Meanwhile my Macbook Pro freezes on me regularly (a "hard" freeze requiring a power cycle). Neither my linux laptop nor my windows (7, home premium) desktop freeze on me often enough for it to be remarkable (but they both do crash occasionally). It happens.

Apple's product isn't technology. It's culture. Technology is a marketing tool they invest heavily in and use to sell their real product. That's one of the more brilliant things Jobs ever did (and it is remarkably brilliant; the man can't be admired enough for it, in my opinion, at least from a business perspective).

Apple's technology works well enough, and the appearance aesthetics are bleeding edge (usually, for a while, at least), but the zeal with which those in the culture defend the technology is simply amusing to behold. No technology is worth such zealous defense.

> Meanwhile my Macbook Pro freezes on me regularly (a "hard" freeze requiring a power cycle).

I'm curious if you see anything in Console for those time frames?

"GPU reset" "I/O error" "Graphics error", that kind of thing.

> No technology is worth such zealous defense.

Tell that to the Linux community.

I'm part of that community. We aren't all trying to be High Priests of the One True Technology. I don't think users of Apple products are all part of a Hive Mind, either.

I had one rock-solid MacBook, followed by one that would kernel panic 2-3 times per week. Switching RAM chips took care of the issue. YMMV

It's a pity you didn't ask him to email you a copy once he did get it working. You know, email - the open protocol that works across different systems?

Your story is basically FUD because you're describing a kernel panic, which is most likely because the guy was intentionally running unstable bleeding edge stuff. If he was running consumer-level linux stuff, it's very unlikely that would have happened.

I'll tell you a secret: that fellow was me, every one of several times over the last half-dozen years that I tried running Ubuntu or Debian, in the latest stable version then available, on various commodity laptops not more than a year or two old.

Oh, I suppose my mistake was in not choosing my hardware according to the recommendations of the assembled gurus at linux-laptop.net, or just not being awesome enough to know what incantation I needed to mumble where, or the precise angle at which to incise the throat of the sacrificial chicken, or some damned thing to which those who haven't yet got bored of sysadmin drudgery are welcome.

Of course, the Linux community being as it is the apotheosis of "blame the user", I'm sure I'll hear all sorts of detailed explanations of what I obviously must have done wrong, none of which does anything to make my Macbook any less preferable as an Emacs substrate.

Or... sometimes computers crash, whether they're linux, windows, or mac. That you saw a linux computer crash once is no more notable than the times I saw a mac crash (and believe me, I have).

Anecdata!

Your anecdotal evidence is entirely irrelevant. I've seen kernel panics multiple times on OS X, including when I really needed to use the machine (OTOH, I've had a solid experience running Linux on various ThinkPads for years). Does that mean I should judge it based on that?

Yes.