black screen of death?

so i plugged in my blackberry pearl the other day and crashed my mac instantly.

it went like this:

1) plug in usb cable to mac
2) plug in usb cable to blackberry
3) black screen of death

i find the black screen of death to be kind of disconcerting.

especially in light of all the fun that was made of the windows xp blue screen of death, and the fact that on my two personal and various work computers, all running windows 2000 or xp, I haven't gotten a BSoD in three or more years.

and i push them hard, plugging and unplugging all sorts of external devices, installing ridiculous amounts of software just to try it out, etc.

i've had them get wonky or slow or freeze an application or something, but these are all somewhat recoverable. you have a chance to save your work, or terminate the frozen application, or restart explorer, or do a controlled reboot when things get really bad.

but never a kernel panic or core dump or black screen of death (or even gray screen of panic) whatever you want to call it, like i got on my mac.

this thing is ugly. and just from plugging in a blackberry.

the blackberry was turned off and somewhat low on battery, but that shouldn't matter. (it doens't to windows or linux.) i'll try again at some point to see if it is reproducible.

(and this isn't the first kernel panic black screen of death my mac has given me, just the latest and most surprising.)

its the smugness of the mac ads and some mac users that really bugs me, especially since, as i've found out, its all false. macs are far less stable than windows xp under both normal everyday use and extreme expert use.

spinning rainbow balls of death, black screens of death, blue screens of death, application crashes, password login windows that never appear, waking from sleep problems, logout/shutdown/restart problems, unexpected firewall behaviour, inconsistent keyboard shortcut usage among applications, funky operating system errors, etc.

i can easily chalk a few of these to learning a new OS. but most of them are really just negligent on the part of apple.

i remain waiting patiently for the next slew of bug fixes and security patches to be released in service pack .2 or whatever its called. hopefully it will address some of these problems.