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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 do have an unhealthy obsession with my Roomba, but it doesn't come close to the religious outrage that descends on my blog whenever / if-ever I say anything that doesn't approach worship of Apple.
Honestly, it's the biggest reason I no longer buy products from Apple. The astonishing thing is how many years this keeps going on. I had a friend who started hiding his Newton for fear of the cultists that would swarm him and go on about how great it was while he was just trying to look up an address or whatever.
The only sane Apple-nut I ever met was Douglas Adams, but then he was at least reasonable enough to acknowledge other OSes, although you wouldn't believe it from the Apple fans who quote him endlessly.
Why are so many of their consumers complete nutcases?
I'm reminded of this episode in which some poor schmuck visited an Apple Store for the first time and wrote about it in his blog.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
IMO, the Linux zealots are less scary.
It's a difference in philosophy. Linux is about freedom and choice. If you say "Linux lacks X", most of the time if you get a negative reply it'll be something like "well, go fix it, the source's there". You generally won't be flamed to a crisp for daring to suggest that say, the state of audio in Linux isn't ideal. Constructive criticism could get a positive reply. Take the guy who did Linux boot benchmarking -- it quickly resulted in optimizations of the process.
Now try to do the same with Apple. Apple is about the "experience". Either you get it, or you can go look somewhere else. If you try to suggest the iPod, iPhone or something else isn't ideal you'll often get a reply from somebody who thinks nothing Apple makes might be a bit imperfect, and that if you don't like it, something is wrong with you. Mac OS was perfect before OS X came out. I've never seen a fan reply to the complaint of the iPod's lack of ability to play Ogg Vorbis as "You know, they should really include that". If it was a Linux device somebody would have added that within a month of the iPod's release.
I don't know why the Mac hating crowd needs to resort to 6+ year old marketing slogans, if there's really that many valid reasons to flame us Mac fans :-)
...which of course the playing of caused the laptop to crash. Another reboot, and an explanation that it's not the projector's fault--especially seeing as it was simply a VGA projector without audio, and she was ready to present.
...and all of this without me having to touch the macbook, do anything technical, or provide any advice beyond 'reboot'.
No, there are plenty of reasons to flame Mac fans. My experience may not be typical, and I'm certainly not directing it at you specifically, but here goes...
I have met or interacted with roughly 40 mac users in my last two years of work. I provide contracted IT services to companies. Each and every single one of those 40 mac users were pretentious twats. Every single one of them acted like the whole problem was my fault--even when they were coming to me because their mac was having issues.
My personal favorite example was a doctor working as a contractor for a company I was contracted to. She had apparently been having no end of issues getting her mac hooked up to the projector.
So after exchanging a bunch of phone calls and finally agreeing that there was no other possible time she could do it save for 7:30 at night on one reoccurring day each month, I finally gave in and said I would help her.
She whipped out her macbook and folded her arms...waiting. So I asked her to show me what she did exactly so I could witness the problem. She indignantly sighed as if I was asking too much and booted the thing up. Once it was fired up, she opened up whatever the hell the mac equivalent of powerpoint was and folded her arms again, and once again glared at me. I waited. She finally sighed again and pulled out the DVI to VGA adapter from her laptop bag and plugged it in. The mac immediately froze. The projector hadn't been plugged in, only the adapter. She threw her hands up in the air and whined "Seeee!!!" at me. "Uh, it crashed. Reboot it."
"It's not supposed to do that!!!". "Nope, probably not. You'll have to call Apple about it--but for now, reboot it and we'll try again."
This time it came up and didn't crash. So we plugged in the projector and everything worked like a charm...
Right up until the point where she was completely baffled by her desktop being EXPANDED onto the projector rather than duplicated onto the projector.
She kept dragging things off the laptop screen onto the projector. This had her totally fucking confused for 5 minutes. Several times I tried to explain what was going on, but she would cut me off and say "See--it's disappearing. Why is it on the projector and not on my laptop. It's broken."
Idiot. So after 10 minutes she finally listened to what I was explaining and figured out that her desktop was extended. (All of this while huffing about how my projector was messed up and not working correctly--because is sure as shit couldn't be her macbook. It was developed by a deity after all, and they make no mistakes.)
