I’d like to take a moment to pitch a small fit. I am not WE. My opinions are my own, my affiliations are non-existent, and I do not fit — nor choose to fit — into any corporate marketer’s fucking target demographic.

The demographic that has me most deeply pissed off at the moment is the Mac Community, as created, promoted and described by MacAddict and MacWorld magazines.

I got a computer. I did not joined a goddamned cult.

But from the contents of a couple of years’ worth of MacAddicts and MacWorlds, and the painfully hyped and never-ending Mac advertising, you would think I was ready to shave my head and start chanting “Steve Jobs is God” along with whichever group of cheesewhiz pissant Mac users it is that has collectively disconnected its cortex matter from its input devices and started sucking on the corporate tit for its opinions. (I have to assume this group exists somewhere. The few other Mac users I know are sane people, but SOMEBODY has to be the model for the crap that goes into these two mags.)

Please don’t misunderstand me. I like my Mac. It’s slow, it was overpriced, and it has certain design features that are there because they’re stylish, not practical, and frankly, fuck style. You know? But the Mac is rock-solid, it’s secure, I have to look at maybe three pieces of spam a day because I use Mail, which comes bundled with the OS for free and has the best spam filter on the planet, bar none. (Please note, however, that my recommendation for buying a Mac only applies to a Mac running OS X. Any Mac OS prior to OS X I consider unusable crap. Tried previous versions, loathed them.)

And the only words I’ve lost since I started using my little iMac were, one time, from a user error. Word crashed on me. (Word is a Windows port. I in no way blame Apple for its bugginess — Apple software works.) When I reloaded it, the Mac politely brought up a temp file of the document I had been working on when Word crashed, and the Mac asked me if I wanted to save this document. The machine had saved all the words I would have lost if it hadn’t been such a polite, elegant little beastie. And I clicked the wrong button. Dumped the doc. User error. One time. About 600 words in the last however-many years.

I don’t get viruses, I don’t get trojans, I don’t get pop-ups, I have never had to reformat my Mac’s hard drive, though I do take good care of it with DiskWarrior. And I keep religious backups anyway, because You Never Know.

But my acquisition of a Mac was a business decision. B-U-S-I-N-E-S-S. It met certain criteria that I required in a BUSINESS machine that was responsible for keeping the mission critical side of my business going. Mainly, that it is rock-solid, that it is less susceptible to all the crap floating around the Internet than a comparable Windows machine, and that it doesn’t routinely eat my work like my last computer, which was a POS Compaq.

Buying a Mac was not a Lifestyle decision. I don’t have a Lifestyle, thank you very fucking much. I have a life. My computer is a part of my life inasmuch as, and no further than, it acts as my interface between me and my written words. I do not let it dictate my diet, my politics, my opinions, my religion, or my sex life. No matter what the editors and the writers of the aforementioned Mac magazines — one of which suggested in a recent article that “if a vegan diet is good enough for Steve, maybe we should consider it” — might think.

Eat me. It’s hardware, pal. Hardware. It’s not an icon, it’s not a revolution, and if I want someone to admire, it won’t be a shitwad multi-millionaire who abandoned his girlfriend and kid to fend for themselves, and who is, even when described by friends, a temper-tantrum-throwing prima donna.

Would I recommend a Mac? Yes. No. Maybe. What do you do with your computer?

I’ve given the pros above. If you have something mission-critical that you do with a computer (mission critical is defined here as, if your computer glitches or gets overrun by viruses and eats your last six months of work, you’ll starve), and if the Mac will run software that will let you do that job, go out RIGHT NOW and by a Mac.

But understand that for the price you’ll pay for any Mac, you could get about double the processing power, speed, and hard drive space in a Win Box.

Here are some other cons.

It’s hard to find Mac software if you don’t live in a densely populated area. Consign yourself to ordering it online.

The software is generally more expensive than what you would pay for Windows software. (It’s usually better, too, but part of that is that the Mac is a much better-integrated machine than a Windows machine. The Mac does have sweet spots.)

If your primary use of a computer is to play games, forget the Mac forever. Games on the Mac are slow, late, kludgy, lumpy, uglier than comparable Windows games, prone to crashes, way overpriced, and they don’t run worth shit unless you paid as much for your computer as I did for my car. (Used, eight years old when I bought it, in good shape, a Mazda.)

If you’re just kicking around with your computer, you don’t want a Mac either. Part of the fun of having a computer is buying cool new software for it, and as previously noted, there isn’t a lot of software for the Mac and what there is is hard to find.

And if you want a rock-solid machine for cheap, you don’t have to have a Mac. If you hear the words “I wrote a script” and you think computer, not Hollywood, build your own Linux box and you can have all the goodies I’ve described with a Mac, and you won’t be able to play any good games either. But you won’t pay as much for the privilege.

Biggest reason NOT to own a Mac? The Mac Community as described and promoted by MacAddict and MacWorld. When these mags stick to tech articles and reviews, they’re as good as any other computer magazine. You need to subscribe to at least one, just because the reviews and tech articles are valuable. Sometimes essential. But along with the good stuff, you’ll have to put up with prissy digs at Windows machines and Windows users, self-congratulatory little asides on how Mac users are smarter, vast generalizations about how Mac users love Steve (I’m voting for fricasseed), essays about how being number two is better than being number one because it makes you special, flat-out pushes for Mac users to support Steve’s Causes like Steve’s Hollywood Friends do (about which we could have a ANOTHER WHOLE FUCKING REALLY NASTY RANT RIGHT NOW, but we won’t), and a whole lot of other snotty, elitist MacBullshit that is almost, but not quite, enough to get me to toss the machine.

But I won’t.

Because, like I said, I DO have a mission-critical app. Writing. The Mac is my business machine and if there were a Mac magazine that had an honest-to-God business slant instead of a we’re-too-fucking-precious-for-words slant, I’d dump the other two and subscribe to that. In the meantime, I’ll keep my Mac, and eventually I’ll buy another one.

And just to allow myself to feel better about being a Mac user — thus lumping myself in with the Mac mags’ fictitious Mac Community of Users (which lives in complete disconnect with me and the other Mac users I actually know) — I’ll eat meat (which I would have done anyway) and once every couple of years I’ll find my way up to Alaska and club a baby seal.