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The Nation of Macintosh?
Devon Avenger writes "A new short British film has been released according to this article at Wired depicting a cult of Macintosh fanatics who are organised in a manner reminiscent of the Nation of Islam."
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This might be pretty cool....now if they just did a linux version of it. Perhaps just open source junkies :0
is that ALL of us in this forum probably know at least one person like an iBrotha. They may or may not be Mac evangelists - very likely Linux promoters or advocates of some social cause [and I'm not debating the worthiness or unworthiness of *any* cause at this time] but we know a few. You or I might even be one.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
An interesting documentary topic, who's timing couldn't be better in light of Apple's recent earnings news ... here's a snippet from the ElectronicNewsNet
...
Despite driving upgrades to its new Mac OS X 10.2 "Jaguar" operating system, Apple reported a US$45 million loss and flat year-on-year revenue for its fiscal 2002 fourth quarter.
Hopefully, this is just an issue of absorbing the R&D costs of their new O/S. I'm not a Mac user, but some of my best friends are
--- have you healed your church website?
It's been my experience that Mac zealots are the worst zealots, only rivaled my the old amiga users, although the Linux camp gave it a good run a few years ago.
I'm convinced the reason behind it is that the typical Mac user is someone who is not very technical and was perhaps intimidated by using a computer, so when they figured out how to use their Mac they get a certain sense of pride and accomplishment which they in turn morph into zealotry.
Thankfully this is changeing with more affluent Unix people migrating over to try OSX, but the core zealot remains the same.
The funny thing is that while I was working with the *BSD dev team to straighten out their internal shceduling problems with the threading code in the kernel I noticed that the dev guys were very calm and rational people, pretty much just the opposite of the Mac user. Interesting indeed.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
Wagner LLC Consulting Co. - Getting it right the first time
The "recovering Mac addict" part bugs the hell out of me, though to each his/her own I suppose.
I've been playing around with some old Macs for the past few weeks. I'm trying to get Linux on a 6100 but having a hell of a time. But in the process, I've had to load OS 7.5 on this thing a dozen times, and even this antiquated OS impresses me. It is clean. Easy to use. The Drive Setup tool, the Mac answer to fdisk, is easy enough my grandma could use it. Yet this kind of stuff eluded the Windows realm for years.
I also finally got OS X on an old G3, and it is the coolest OS I have ever used. All my UNIX utilities are there. So are some gorgeous GUI apps. It is clean, simple, and that is just the way I like it. I love the CLI in Linux because I like simple, and I can get what I want to do done, and quickly. OS X is the GUI answer to that.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who uses Windows is a masochist.
And as far as the hardware debate, yea, Macs are more expensive. It is economies of scale. But even this old 6100 uses SCSI! And the layout is well though out, with one fan for the entire computer (the PSU fan).
Sure, the mac is not alone in this. I agree.
but the thing that strikes me is how much outright hatred there is out there.
ITs not about preference-- its actually persecution (in the same way gay people are persecuted-- not burned at the stake, but harassed and denied opportunity.)
Just look at the blatantly biased way my post has been modded.
Yes, amiga users suffer the same fate, and Linux users too, but its worth noting that at least in these parts its the linux users running around calling us "macfags" and getting modded up for it!
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
He was all about evangelizing the platform. His columns always had a amateurish, strange, almost irrational quality (he wrote for many Mac publications as iBrotha). It's hard to tell from the article - but it appears he was associated with the production (or at least inspired it).
I always thought he was a little macadamia nuts. You've done your damage, Rodney, rest in peace.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
The wired story says the film even stars a 512k, the original Mac. Don't those heathens know their macs? Everyone knows that the 128K came out before the 512K!
Next they'll be telling me that the Classic was the original mac like all those posers do on eBay.
Actually, I've been pricing entry level laptops for my company, and imagine my surprise when I found the iBook cheaper than the competition.
This is for our new outside sales force, so style is legitimately more important than substance. An iBook is undeniably stylish, and at $1,195 pretty reasonable. Compare that to the Sony subnotebook, which costs $1,699, or even the entry-level ThinkPad at $1,300-odd.
I may just wind up getting my company to purchase Macs for the first time, since the software the salespeople use is browser-based anyway.
D
God is not a machintosh.
--- You make things foolproof, and they'll find you a damn fool.
etc, etc, etc...
Now, I don't want to sound insensative here, but take a deep breath. You have chosen Apple to be your platform of preference. That's fine. If the public is wrong about Macintoshes being slow, or toylike, then let them continue on in ignorance. As for this:
despite better economics of mac software
I would really like to know how publishing software for a smaller OS userbase is better then publishing for a larger OS userbase. Granted, less competition for your product, but a very low ceiling on how many copies you can sell of any given program. I would debate the rest of the post, but you're not entirely incorrect. Just clearly, very touchy. I don't like MacOS (although 10.1 has piqued my interest). I don't like windows. I use windows, because it's the platform that I need to use. I don't hate you for liking macs. Please don't insist I should feel ashamed for not liking what you like.
Oh, and one more thing.
Oh yeah, that's right, this is a nation that worships conformity.
I'm sorry we didn't all adopt the ad slogan of your fave OS company and "think different". sweet irony....
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
But Apple *is* "in the same market as your local clone company or the built-it-yourself-cheap-online sites" as far as most computer consumers are concerned (just not Mac loyalists), and that is precisely their problem. If I could justify the pricier hardware, I would love to replace my powerful, self-built linux machine with a powerful Mac running OSX (because I use Photoshop as much as I use a text editor), so you can't tell me that they're not in the same market. Consumers like me, not Apple loyalists, decide who's included in a particular market.
To understand Apple's trouble, you must learn to differentiate between *competition* and *rivalry*.
Rivalry is something that we see in markets with high barriers to entry. For example, auto manufacturers rely heavily on advertising, styling, and aggresive marketing because their products aren't nearly as standardized as PC's.
Apple and their loyalists are still thinking in terms of brand *rivalry* while producers and consumers on the PC side of the market are thinking in terms of pure *competition*. At least 90% of all computer consumers are benefitting from PC standardization, which had the effect of commoditizing personal computers.
In the PC market you can forget the brand image completely while choosing between a Gateway and a Dell. With a decision like that, you're only concerned with specs and prices. If you know enough to spec out a self-built computer, you'll probably go with that. Not because building computers is fun, but because you know it's all so standardized that once you're running Windows or Linux, you're not going to know the difference.
When you buy Apple-compatible hardware, you're rarely given the choice of just getting a reference implementation of some new chipset. This is Apple's game: high barrier to entry.
Apple doesn't want to compete with PC producers, and their loyalists don't like to think that they have to compete. Fine, if they're satisfied with their current market share (mostly composed of Mac loyalists, but also some newbies who are highly responsive to advertising and other aspects of brand rivalry because they haven't yet realized the benefit of PC standards). If Apple wants to expand their market share, they don't have a choice but to try to compete. Otherwise, the end result of their "strategy" is that they still find themselves up against, and losing to, far more efficient personal computer producers (efficency being the product of pure *competition*).