probably work.)

Apple do need to sort out OSX, though, it’s an awful unintuitive lump.