You know how your Catholic friends are all "Sure, I f**k around and take the pill, but dude, how cool is St. Thomas Aquinas?" Okay, maybe those are only Catholic friends. But our Apple fiend friends can seem more dogmatic than the Apostle Paul. Question Apple's hardware? "Blasphemy! Get thee to Windoze and suffer an enternity for your sins!"

Well, we call bulls**t on Apple for how they pissed on poor fans by neglecting to include the motion-protection technology on their 12" PowerBooks from 2004. The 15" and 17" models had it, and they're a hell of a lot less portable. If you're going to enter the notebook market, understand that people are going to treat them like notebooks. That means shutting the lid and running for a MUNI bus, carrying them in a regular shoulder-bag, and especially the occassional drop.

About two months after the warranty expired, our hard drive began to fail. Last week it started to whine loudly, and now we have to replace it ($75 covered the hardware -- luckily, we can do the labor ourselves). As much as we'd like to replace it with a 12" iBook, the fact is that you should have an external drive and some good backup software on-hand at all times if you decide to go with a small Apple laptop.

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