Designed for the stupid and poor. It's a huge, expanding market.
1. The mere fact of using Linux is not a proof of intelligence since the hard things in Linux are harder because they are more tedious, less user friendly or both (e.g: The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story).
2. Being able to afford a Macintosh is not what I would call rich and the implication that having money is a virtue in itself is disgusting.
As a rule of thumb, the difference between classy humor and not-classy humor is that with the former, you put the joke on yourself (not on others) and/or you point out that the stereotype has holes in it the size of an NSA machineroom.
When you think about it that way, it makes the analogy so much worse (or better, I suppose).
There are people who are totally fine with being completely clueless about how their computers work. Microsoft targets them actively. This is not evil per se - it's just market strategy.
When you're the market leader, you kind of have a responsibility to represent the industry in a good light.
"Have you tried turning it off and on again"? Is a horrible horrible tech support answer (Checkout IT crowd if you haven't watched it), but it's so common. We've become accepting of computers, and software crashing, and IMHO a large part of the blame is squarely with MS.
However, the blue screen of death was so prevalent that it set windows apart from other OS'es.
Kernel panics on linux are pretty rare. And I've never seen OSX just die at the OS level.
edit: Just remembered, I have seen OSX die, on my mac mini if I try to play backed up DVDs and output dolby5.1 in frontrow sometimes it just blows up and says "Your computer requires a restart" :/ eugh. Still, works if you use other players, and something easy to avoid.
I know Windows gets a bad rep for crashing—I use XP on my Macbook and I've had no crashes yet—but beyond crashing, I'm astonished at how grotesquely unstable it is. I use an app on it that takes up the full screen, where one window generates the full screen window, so Alt-F4 doesn't work, and I can't open a task manager because it just gets auto-hidden by the screen. That's incredibly bad practice, but I've seen it done by multiple Windows designers because it, unlike OS X, doesn't offer a rigid set of guidelines for its functions.
Beyond crashing and messing up, Windows is just incredibly un-smooth. Perhaps they fixed it with 7, I don't know yet, but when I use XP or Vista I'm struck by how hard it is for me to treat its window metaphor with any respect. I can't rely on windows to move when I click and drag them, they don't have any particularly good window hierarchy in place, and everything is so choppy and clunky, even with a good mouse, that I find myself resenting the system. That compared to OS X, which is the smoothest system I've ever used. Everything in it adds up brilliantly.
I still like XP—or, I do until there are more Mac emulators available—but I completely get axod's argument, and agree with it. Microsoft killed computers' reputation, and are primarily responsible for why people I know think computers are so impossible to deal with.
You might try setting the "Always on top" option for taskman, so that other app windows can't cover it up. I've _never_ had a problem with taskman being obscured by another window.
You say it like it was deliberate. Historically, where Linux has said "not a chance on this hardware but hey, you could always write your own drivers", Windows has said "OK let's give it a go, fingers crossed" and it hasn't always worked.
You should know what a spleen does and how to tell if it's healthy - if you're a doctor.
You should know what a tappet does and how you can fix it - if you're a car mechanic.
You should know what a tort does and how you can serve one - if you're a lawyer.
The Doctor, Lawyer, mechanic can be intelligent, dedicated, passionate people. Just not about computers. Why on earth should they care about operating systems more than you care about spleens, torts or tappets? What makes you special?
"“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”"
Now, most of the specifics here are things that normal people could do (cook a meal, etc). Few of them ("plan an invasion") are something that require substantial training. But his point is that people should be well-rounded, not specialized.
The problem is, generalization isn't rewarded in any modern culture that I'm aware of. The phrase "age of the specialist" is well known; people who are fantastic experts at (neurosurgery|IP law|graphics coding|etc) and utterly incompetent outside their field of expertise always have higher status and salaries than JOATs who can turn their hand to anything and do a decent job, but don't have great mastery at any one thing.
It's even hard to argue which approach is better; who is more likely to make a significant new discovery, the scientist who knows every little detail of his entire field and can synthesize all of them, or the scientist with decent familiarity with half a dozen fields, that has bring a cross-disciplinary approach to the problem?
I suppose there's a place for both. Certainly, when you have a knee surgery done, the guy you want to go to is the one who does nothing but knees, 4-8 operations per week, and not the guy who does whatever kind of surgery comes into his OR.