Extraordinary machine

Why exactly does the press go bananas whenever Apple makes an incremental upgrade to its products? Jack Shafer took on the press's Apple-polishing in Slate last week.

There's one possible culprit that Shafer overlooks, though, and one that explains why even arguably superior products geared toward Windows users (yes, I KNOW iPods work with Windows, but bear with me) often fail to arouse more than ambivalence--every magazine I've worked at over the past 15 years uses Macs exclusively.

I do, too. Like nearly every single one of my friends, I don't own a PC. Never have. I love that my iBook just recognizes any device I plug in to it--printer, camera, disk drive. I especially love how iTunes has freed me from the tyranny of keeping CDs just because they have one good song, and how my iPod has 8 billion songs on it and is only half full. My icy white laptop, with its glowing sleep-mode light, looks cool when I put it on the conveyer belt at airports. I have all the software I need, and it works very nicely.

Whenever my mom's Dell laptop blows a gasket (which seemed to be every time she turned it on for the first few months she had it), I try to help her figure it out, but Windows is so damn counterintuitive, we often end up calling customer service and talking to some nice person in Delhi. I've never had to so much as email Apple.

So I am exactly the wrong person to write an objective article about Apple products. And I am exactly the type of person who writes about them. So even though I could give a flying crap about the new iPod, I still pay attention. Because Apple's products are a part of my life, and I trust them, and I thereby seriously advise you not to trust my objectivity.