Next thing I know, she's firing up iTunes...and for the finale I thought "I'll bet she's *the* air america listener".
Sure enough. Hundreds of air america broadcasts/podcasts/whatever.
Oh yeah, and when I said "It looks like you're all set", there was no "Thanks" or "Awesome" or really any positive acknowledgment other than "It's about time".
And yes, all 39 other mac users displayed the same total lack of technical knowledge and the same "I'm better than you attitude" when really they were just so fucking stupid I'm surprised they didn't die half way through the troubleshooting process because they didn't remember to breathe.
I suppose I should amend this slightly. I actually do know 2 mac users that are intelligent. My friends parents. They bought it because o
There's no place like
I wouldn't compare Apple fanboyism to the Israeli/Palastenian conflict, but I can certainly understand why somebody would. I mean, how extreme is that? I don't even know how you get that many people with mod points to come in for the attack. Very extreme. The worst part? I wasn't trolling. I might have been more respectful of it if I had said something snide or shitty, but I didn't. I sat down and explained where I was coming from on it. (Hence the positive mods.) But
Oh well. That's the internet for you.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Yikes, I don't know what bad karmic deities you pissed off to get that kind of treatment. :-) My exposure to Mac users is rather opposite.
I'm a physicist in grad school, so maybe my cross section of mac users is entirely from a different demographic. In the past few years I've seen several physicists go from Linux to Mac, just to "get stuff done" easier without having to waste time fiddling with the system (both professors and students, and myself included). A computational/simulational group in my department went from IBM-supplied UNIX boxes (not sure if AIX or Linux) to Mac. I know a few theorists that have gone from Linux to Mac too.
More interestingly, a huge astro research entity nearby (with ties to NASA) with several hundred employees is in the process of switching almost exclusively to OS X. They used to use predominantly Solaris boxes, which are relatively old by now and need upgrading. So OS X fits their needs nearly exactly, especially with regards to visualization toolkits and software. It's pretty cool for me because sometimes they call in Apple engineers to give technical talks about various features/software of interest for scientists.
In all these cases, though, I guess the mac users are fairly intelligent and computer savvy. Seems to be opposite to the Mac users you interface with.
The only potential explanation I can give you, and I hope I'm not accused of being a fanboy, is related to my experience where I've had significantly less problems on my Mac than on Windows (which I had to use in my lab). I'm not saying Macs are problem free, they're not, but IMHO they give much less hassle and I'm more efficient at them.
So anyway, it could be that when the shit hits the fan and you get a support call from a Mac user, they're far more irate than a Windows user that is relatively used to dealing with problems. Just a hand-wavy guess, but given the exposure you have to mac users versus mine in science, it's a possibility.
make world, not war
The big problem I find is that Macs are not nearly as problem free as many of their users think they are, then they get mad if you can't fix it. For example at work we don't support Macs. We support Windows, Solaris, and very specific versions of Linux. That's just how it is going to be when there's like 4 people for 500 computers. None of us have any Mac experience, and the department isn't willing to hire a Mac person. They also aren't willing to pay to train one of us on Macs. Hence, no Mac support.
However, we get users that insist on buying Macs. Ok, fine, they can support them by themselves. We don't mandate using department support and many research labs have systems that are all their own. Well that would all be fine, except the Mac users come crying to us when things won't work, and then get mad when we can't fix them.
That's why I get tired of. The attitude of "Macs never break so I'll use one, oh wait my Mac has a problem you have to fix it!" This is not the first job I've encountered it at. If a place wants to use Macs and support them, that's great. If a place wants to train me to do Mac support, that's also great. However when the policy is "Macs are unsupported," I get tired of Mac users justifying buying them by saying they won't need support, then bitching about it.
Also, in many cases recently, it has even been almost completely useless. One of our professors bought a number of Macs for his lab. Since there's a good deal of software we use that isn't for Mac OS, Windows is on there too. His students are always booted in to the Windows side since everything they want to do can be done there. So it wasn't as though he bought the Macs out of a well researched need, he bought them because he's a Mac fan, without consideration as to if that's the right tool for the job.
Hence, I get a little annoyed.