I'll bet most people can't even tell what the actual icon is when they are browsing on their network. There are tons of icons in OS X with minute details that you don't notice in normal usage of the OS. Ever notice the Lorem Ipsum on the Dictionary icon? How about "ie sucks" on the CSSEdit icon?
That said, I simply cannot remember the last time an Apple computer hard froze on me - not an application, the entire OS. It simply doesn't seem to happen. (Also his link to a picture of a crashed Apple (presumably?) seems broken.)
That said, I also run Debian, and complete system lock-ups never happen there either.
(This is [2007], by the way. The BSOD icon is still there, though. It wasn’t removed with 10.6 update.)
It is no more smug than the envelope/stamp imagery used for email - it's not as if we email users look down upon those poor deluded souls who still cling to their snail mail. (do we?)
Oh and my (older) MBP freezes 25% of the time just by plugging something into the dvi port. It's nice when you're just starting a presentation and have to say: "sorry everyone, just let me reboot". That MBP also has issues "waking up", it likes to stay asleep (lazy).
And let's not even get into the shitty batteries and how the MBP will randomly blank out (turn off) with like 20-30% battery life left. No warning, nothing, just powers off.
On my macs, Flash will regularly eat my cursor, and jitouch and my Wacom drivers can occasionally interfere with my keyboard or cause recent versions of iTunes to crash, but none of these require a reboot, and usually don't even require me to log out to recover.
Your MBP clearly needs a new battery if your machine dies when it's still at 20-30%. I bet if you went to the power section of System Profiler, you'd see see the full charge capacity of your battery is less than one fourth of its rated capacity. I once abused a battery so badly that its full charge capacity was less than one tenth of its rated capacity. (Oddly enough, this was partly due to Windows, but that's a story for another day.)
Now, my Windows computer that I built a few months ago for playing games... that'll lock up if, get this, you don't use it for a while. BSOD's when nothing happens. Play a game? You're fine. Leave it sitting for 5 minutes? Drops dead.
I would also guess that it is trying to use a power saving feature which may not be supported by your computer, as another commenter pointed out.
Whenever I have more than 100 browser tabs open, I get crashes at a rate of about one a week. Somehow, YouTube is always the straw that breaks the camel's back.
I love it. Keeps my desktop clean :-)
I cannot stress this enough: Backup your data. Even if you have RAID, you can still accidentally delete data. Considering how simple it is to use Time Machine, there's no excuse for not having backups.
"This is one of the things that makes me hesitate to get a Mac when I get my first laptop next year. Spec-wise a Macbook would fit my needs perfectly, but I'm just not sure I want to become part of the Mac demographic. Unfortunately, said demographic tends to intersect with the irritating-smug-people demographic and I don't want anything to do with that. I like Macs, but I wish the company was secure enough in its betterness to present itself simply as creating great products, not as a creating products that are better than everything else."
its like saying i prefer bsod over a pic of bsod. ha ha