Oy vey, just when it looked like the default Apple-bashing in the media might finally have passed, along comes the New York Times, otherwise known as "Old Faithful" among those who are familiar with its record of Mac-slamming. Their article "Clan Macintosh Feels the Pain" is more of their standard "Apple is dying" rhetoric, but dressed up with a few recent numbers and quotes from Mac folk who are finally bailing on the platform. While it may be a bad idea to read it on a full stomach, it could serve as a powerful drugless appetite suppressant for you dieters out there. (See? We find the good in everything.)

We're not all that great with the self-righteous anger bit, and we paid our point-by-point refuting dues in comp.sys.mac.advocacy ages ago, so we'll leave it up to the pros to tear this thing to shreds. Our good buddy John Farr gets his licks in over at AppleLinks, in particular wondering just how aware Bob Levitus and John Warnock were of the context in which their comments would be taken. And then there's Don Crabb, whom we just knew couldn't leave this story alone if you paid him. His analysis is available over at MacCentral, and is required reading for anyone who reads the NYT article. As for us, we'll just rest content in the knowledge that after being awake for thirty-six hours straight, we were still able to talk a computer novice located three thousand miles away through installing and setting up a U. S. Robotics PC-card modem on a Powerbook 1400, including ARA and TCP/IP setup, in about an hour's worth of conversation over a barely-audible cellular phone, to save the day at an important trade show-- while our dedicated and able-bodied system administrator wasted five hours to get the exact same modem working on a stubborn Windows laptop sitting right in front of him, due to IRQ conflicts and Plug and Play that only Plugged and then sort of sat around instead of Playing. For us, that's the only counterargument we need.

Don't take this the wrong way, but in a warped sense, we're glad the article got published. Truth be told, we've seen so much Apple-bashing in the mainstream press for the last couple of years, this recent trend of "Apple may survive after all" stories had us a trifle uneasy. The cease-fire was dulling the once-sharp edge of our paranoia. But now that we know the New York Times hasn't lost sight of their ultimate goal of the complete and utter destruction of Apple, we can breathe a little harder, tense back up, and start jumping at shadows again. Ahhh, it feels good to be back...