Prepare to be shocked: according to a survey mentioned in a Wired article kindly sent to us by faithful viewer Daniel M. Dreifus, "one in every four computers has been physically attacked by its owner." "Okay," we hear you reply, "so what?" So, that's not the shocking part. The shocking part is that the researchers, knowing full well that over 90% of desktop computers out there are running Microsoft operating systems, are somehow still surprised by these findings. Go figure.

Seriously, British PC manufacturer Novatech (who ran the survey) claims to have been somewhat startled when its "lighthearted look" at "little technical bloopers" revealed a "much darker story": fully 25% of the survey's 4200 respondents confessed to "physically attacking their computers." Sadly, Novatech doesn't elaborate on the type of abuse that these computer users directed at the sources of their frustration, but Wired fills the gap: a computer shop owner reports that the most commonly observed sign of an abused computer is a battered keyboard "from people smacking down... with an open hand or sometimes a fist." The most typical punishment meted out is a "sharp slap delivered to the monitor or the hard drive case." That was certainly the downfall of William Vincent, who thusly managed to kill his hard drive completely when his Dell crashed and he started beating it like a-- well, like a dead Dell. (Of course, that was just mistake number three. Mistake number two was not saving his work regularly; mistake number one was buying a Dell in the first place.)

Perhaps someday someone will do a study correlating violence against computers with the operating systems that said computers are running, but we're going to go out on a limb here and guess that the occurrence of physical Mac abuse is disproportionately low; sure, you always hurt the ones you love, but who could really hit a system that smiles at you when you start it up? (Conversely, who could suppress the urge to smack the living bejeezus out of a computer that makes you click "Start" to shut it down?) Heck, in recent years the percentage of Mac-related computer abuse has probably gotten even lower; the machines are now just too darn pretty to beat up. In light of this discovery, perhaps it's all just coming down to natural selection, and Macs are evolving to avoid vicious user-delivered beatdowns. And you thought they were designed in labs...