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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.'"
You must be hoping that all the fanboys are asleep, or you are looking to stir up the biggest hornets nest ever.
Lets see, find the biggest least rational fan base you can, then point it out. This should be fun to watch!
(yes, there are lots of irrational fan camps, apple just has the biggest because almost no one loves MS anymore)
yeah, when most of your customers are douchebags and/or starbucks customers that are shallow and extremely concerned about their image, they tend to bitch about anything negative you say about them or anything they have. Unfortunately, they fell for Apple's douchebag targetting ads with their hippie music and, being douchebags, they don't want to admit that the quality of the product is in fact horrendous. What we need is for people like me that hate Apple to because just as zealous. If all their customers really are concerned about image, and everyone hates them, bye bye Apple :P
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Apple are clearly the Israelis. A smaller group, but richer and much more civilised. Users of other OSs need to hate them to take their mind off the endless fail they experience on a daily basis.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
You know, they really should include that.
(Typed on my Rev B Power Mac G5 with my PowerBook G3 heating my lap and my Mac Mini churning away on my other desk... oh, and a PowerMac 5200 as my doorstop.)
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
I provide contracted IT services to companies. Each and every single one of those 40 mac users were pretentious twats.
My Spider-sense detects a classic case of projection...
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."
Yes, because ignorant users that blame tech support don't exist in the Windows world...
I've honestly never seen that. Most Mac users I know (including myself) are techies who switched from Linux to get better hardware support out-of-the-box.
It may be the case in the USA but let me give you some facts from over here in Europe.
Counting all my family and my social and work colleagues, let say there's around 100 households, I can't think of one that doesn't run XP or Vista. About 10 of them are doing something with Linux because they use me for support and help with installing it - about half the Linux users have set aside a separate machine for it (e.g. Myth TV, Samba file server, etc.) and about half have it as a dual-boot on their desktop machines.
One of those people has a Mac. He was given it by his boss at work because it was sat in its box gathering dust. He bought it home, fired it up once and now it's back in its box again gathering dust. He's a Windows user who has a Ubuntu box that he does use a little, but nothing more than that.
These people are not all techies or computer buffs, in my mind they represent a good cross-section of computer users here in the UK, from the obvious techies to the novices. Yes, they have the occasional gripe about Windows, or indeed Linux, but not one has ever asked me about Macs or, as far as I know, ever looked at buying one.
I'm fully prepared to accept that there is a greater penetration of Macs in the US, but based on my cross-section of people, I'll give 95% to Windows, 4.5% to Linux (based on the fact that the 10 people are not full time Linux people) and 0.5% to the Mac for the guy that has one in a box.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I'd therefore suggest that a lot of the Amiga userbase went over to Apple due to platform similarities and the fact that they could port code and their own programming skills to the Apple platforms much easier.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I find it difficult to believe that someone would come up with this excuse after having bought a Mac. Surely, a sensible person who plans on spending that much money on a piece of hardware, takes the availability of other hardware and software into account before making the purchase. To me that seems quite a major reason not to buy that piece of hardware in the first place, especially if that hardware comes at a premium cost.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
"Hi I'm a Mac" "And I'm a PC" "Hey PC what are you doing?" "Right Clicking" "*#&%@)$@#"
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
You can have a look at what happened to me when I bothered to defend Apple in the latest Wintel crap on Apple festival. The conversation was crap flooded and then I was punished. I count no fewer than 7 "troll" points dropped onto me but the punishment is only obvious when you look at my page. Someone has obviously used two accounts worth of mod points to try and bury the whole conversation and me at the same time. It did not work at the time because the community thought well of it.
Microsoft or some big Microsoft fanboy is obviously gaming Slashdot. For some reason, they keep pointing at and saying nasty things about you. That makes you my friend.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
Please explain what you mean by "higher standard". If you're comparing an Airbook to a £400 Dell laptop then you're probably correct - but then you'll never get an Airbook for £400.
