Yeah, but I'm also saying that power users have been a not-insignificant subculture who sustained Apple through years of darkness in the mid-'90s when their platform was widely ridiculed by PC users. During the shift to Unix, Apple relied on the more-informed fraction of their user base to evangelize for them. Now they seem to have changed wholeheartedly to a marketing strategy aimed only at the lowest common denominator, the dumbest appliance user, the GPS-enabled cell phone consumer... or what Windows users always accused Mac junkies of being from day one. I think it's a terrible strategic error, because they're tossing out the years of investment they've made to build themselves into a legitimate competitor against what most acknowledge is a terrible hog of an OS that controls 80% of desktops, laptops and mobiles... and they're ditching that in favor of... an OS that doesn't allow multitasking? That doesn't allow any kind of creativity, only consumption of pre-made movies and music and crapplications?

The reason most so-called power users bought macs and got good on them was that we wanted powerful video editing and color calibration and preflight press tools that just weren't up to speed under Windows 3 in the mid-90's. Most of which were made by Adobe or companies and technologies it has since absorbed. We became power users because we didn't want to be constrained by out-of-the-box utilities and applications. I think Apple's mistake here is that they've become convinced that ease of use was the only reason most artists and designers opted to buy their machines. It's not and it never was. We bought their gear because it was slick and easy and we could make it do whatever we wanted it to do. Take the flexibility and openness out of the equation, stick it all into a walled garden, and you have an overpriced dummy appliance; a TiVo box on steroids. I think it's huge mistake. It's the Apple Lisa all over again, and Jobs should know better.

I've never downloaded an update of iTunes. When I buy a new Mac for my business, the first thing I do is delete iPhoto, iMovie, and everything else on the ****er that starts with a lowercase i. If they aren't going to let me do that, I don't want their POS*** platform anymore; it's worse than worthless.