Thank heaven! Here we were, thinking that the knee-jerk anti-Mac sentiment in the press had gone the way of the dinosaurs, when Information Week columnist Fred Langa proves otherwise. In his latest "Langa Letter," he claims that the press has been handling Apple with kid gloves because "no one likes to kick an underdog." (Heck, if that were true, what was all that "Apple is dead" press back when the company was really an underdog?) Langa admits that Apple has "done some things well," like advertising the iMac, but he goes on to list what he perceives to be continuing problems that Apple still has to face.

Now, let's be perfectly fair: many of Langa's points are valid, even if they're spun waaay in the anti-Mac direction. He says, for example, that "the Mac's memory management/memory protection scheme is legendarily outdated-- the Mac has probably the very worst memory management among all the currently shipping major operating systems." Harsh words, yes-- but basically true. But then he goes on to blame those OS problems for the glitches that plagued the Macworld Expo Tokyo keynote address in a remarkably inaccurate manner. Reading his account of the keynote is like looking at one of those "How Many Things Are Wrong With This Picture?" puzzles. First of all, he claims that the system crashed while Jobs was performing a demo and had to be rebooted. Actually, it crashed while Microsoft rep Ben Waldman was trying to demo a brand-new Japanese version of Internet Explorer. And it wasn't Jobs earnestly trying to point out an "innovation" to the audience by mentioning the reset switch on the front-- it was Waldman, trying to cover IE's instability with a pathetic little joke.

Langa then goes on to say that Jobs' streaming video demo, in which a G3 server was to send video to fifty iMacs at once, "didn't work. At all." But anyone who would actually take the time to watch the demo via the video streams that were made available via the web saw that it wasn't nearly that bad, and the demo did work eventually. And, of course, it worked flawlessly a month before in San Francisco. Glaring factual errors make it clear that Langa isn't interested in the truth; he's just out to bash Apple. Cool! Finally, we can relax, knowing that there's still a healthy dose of anti-Mac hysteria in the media. Maybe the world isn't coming to an end, after all.