You also forgot to mention that all Apple products have an "Apple" look about them. Yes, it might, for you, be a nice-looking and elegant design but that has nothing to do with the higher operating standard of the product and you are paying a premium price as a result of paying for that design.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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?
Biggest selling point to which audience? Those who are trapped in their particular OS because of software dependancies? That is amusing now?
I've concluded that Macs are no more or less irritating*, crash prone**, or prone to dumb design ideas*** than are PCs.
Give some examples please. The biggest example that comes to my mind are sleep and hibernation modes. Mac desktops and laptops both come out of sleep quicker and connect to my wireless network far quicker than any PC I've ever had. My dell laptops take a full minute or two to connect to my WAP from wakeup. As for hibernation, I wont speak for Vista, but XP and back are absolutely f'ing horrible, while Macs do it flawlessly. Blame it on 3rd party software, USB devices, docks, whatever, Windows hibernation sucks and we all know it.
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.
*AHEM* I would like to argue that point. Although, if you've TOUCHED a Mac you are more knowledgeable than most PC users, but it takes more than that to give a fair comparison. Two of your three following points paint a fairly clear picture of a diehard Windows user who borrowed an old Mac for a week and bitches about how different from Windows it is. Been there, seen that. Your Mac experience was doomed before you even laid hands on it.
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.
Maybe on your laptop this is true, but not on any full Mac keyboard. The shortcut is Fn-delete, FYI. There are keys to delete forward and backwards on full Mac keyboards. The "delete" key DOES cause things to be deleted, where do you get off saying it doesn't?
Here, this a nice article on the subject. Does deleting an object from a document make more sense than "backspacing" it? I thought so. This is what made me laugh when you said "I have taken the time to understand the ways that things work on the Mac." ORLY?
"Kernel Panic" is exactly the same as the "Blue Screen of Death".
Oh, really???? Yah, that was sarcasm.
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.
In my experience XP crashes more often than my iMac. And then there have been programs that just stop working for no apparent reason. ;)
I'm not being sarcastic, that's the honest-to-God truth. You have to realize how silly either of those statements are. You also know which of us is in the majority
The Dock irritates me no end on this small 12" screen. I'll take the Windows task bar any day. Simpler is better.
Make the dock smaller, turn on auto-hide? It's a 12" screen, deal with it. Have you seen a Start Menu on a 12" screen??
I'll forgive you only because the Dock options are so hidden.
It's under "System Preferences", then "Dock", then use the "Dock Size" slider, and "Automatically hide and show the Dock" checkbox.
Yah, I was being sarca.... never mind.
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.
Not ALL apps work this way. Why in God's name does it drive you crazy anyway? The dock is not a task bar, quit dragging dumb Windows habits into this. Again, "I have taken the time to understand the ways that things work on the Mac" is hyst
So you got banned for close-mindedly bashing Apple, and the people that called you out are the zealots? I didn't read your comments, but it's one thing to not like iTunes then say why in clear, logical sentences, and another thing altogether to bash a relatively good product because of its closed structure (and get banned for it). If you don't agree with the business model that's fine, voice as much, but for those who LIKE the product, the functionality, the ease-of-use, the "lock-in" is a non-issue. In other words, the Anti-Apple-anti-lock-in crowd are the zealous ones here, not fans of the product (fanboys, as the term is too loosely thrown around).
So I get modded as "troll" by falling for a Troll???? The guy was obviously exaggerating the fact that he got banned, since nobody can actually find all his posts that were supposedly modded as troll. So anyone care to make me a better slashdot contributor and explain exactly why my post qualifies as troll? All I asked was that if you criticize Apple, to do so in "clear, logical sentences" as opposed to say, "Mac Sucks!"
Yup. I was leaving that as the little puzzle for those in the U.S. to work out. Of course, upon working it out, they'd reject the notion immediately, and go back to complaining how public transport just doesn't work in places as sparsely populated as the U.S.A. Lather rinse repeat... ;-)
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863