Inevitably, you are going to think of a long list of intelligent, defensible reasons why each of these options is absolutely, positively essential. Don't bother. I know. Each additional choice makes complete sense until you find yourself explaining to your uncle that he has to choose between 15 different ways to turn off a laptop.

This highlights a style of software design shared by Microsoft and the open source movement, in both cases driven by a desire for consensus and for "Making Everybody Happy," but it's based on the misconceived notion that lots of choices make people happy, which we really need to rethink.

Well, there's a bit of a schism... a lot of people assume that the creativity that Apple fosters is the kind of "creativity" that leads people to mod their cases and skin their OS. It's really not the same thing.

What Apple's design ethos is is that the interface fades away into the background, because what you're creating is the media that comes out of apps like iMovie and iPhoto, not the tweaks of the environment around it. To borrow the "car" metaphor, many people sink hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into adding spoilers and decals and stereo equipment to their cars, whereas I would prefer to spend that time and money driving to Alaska.

With that in mind, it ought to make more sense that the customization options of Mac OS X are more limited than in Windows—because you're supposed to not have to think about the interface. It gets out of your way. People who fixate on the twiddly details of the interface and spend hours trying to make it behave like Windows does, like this article's author apparently did, are bound to be stymied and then they'll complain about things like Word not having a "File > Delete" menu option. If he were a Mac user, and used to the idea that file operations are supposed to take place in the Finder and not in random applications, he wouldn't have been so surprised by this.

A Python-programming friend of mine often chants "TIMTOWTDI Must Die!" (There Is More Than One Way To Do It.) Yeah, it makes things less flexible to give you fewer ways into some action. But it also means you spend less time thinking about it and more time thinking about getting work done.