Not just Slashdot in 2003. Also Slashdot in 1998, Hacker News in 2008, Usenet in 1988, and all throughout the intervening years and back to the very dawn of recorded history. Sumerians were exchanging angry commentary written on their clay tablets about the virtues of Microsoft, IBM, and Apple computers in the Euphrates swamps six thousand years ago.

Meh, I don't think this is the same. Back then, the PC mainstream looked at Apple buyers like a rabble of fanboys who didn't know what they were buying. And indeed a lot of them were exactly that: artists, musicians and schoolteachers overpaying for hardware in order to get the superior MacOS experience.

Today, the mainstream in tech circles is a mob of disgruntled Apple buyers that Cupertino spent decades courting and accumulating with bold moves (like the MBA and the MBPR), who now don't see a reason to stick around. It's a bad trend for Apple.

I'm glad someone made this comment, although I confess I stopped reading the whole thread after the comment count went above 700 or so, so for all I know there is another like it in the dogpile here.

There is something about this topic that really gets the comments going, and I wonder what it is.

It's not just Apple vs. Microsoft. It is also Apple vs. what Apple should have done, or Microsoft vs. what its competitors are doing.

I propose that a simple A vs. B discussion isn't enough to provoke all this. Today's Apple announcement is being taken as a kind of indirect referendum on the future of nerd-friendly high-end computing hardware as a whole. As you point out, the waning significance of this question (with the rise of phones and tablets) has caused a lot of anxiety out there!