Slashdot Mirror
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.
It's is well known (although I cannot remember the technical name for the effect) that people are 'loyal' to their decisions. Even if they've made a bad choice, there is an internal attempt to justify it.
There are a good portion of us who are very technically aware, have used all of the major OSes extensively, and feel that Mac OS is much better than Windoze.
There are a large number of you out there who say that "Macs are crap" blindly, without having used one in quite a while or ever. I would say that those people should "atleast [sic] have the decency to KNOW what [they] are talking about".
Well it seems the Apple isn't a (as in single) subculture anymore.
Firstly there are the old time Mac users - they used a Mac found it easy to do what they wanted and just attached themselves to the system. Many have had Macs for years and will tell you how the Mac "changed their life". Often these users work in "arty" jobs (DTP, Graphic Designers, etc)
Then there are Windows switchers - they got fed up with the Wintel PC, some it was system crashes, some it's more religous reasons.
Linux switchers, often those who were working in Windows/Linux for various reasons. Lots have PowerBooks.
Then there are old NeXT users (not many of us actually!).
And others I'm too stupid to identify. I'm not sure that the Mac is a single culture anymore. I hope this is healthy for the platform.
Of course I have omitted those who "co-exist" and use Mac and something else.
If people forgive youre mistakes it means you have succeeded in what every company wants. Brand-loyalty. Lucasarts had it for a long time. Sure they made a couple of stinkers, afterlife, but by and large most gamers where willing to trust them. Hell any lucasarts adventure I will buy without even reading the back of the box. This kind of loyalty is very important since it allows a company to make mistakes/try new things and not be immidialty killed of for it.
If at as a competitor you are wondering how the hell a company gets away with it ask youreself what you youreself have done to win youre customers loyalty. Perhaps it is the small things that allow you to get away with the big things. Surely I can not be only one who thinks that Apple charging for point upgrades makes MS constant upgrade or be obsolete cycle seem mild in comparison.
Any psychologist majors around who can explain this behaviour?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The Macintosh do seem more attractive to users (used?) that are not tech-savvy, and not just because it looks nice. The GUI has a certain flexibility and learning it is very straightforward. However, everyone learns it in their own way, and Mac users have all different habits.
So that explains Mac zealotry, since once you get used to using a Mac, going to Windows can be hard since it doesn't have the same usability features.
However, the same can be said about Windows - although it seems that it imposes its own way of doing things, it becomes natural once you are used to it. And when you try a mac, you complain that everything is missing. ^^
Mac OS X should be attractive to Windows users that wish to use some flavor of Unix but who doesn't want to give up a nice interface. But Apple loses in this crowd with the propietary hardware. I would have loved to build a machine with OS X, but I find the idea of buying overpriced hardware ridiculous (for the same price I can buy technically superior and esthetically equivalent components).
Of course for Linux enthusiasts, Apple is just another Microsoft. Don't forget that Steve Jobs once said "Microsoft succeeded in what we have tried to accomplish" (he also said that comparing Mac to PCs was ridiculous since PCs have already won - both quotes from the book "Apple Confidential").
The ENIAC Demo Competition
Linux is, from a technical standpoint, a superior operating system.
From a social standpoint, it all depends. Linux supports fewer commercial applications than does Windows; this emerges from the current state of the industry that if you want to market your software, you will write it for Windows.
This has nothing to do with the technical merits of Linux, and everything to do with economics as seen through the eyes of the businessmen who run software companies. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, and very difficult to resolve: the only way to stimulate a Linux market for games is to write games for Linux, and yet no one will do so because there isn't enough of a market!
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Windows NT had true multitasking, none of that memory allocation to each app crap, and was overall more stable (despite what Mac freaks say). Apple's OS was still basically a modified Andy Hertzfeld Switcher program. Hook into GetNextEvent and steal control and pass it to another program. Polling -- yack.
