Is Apple & Community Evangelizing Into Uncoolness?

kbeischer writes "John Kheit followed up his MacObsorne article, which others have since covered minus the parts detailing a Steve Jobs uncanny ability to repeat his own mistakes, with a scathing editorial damning the most of the Mac Press, Apple's managment and parts of the user base as a bunch of deranged goose-stepping lemmings that are ignoring the costs associated with the Mac PPC to Intel switch. In the editorial, he links to an older article on BOZO (bitter obstanate zealot order) users causing market share loss. All of which makes me wonder, do evangelical users and press help or hurt the popularity of a platform?"

Comments

"Scathing"....good word.

[TripMaster Monkey]

Here's a quote from TFA (the very first sentence, as matter of fact...):

I wonder if the Atlantic ocean has as vast a collection of spineless jellyfish as seemingly comprises significant portions of the Macintosh user base and its ass-kissing punditry.

Nice going, Sarcastro. Nothing opens up the floor for rational discussion like howling ad hominem attacks.
I thought that the rest of the article would prove to be more substantive, but no, it's pretty much all like that.

Perfect article for Slashdotters, though. Let the flame war begin.

Re:"Scathing"....good word.

[BoomerSooner]

True, however wouldn't you expect a quad 3.6 GHz processor to outperform a Dual 2.7GHz processor? That wouldn't be spectacular at all.

I could forgive the guy but he starts off like an asshat. When researching an article maybe you should know a bit about what you are writing. Like Quad Pentium 4's don't exist and Mac Rumor sites frequently are full of shit (G5 Powerbook out days after WWDC). A Mac fanatic I can see making this mistake (since they probably have only used PPC/68K based systems). For someone ripping Mac users for their zealotry I think it's a stupid ass mistake.

You mean like Linux zealots?

[greenmars]

"They get so caught up in what they are preaching, they don't have time to learn about other things." That reminds me of Linux zealots on Slashdot talking about Windows -- they don't know what they're talking about.

Evangelists vs. Zealots

[davidwr]

A good evangelist, though vocal and possibly in-your-face, is rational and can explain why he believes as he does and why you should too, but will not insist you beleive as he does "or else."

A zealot will drown you out and/or attempt to make life rough for you if you disagree with him.

Some people get turned off by evangelists they disagree with, almost everyone gets turned off by zealots they disagree with.

Re:Evangelists vs. Zealots

[geekee]

" A good evangelist, though vocal and possibly in-your-face, is rational and can explain why he believes as he does and why you should too, but will not insist you beleive as he does "or else.""

Evangelists are not rational. They make up arguements to support beliefs, not facts. The article points this out by example, saying that the Mac evangelists bashed Intel until the day Jobs said Apple was switching to Intel. Now they're adjusting their arguements to fit in with the new belief that Intel is good.

Bah

[rwven]

There are zealots on both sides who will argue until they are absolutely blue in the face over what is better than what. However, how does anyone ever plan on being able to prove it? Mac Zealots evangelize Mac just as much as Linux users do Linux....But while linux may be ridiculously stable and open source....try getting any ported game to run as fast on it as it runs on windows.

My point is that there will never be a "winner" in this debate. They're all here to stay, and the more griping and screaming that's done about how much better one product is than the other, the more people won't want to use those products simply because everyone supporting them seems like a blathering idiot... They all have good and ad points and all this screaming is retarded.

Neg Mod away...

Why I use Apple

[MichiganMyrick]

I didn't pick Apple for their marketing, their fanatics, or their devoted press. I picked Apple because the platform suited my needs. I liked the design of the PowerBook and I liked the design and feel of the OS. Those are the most important factors in my book. In fact, I got my PowerBook because I enjoy my iPod Mini so much. I recognized good design (at least, good design for my purposes, YMMV). Zealotry never really was a consideration.

evangelizing is bad for other platforms

[amigabill]

>All of which makes me wonder, do evangelical users
>and press help or hurt the popularity of a platform?

I think AmigaOS is the greatest, it's easier to use and customize than blah blah blah.

Guess what? Every time someone says a good thing about Amiga, zillions of Slashdotters attack, calling the poster nuts, stupid, dead, and other things. I'll probably get called names or told my platform is dead just for posting this satirical evangalistic nonsense here.

So it's not good or beneficial to all platforms. You all used to think Mac users were a bunch of weirdos too until the switch to OSX, right? Suddenly Macs became cool and accepted on Slashdot and other places. Why did the Mac Mini get popular here, because someone went on and on about how cool they thought Apple or Jobs was, or because a tiny quiet computer with a BSD based OS was actually useful for new space-sensetive applications?

I don't think that evangelizing changed that, the better technology did.

Common logical fallacy in the article

[wealthychef]

The article makes a common mistake. Before, SOME mac users claimed PPC was THE way to go. Now SOME Mac users are saying Intel sounds like a good idea. Hey, guess what? They are not the same people saying this. The author is just being silly. I don't think many people have changed their positions about anything since Jobs made his announcement. The people who were saying "Mac is better because of PPC" are now saying, "Damn, this is a bad move, what's going on?" But most people don't give a crap. It's just about making the best Mac possible. If it's built on Intel, great.

I think his article

[aftk2]

was compiled missing the -use-logic argument. One such example:

I do not happen to use Classic, but I know many that do, and I have enough sense to know that I'm not in a demographic representative of the entire user base. There are plenty of people that do rely on Classic--for them it's crucial. Many of those individuals work in publishing. It is important that Classic work... It's amazing that someone in marketing would be so insensitive to one of the company's core user bases. With that kind of attitude, I would not be surprised if significant portions of the publishing industry say "enough" and just jump platforms moving to Windows.

