Newsflash: Mac Users Love Apple, Hate Microsoft

An anonymous reader writes "An article on wired.com talks about how Mac users helped Apple through the dark years of the 90s." It goes on to discuss how a psychologist was hired to figure out how to woo Mac users away from Apple, with some (to him) surprising results.

Comments

Re:Psychology 101

[zenquest]

The technical name is cognitive dissonance.

Re:Ahh, blind zealotry

[CynicTheHedgehog]

If you are going to be blindly loyal, atleast have the decency to KNOW what you are talking about as opposed to 'it just works' and 'its prettier than PC'

That's exactly why I am loyal. I got a product that is useful to me as well as aesthetically pleasing. Who cares how or why it works as long as it does.

Coming from a PC background I can understand having to know how to partition or reformat; or move NICs to PCI slots without shared IRQs; or diagnose DLL and registry problems introduced by 3rd party software products. I did learn a lot, but that's a lot of lost productivity.

Some people like to use computers without having to be amateur computer scientists. That's why people love Macs. That's why people still buy them, despite the good rodgering some people think we got from them over the whole 10.2 and .Mac thing. They're still getting what they paid for--a computer that just works, no questions asked.

Re:Mac v. Amiga

[RatBastard]

• User Interface: Invented by amiga
  Sorry. Xerox invented the GUI. Apple AND Atari had GUI systems in the market before Amiga did.
• 3.25" floppy: Invented by amiga
  Wrong again. Invented by Sony.
• Multitasking: Invented by amiga
  I thought Unix had been doing that for decades before teh Amiga showed up.
• Multiprocessing: Invented by amiga
  See previous point.

I've got nothing against Amiga. But I do take umbrage with people who claim Amiga invented things they didn't.

Re:From the article...

[jmenezes]

But on the same hand, if you want a car with Northstar ( i think thats the name) you go with cadillac.
If you want a car based on bmw engine, you dont get a mercedes or a VW. you get a BMW.

so like the poster above you said, "BMW has a monopoly in the BMW market. GM has a monopoly in the GM market. And yet, they both sell cars and compete against each other.
I can assure you Dell has 0% market penetration in the cow-logo computer market. Therefore, gateway has their own monopoly on cow logo computers.
if you want a Mac, you get an apple computer.
simple as that.
they all have a monopoly on the products they sell, if you define it close enough

Re:Mac v. Amiga

[drinkypoo]

In fact Amiga invented absolutely nothing. What Amiga had was the ability to do everything they bothered to do (which unfortunately did not include memory protection) better than everyone else. For instance, they didn't invent bit blitting, or hardware blitters, but theirs was very fast and integrated into just the right place in the system to really speed up graphics processing.

Unfortunately the peculiar design of the Amiga, coupled with its lack of processing power (both of which being what made it inexpensive) were a problem because people were forced to customize their software to a particular operating system and machine combination (remember, this is in the early days) to get the most out of the machine, and this led to incompatibility with future releases. Since it didn't have memory protection, this generally meant that when your OS version incremented significantly, things started stepping on each other and exploding left and right.

The Amiga had a fantastic multitasking OS with all the usual features at the time (though again everyone else was exploring memory protection at the time... well okay, not Apple either) which fit on one floppy plus 512k of ROM. They also had the best autoconfiguration around, bar none, because all drivers were user-mode and you could put the drivers in ROM on an expansion card. When the card was initialized, the driver was executed at which point it was mapped onto or copied into memory. Of course this led to needing to upgrade driver ROMs on various expansion cards but no plan is perfect, I guess. In the modern age of flash ROM this would be a non-issue.

Anyway if Amiga invented anything it would be the mindless Zealot.