But this past summer I bought an iMac. What a beaut. Unix underneath it all, stable, runs well, a joy to use. Now I still have ah, two XP machines, one 2000 server, one Linux router/firewall, a laptop with XP, and one Linux workstation in the house (between my wife and I), and the iMac is in the living room on the coffee table, but my next laptop purchase will be a Mac, that's for sure.
Anyway, the claim that all Mac users stuck with Apple through bad times isn't true in my case. If they don't make a better product, I won't buy it. Right now, except for the dead-end processor chip they are currently stuck with, it's just a better product... (and if they don't put a G4 in the iBook this January, I won't be buying a crippled G3 iBook nor an over-priced G4 Powerbook.)
Business decisions made by... former CEO Amelio! I read this as saying: "Even someone who makes as many bad business decisions as myself couldn't sink that ship with so many loyal users manning the pumps." One wonders how these people manage to find employment at the CEO level after comments like that.
Windows 95 -> Windows 95 B certainly should have been a free upgrade. Windows 95 -> Windows 98, maybe, maybe not. It offered substantially more functionality. Windows 98 -> Windows 98 SE certainly should be, and it more or less is, if you are willing to sit through a lot of time with Windows Update.
Microsoft releases many point patches for their various operating system, though many of them are limited-release hotfixes, which is to say that you have to call microsoft and pay for support time or have a support contract with them (same thing) in order to get them. So, good, and bad.
Apple and Microsoft are both in the business of selling software. Apple just happens to also be in the business of selling hardware, so they get you coming and going. They get to drive new hardware releases of their platform, AND new software releases. This means that you are at their mercy. "Well, our new hardware which is twice is fast as out, and won't run the old OS, which you also must pay for." Sound familiar? The other Appleism is "Well our new OS is out, which you have to pay for, and by the way it won't run on your old though PowerPC macintosh. Even though it is based on the same 32 bit instruction set and has MORE instructions than the 603 which we also used lots of, we will not support operation on your PowerPC 601.
Remember, Apple and Microsoft are both evil companies. Apple is not supporting DRM (until they have to) because the people in their niche market (now two niche markets; people too stupid to use windows and people who want stable Unix on the desktop, plus I suppose a third niche of people with too much money who want a pretty case and a pretty GUI and don't care what OS they run) don't particularly want it, and it would cost them money to implement. If they had a more successful meme (As Microsoft did) then Apple would be in charge of computing, and they would be every bit as evil as Microsoft is.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I am a sys admin for a small company where I have to administer a couple of Novell servers, a Debian webserver, a Debian mail server, an NT Navision (POS but stable as hell) box and a bunch of non computer savy users. In order to make my job easier I got myself a Dell Inspiron laptop with XP Pro and it has worked just fine, supports all the proprietry apps and hasn't crashed once and is pretty fast. But windows, even XP, is just plainly so incredibly badly designed. I posted this before, but I'll say it again: Why oh why does Microsoft have to make network setup such a confusing mess? Why does Microsoft have to make the ability to look at mail headers hidden in view->options in a little hard to view box? There are many, many things like this that I am confronted with every day. So often in fact that I would get used to it if it wasn't for that I still have my old 333MHz G3 Powerbook chugging away with OSX on it at home.
The system preferences, all of them, are in one single place, in a thing on the dock called... system preferences. The buttons, window titles bars and other widgets are clear, big and don't fuck with millions of non consistent rollovers that work in some software in one way and in another in another way. One click of the terminal icon and I've got got a true shell at my fingertips, just like the two debian boxes at work. This is why people love it. Lots of people have their problems with the UI but very few of those claim that Windows is more consistent or easier to use.
I'm saving up now and will be getting my new G4Powerbook in January.
I have a dream application athat I've wanted to try writing for about two years now, and the tools, Project and Interface Builder, are there and don't cost any more. If the application is ever made it will probably only find a small audience, and only in the Mac world, since it's being written in ObjC, but I'm not doing it for the money. I'm doing it because I want to be able to make a useful tool and have fun doing it. On Windows, I can't do this.