What is Apple Computer? I know back in the day they engineered the fist PC, the Apple II or whatever, but these days they use Intel Chips and NVidia cards don't they? So what is the difference?

And when the iPod came out a long time ago what was all the buzz about? Wasn't it just an mp3 player? I know those were around before the iPod.

Someone enlighten me.

....

thx

I beg to differ. With the exception of using EFI rather than the 20 year old BIOs, Macs == PC. Sooner or later other non apple PCs will be using EFI. Still, as far as I'm concerned, they aren't anything special. It run's apple's OSX. Big deal, although it is a nice OS, to me it isn't hardly worth the vendor lock-in for. So I can just as easily build a 'hackintosh' to run it, or emulate it in a VM, and there isn't much apple can do about it, unless they go back to POWER instead of x86.

Sorry to rag on apple, but also I'm not impressed by their i-pods. *I* don't care if their product has an i before it, *I* ain't buying it. If I have to use itunes, or another special app just to sync my music, rather than simply copying it over, the player sucks, period. I have my eye on some players that can play flac natively, but I don't know how they operate; I don't know if I have to use some crappy software just to put my music on it.

i-phone, i-pod, i-hype.

Regarding MP3 players, I have one (non-Apple) that came with software that you "have to" use to put music on the device, but I never installed it, and I no longer even can since I switched to Linux, but my machine just recognizes the player as a generic removable storage device when I plug it into the USB port. So not all MP3 players require you to use the manufacturer's stupid software to copy songs to the unit, even if the instructions say that you are.

Apple = style

Honestly... some of their stuff looks really good. But that's all it is. Looks. I don't feel like paying for looks. I have an ipood because it was a gift. I just use gktPod (*nix) or sharepod (win). I suppose if you knew how to write entries to the itunes database on the ipod, then you could copy everything by hand.

I still have no idea what syncing is. I got one them sansa mp3 players. I mount it and copy files on to it. Then I play the files. If syncing is a new way to do that I can't imagine what it would be.

A sync is a commit to your changes. The files don't get removed or copied to the device till you press sync.