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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?"
Here's a quote from TFA (the very first sentence, as matter of fact...):
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.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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...
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.
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.
Currently hooked on AMP
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.
>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