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The Wrath of the Apple Tribe
Narrative Fallacy writes "If you've ever written about Apple products with even a hint of negativity, you'll appreciate Salon's excerpt from Farhad Manjoo's True Enough, about why the Apple tribe is so rabid. 'There are many tribes in the tech world: TiVo lovers, Blackberry addicts, Palm Treo fanatics, and people who exhibit unhealthy affection for their Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners,' writes Manjoo. 'But there is no bigger tribe, and none more zealous, than fans of Apple, who are infamous for their sensitivity to slams, real or imagined, against the beloved company.' Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg has even coined a name for the phenomenon — the 'Doctrine of Insufficient Adulation.' 'If I see the world as all black and you see the world as all white and some person comes along and says it's partially black and partially white, we both are going to be unhappy,' says psychologist Lee Ross at Stanford University. 'You think there are more facts and better facts on your side than on the other side. The very act of giving them equal weight seems like bias. Like inappropriate evenhandedness.'"
I personally have purchased only one Apple product -- I recently bought my wife an iPod touch. While I absolutely love the cool user interface experience, the consumer lock down is much worse than I imagined it would be (and I was expecting bad.) Overall I can only rate the thing "half-way above shit." I'll never buy anything else from them and I'm not going to recommend them to other people unless that changes drastically.
John
I see two mistakes in your comment. First, black*, foreign (whatever country you are from; I'm assuming U.S.) and (arguably) gay people are born the way they are; they cannot change that, and even if they could, many, or most, wouldn't. On the other hand, a consumer has the choice to either spend more than he earns in a month (and, believe me, it happens more often than not down here in the Third World) on an item he believes (often correctly) that will give him more social status, or spend half or two-third his monthly wage on something that will be useful to him, running some OS and graphic DE that is at least as beautiful as Apple's.
The second mistake I see is that the Free and/or Open Source (internal feuds do exist; let them sort themselves out) Software fanboys are even more plentiful than Apple ones. Being one of those myself, I think the reason is that we believe in an ideal, fulfilled by the hard work of those seeking recognition among their peers, or money, or plain and simple sense of self-fulfillment. Yes, there are very vocal FOSS fanboys out there, but they are either novices to the belief or prophets of the cult; most of us fall in-between, prowd of our sense of judgement, knowing what is good and what isn't for our families and for our our stranded relative's PHD about-to-be-lost-to-a-virus thesis.
* That PC crap hits my nerves; I'm black, but I was born in Brazil; I'm not a fucking African-American, I'm BLACK, thank you very much! And I wasn't born in a "developing country", I was born and live in an UNDERDEVELOPED country; the notion that we are in a "developing country" has deluded our leaders to think we are "getting there". No country "gets there" when 32 million of its population STARVES.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
Your profile page - I only see one thing modded down and that was: this one. Yep, douchebaggery. If by 'douchebag' you mean "didn't join the pitchfork party when I was called to do so", then yes, you've got a point. If you mean that I made a comment just for the sake of trolling, no. I felt I had a point to make. I did. It was modded up. Then it was yo-yo'd back down a long with a number of other posts I made. Care to post the other username (assuming there really is one) with all the downmodded comments so we can pass judgement on you? The main reason is that Slashdot's search engine sucks and Google's not being completely helpful, either. There was a story back in early-2006 about Napster's CEO criticizing Apple's de-facto monopoly stifling innovation. I said he had a point: Apple, for example, wasn't considering a subscription service. Because they have control of the market, that sort of service isn't getting attention to the masses. If you find that story, look for several -1 posts by NanoGator. Now, agree with me or disagree, I'm cool either way. I dare you though, to look at it objectively. Did my comment actually warrant a ton of negative moderations? Well, since I haven't been able to cook up the fabled link, I'll paint you a worst case scenario: Let's say that my post merely said that Steve Jobs takes it up the butt from Bill Gates on a nightly basis. Seriously, as silly and childish as that is, that was a heck of a co-ordinated attack. You can see the remains of it here. This was months after the event, and they were still watching me.
Even if I were the biggest douchebag in the world (yet somehow still posting at +2...) and I made the douchiest comment in the universe, could you really deny that that sort of Apple fanboism is (or at least was) extreme?
That said, I will be up front about one thing: You won't catch me at my best behaviour if you find that. After my posts started getting modded down I got annoyed and rather defensive. You might look at that and think I was being a douche. That's one thing about looking at this stuff from the past, you can't see what order the events (like moderations) took place in. That's why I don't expect you guys to be kind to me. That's fine, I'll deal with it. Have a good night.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
You should probably be mad at her for wasting $100 then because itunes will let you play songs from a connected ipod even if they aren't in the itunes library. I just double checked by installing itunes on my XP box, it's never had itunes on it and there are no songs in the library, plugged in the ipod, waited a minute for itunes to come up then clicked on Music in the sidebar underneath the ipod icon. All the songs on the ipod play fine through the computers speakers, you can even plug headphones into the ipod and listen to a different song than it's sending to the computer.
Was she clicking on the music icon under library? because obviously they're not in the library they're on the ipod. I'm not sure why you, your wife or your "Apple buddy" couldn't get this simple, obvious thing to work for her.
Piss and moan all you want about not being able to copy them off the ipod, that's entirely true and annoying, but figuring out that you have to double click on a song under the ipod and not in the library really doesn't take geek smarts.
And just so we can keep track of the fan scores, I own 1 iPod, 1 ancient g4 emac, 1 amd xp/linux box and 1 dell vostro core 2 duo running xp, so could someone explain to me whether i'm palestinian or israeli?
I'm a mac-user, and I'm also a mac-user-hater. Your experience is unfortunately all too common.
Anyone else amused that one of the biggest selling points of new Intel Macs is the ability to run Windows and access all of the programs that aren't available on the Mac?
Two and half years into owning a G4 Powerbook I've concluded that Macs are no more or less irritating*, crash prone**, or prone to dumb design ideas*** than are PCs. They just incorporate different irritations, ways of crashing, and dumb design choices.
I've given the Mac a good run, and arguably am more knowledgeable than most users. I have taken the time to understand the ways that things work on the Mac. I doubt that I would buy another.
* No Delete key, but a key marked "delete" which actually backspaces. Yes, I know there is some multiple key combination that will delete stuff, but I still believe that pressing a key marked "delete" should cause things to be deleted.
** "Kernel Panic" is exactly the same as the "Blue Screen of Death". In my experience the Mac crashes more often than my XP machine. And then there have been programs that just stop working for no apparent reason.
*** The Dock irritates me no end on this small 12" screen. I'll take the Windows task bar any day. Simpler is better. It also drives me crazy that the Mac defaults to leaving all apps running forever instead of shutting them down when you click the "close" button.
Three Squirrels