I don't get it...

So, I've had my hands on an Apple Mac (for the first time since about 1989), the main reason for this was to see how it stood up in the coding department, they tout OS X as the most advanced operating system in the world... Really its not, its just a very pretty looking version of Unix... Sooo... where's the killer app?

You see, my impression of Mac software has always been that its fantastic looking, but doesn't do an awful lot... and you know what, right out of the box this Mac I'm putting my fangs into smacks of exactly the same thing.. Its dead pretty, its real elegant, but there's not a whole lot I can do with it...

All the programming side of things (XCode) is locked away behind a $99 license... I mean, this is Unix being shipped without a compiler... of any kind....

I've looked around, I can't get any GNU tools on there. I mean I can even get GNU GCC on the aborted alient faetus that is Vista... what the hell are Apple thinking stopping us programming on their kit... this is stuff that I can't believe is happening.

The other end of the stick is that, I always see academic use of Apple kit, I've just watched a presentation from Stamford Uni, where they were using OS X as the base operating system for all their programming examples... so they had all their students pay $99 to Apple... is this something about Apple being in California and Stamford being just around the corner??? I do not get this.

I'm going to keep plugging away at this puppy over the next few days, but for the cost of Apple kit, the cost of the XCode license and the hassle of it being only for their platform, I'd say get a real shitty PC/Lappy from ebay and stick Unbuntu on there for free...