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Are Media Writers Biased Towards Apple?
Art Vanderlay writes "Readers should not be surprised by overcoverage of Apple Computers since the tech writers and columnists for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Fortune are all Mac users. According to John Dvorak of PC Mag, no one seems to point out the connection between the skewed coverage and the existence of this peculiar conflict of interest based on the national writers' use of Macs. He feels the newsroom editors are generally so out of touch that they can't see this bias and are also Mac users." From the article: "This reality is not going to change. In fact it will only get worse as technology coverage is handed to newer, less-qualified observers who simply cannot use a Microsoft Windows computer. With no Microsoft-centric frame of reference, Microsoft cannot look good. The company essentially brought this on itself with various PR and marketing policies that discouraged knowledgeable coverage. I'll save those complaints for a future gripe session."
Bzzzzt Wrong!
Before the iPod Apple made a stir with OS X, which was certainly not just some stylized rehash of any PC stuff. Before OS X (and even through today... well yesterday at least) Apple made a splash with the iMac which (while certainly done with a great deal of style) redefined what a consumer friendly computer could be (Easy to set up, easy to use (relatively), and will look good at home where people tend to care about those things).
The truth is since Steve returned with his NeXt compatriots Apple's been churning out lot of fantastic new products. Have you looked a Aperture which Apple announced yesterday? That product (unless there's some serious hidden bug in there somewhere) will totally rock the digital photography world. It's exactly the type of tool that everyones wanted and nobody made... Photoshop was resting on it market place domination and everyone else was trying to copy Photoshop.
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No, technically it's a stylised rehash of Openstep which was a stylised rehash of Nextstep which was a stylised rehash of... well... nothing. Nextstep used a BSD Unix base combined with Carnegie Mellon's Mach microkernel, and used a completely unique object oriented development environment with a lot of other pioneering technology to make something which couldn't really have it's lineage traced back to any operating system that existed before it.
If you want to get really technical, Mac OS X's relationship to BSD is that it runs a server on the XNU microkernel that creates a BSD-like environment for applications, it's not really even fair to say that OS X is based on BSD, let alone a stylised rehash of it. It has just taken elements from BSD and incorporated them into the operating system.