Hey. GENIUS. The purported purpose of your article is to explain why buying a PowerPC-based Mac now is foolish. But now you're describing why buying an x86 Mac would be foolish. Not to mention the fact that buying a new machine in no way invalidates the ways you used to use the OLD machine. Why do you think publishing houses keep old machines around? Oh, and another thing: his argument for not abandoning Classic is that it'd cost a lot of money for these publishing houses to update their apps. Then he says they'll probably move to Windows out of spite. HEY NUMBNUTS - that costs money too!

This article doesn't know what it wants to be.

You didn't start early enough:

[argent]

Steve's been trying to kill Classic Mac OS for longer than that.

Steve to developers in 1997: Rhapsody will only run OS 8 apps in an emulator, start using "Yellow Box" now.
Steve to developers in 1998: If you port to Carbon, you'll be able to run on Rhapsody and OS 8/9.
Steve to developers in 1997: If you develop for Carbon, you'll be able to run on OS X and OS 8/9.
Steve to developers in 2000: If you develop for Carbon, you can run on OS X, but Cocoa is really the way forward.
Steve to developers in 2001: We really have OS X working properly now, switch to Cocoa.
Steve to developers in 2002: OS 9 is dead, stop developing for it.
Steve in 2003: You should all be developing for OS X now, OS 9 is dead.
Steve in 2004: Develop under OS X Xcode, OS 9 is long dead
Steve in 2005: It'll be much easier to port Cocoa apps to OS X Intel, and did you notice we don't sell OS 9 bootable Macs any more?
Steve in 2006: It's much easier to port Cocoa apps to OS X Intel, you don't need to keep OS 9 compatibility, honest!
Steve in 2007: WTF is wrong with you people, stop developing for OS 9 already.

Re:Harkening back to the SGI and DEC days...

[bloggins02]

Your comparison fails right after "...but Windows NT-based x86 workstation.". This pretty much means that SGI tried to be yet another PC vendor (I saw the boxes and they were pretty, but they were really just another PC).

Now if SGI had ported IRIX to x86 and still failed, you might have a point, but since the story doesn't read "Apple switches to Intel, ditches OS X for Apple-branded Windows," I'm afraid your comparison falls short.

game performance

[John Carmack]

>How much do you want to bet a bunch of those developers drop support for PPC Macs far sooner than the
>aforementioned "3-5 year" period and claim that the games demand the "performance" of the faster Intel
>machines. We already saw that when Doom 3 was released for the Mac. It supported only the very fastest
>Macs while leaving many other current and/or new Macs out in the lurch.

Does he think we just sit around and say "Lets just not support the rest of these macs because we want to screw the user base!"

We work with Apple, ATI, and Nvidia to make everything run as well as possible. Doom 3 had AltiVec code in it, and there were driver changes to make things work better. The bottom line is that the compiler / cpu / system / graphics card combinations available for macs has just never been as fast as the equivalent x86/windows systems. The performance gap is not a myth or the result of malicious developers trying to make your platform of choice look bad.

Yes, it is always possible to make an application faster, but expecting developers to work harder on the mac platform than on windows is not reasonable. The xbox version of Doom required extensive effort in both programming and content to get good performance, but it was justified because of the market. In hindsight, we probably should have waited and ported the xbox version of the game to the mac, which would have played on a broader range of hardware. Of course, then we would have taken criticism for only giving the mac community the "crippled, cut down version".

John Carmack

Re:Mourn this...

[John Newman]

That's kind of a characteristic of long-pipeline cores in general.

A PowerMac G5 has as many integer units as a Cell + a Xenon. And would probably outperform either on general-purpose tasks. These PPE's look like very specialized beasts that will excel at what they are designed to excel at...which is feeding data to vector units. Moreover, 3.2 is not much greater than 2.7, and console chips aren't intended to scale. Is Apple supposed to ship a 3.2GHz PC for the next five years? How much effort has Sony put into upgrading the Emotion Engine?

This leads to the fundamental point, which is economics.

Um, the G4 core has always been close to twice as fast clock-for-clock than the Pentium 4.

Sure. But do you remember how it took a year to scale from 450 to 500 MHz? And how it's been tooth-and-nail for every extra cycle since? The G4 was always the "better" CPU, but the P4 consistently ran at more than twice the frequency. Even today, the race stands at 3.8 vs. 1.67. Freescale has barely managed incremental upgrades to the G4, while Intel has been plowing along with a variety of architectures, one of which was bound to not suck. The M is 70% faster per clock than the P4, already runs at much faster clockspeed than the G4, and is scheduled to be dual-core in the same timeframe as Freescale's e600.

Mot/Freescale has, since 2000, shown the classic symptoms of a company trying to compete in a capital- and R&D-intensive industry without sufficient resources. In reality, they haven't been trying to compete - they focus very effectively in the embedded market, which has had just enough overlap with Apple's designs to enable dual-use products. But the embedded market still has different economics and incentives than the PC market, and Apple's suffered enormously for that. IBM's motivations for diving in with the 970 remain obscure, but may have been marketing as much as anything else. Having secured their spot as manufacturer for every next-gen console CPU, they have little incentive to both keep up with Intel (who's going to buy these chips, and who else are they trying to impress?) and invest the cash to differentiate the 970 (for use in what else, consoles? IBM laptops?). There's just nothing in it for them. And the next-gen console chips are great, but they're subject to console-chip rules. Apple would be insane to bet their business on them.

For better or worse, Intel is the only major supplier of PC CPUs in the world - aside from AMD, which shares a common platform, anyway. It was only inertia that made the switch seem unthinkable - it was really inevitable.