True you do need the EFI, but there are great developer comunities out there that write those, and you can flash most fx cards after they have been on the market a few months to work on any mac. I have done this before. or you can buy preflashed cards if you want, they are plug and play.

as for codecs, wma-drm, ogg, flac are the non suported ones.. i would like to see ogg added, as the hardware is capable of it. what more do you want, and non drm wma works, any non drm music from other music stores will work

i do wish they would hurry up and strip all drm from their music, but i suspect music industry is using this to try and leverage more control from apple, itunes supports the same, but you can add ogg and flac, i have both on mine

iphone, i would like to say i know more about it, but im now waiting for version 3 before getting one, as many things are not there that i want, and by then the link to at&t should be broken, but i look at its specs and think better could be done, but all smart phones strike me that way, i was still using a sarteck until analog was killed 

I think it is far more that the dev community for apple is still smaller, and i feel it is just as open as windows, but not as much as linux, but then nothing else is, and linux suffers from the same gpu issuses as osx if thats a point of yours. give it a few more years, and i feel we wont even need to flash cards to make them uniform, i feel the next few os releases will help with this. I used to get advanced copies, but I no longer want to pay for the dev community privlege for that 

my current boxes are an 03 g5 tower dual 2  (gpu ati 850 overclocked), a mac mini  05 1.42 ( ati overclocked gpu makes a nice file server), mac book pro 15 06 (worked with overclocking it, but could not dissipate heat well enough). 

They don't suck. I think it legitimately shuts up this dumb Mac phase everyone's going through:

"Hey, I'm a Mac, and I can do photo booth, and edit videos in one easy click"

So?

"Hey, I'm a PC, and everything that makes this world turn can be done on my system"

I think I like the latter better

There are plenty other codecs itunes/iphone do not support. There's nothing but Apple's will stopping such implementations... (except in the few cases of propietary codecs that require royalties).

Also, the fact that you can hack your way around their walled garden approach it's nothing but a confirmation that they indeed limit choice. Do you need to hack / use pirated bios to install graphic cards on a pc?

You are basically saying that apple's door is not closed and the proof is that you can pick the lock to open it. HINT: if there's a lock to be picked, the door is closed.

As for linux and graphic cards, there's a substantial difference between the OS owner/machine manufacturer putting up doors so you can't do something and open software lacking driver support. Hint, only in one of those situations there's someone actively trying to limit choice.

edit: geez, I can't believe that as a sort-of-apple-fan I'm actually arguing against a rabider fanboy about apple's merits and demerits. Surreal.

@bitmap, as a matter of fact, i did have to when vista first came out, the nvida drivers were terrible. and quite a few pci card swere close to usless, and i needed my firewire cards, so yes... i have had to, the video problem for mac is very related to that, the hardware manufacturer thought it wasnt worth the time to update it because you would buy a replacment or replace the computer.

heh.. it is, whats worse is i love my 360... i am a walking hypocrisy?

I have things i hold against apple, like not sliding the price as the tech in products goes out of date... (hd monitors need a refresh or price drop) why did you steal firewire from my ipods (i know its cost size, and the pc world loves its slow usb2). i am still bitter over the switch to x86, (I know the road maps never played out right on powerpc/ IBM was trying to bail)

People who are complaing that the Microsoft Ads don't say why you should get windows are being kinda ignorant.

Not that that's a bad thing since not everyone has had classes in marketing... but the most important ads for dominant brand leaders are "reminder" ads.

Ads that just say "Hey, remember coke?"

Everyone already knows who you are, and your commercials are more a sign to remind people you are still the dominant brand. You only spend money on advertising to counteract advertising your competitors make so you have just as much airtime as them... if not a lot more.

Therefore all you need is memorability.

Hey, I really enjoy my 360 too. It's not about both of us being hypocrites but rather about having criteria.

And yeah, taking out firewire sucked - specially these days when the ipods/iphones go up to 16gb and more. It took forever to dump my 12gb itunes library, usb is just bad.