Okay, I shouldn't really have to qualify myself here, but I will. I *only* use Macs for my personal life and day-to-day work, I own an iPhone and an Apple TV. Okay, that's partly a lie. In my recording studio, I have a Windows XP machine for running Adobe Audition. And I have a Acer laptop that runs Vista that sits in the studio and collects dust.
Otherwise I work mainly on my MacBook Pro. My fiancee uses a white MacBook. And our wireless network is served by an Apple Airport Extreme 802.11g, and we use AirTunes with an Airport Express (g) in our living room.
But what really is beyond me, is how nutty all you fanboys are. Apple screwed up the iPhone 3G launch and the MobileMe launch... bad. I was without my .mac email (which I actually use) for five days. Yes, I was in that "one percent". FIVE DAYS.
Jobs sending an internal email acknowledging this mistake may make this all just evaporate for you, while you fawn over the perfection of his management style. Except of course, a perfect manager and perfect company wouldn't have screwed up a major product launch this badlytwice in a row no less (remember the activation servers crashing with the initial iPhone launch?). Actually, remember the iTunes servers crashing pretty much every Christmas Day for the last 5 years?
Oh, and remember the security holes in Safari that went unpatched for months? Or the Back to My Mac service that doesn't work?
I hate to say it... but for all the unstylishness of Microsoft, and all it's flaws, and the even the market failure of Vista, I really can't think of Microsoft making such big flops in terms of technical execution that Apple has been routinely making in product launches for years.
Apple gets away with having such crappy execution and services because it has such well-designed products. But Apple has made a habit out of pushing unfinished, poorly tested products out the door (Leopard included).
Just go back and look through the history of MR for every major Apple product launch in the last 3-4 years, and you'll find a thread with people bitching about some ridiculous problem. Then Apple starts releasing version x.1, x.2, x.3, and the complaints finally die into the forgotten past.
If you ask me: Apple is the antithesis to Microsoft; Microsoft can't pull off a slick consumer product to save it's life, but on the other hand, Apple can't understand high-availability/high-scale solutions from it's ass. They might actually compliment each other, and in some ways they've started to: the iPhone 3G supports Exchange after all.
