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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.'"
prvi post
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)
I wouldn't say Apple's is the largest such tribe. Consider the Republican party. About 30% of the US population thinks President Bush has done a fantastic job with the Iraq war, and has made the country safer from terrorists.
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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'
Actually, it was IBM who invented the PC, and Xerox who invented the GUI. But don't let facts get in the way, carry on worshiping Apple.
No, the first personal computer widely accepted by individuals and small businesses was the Apple II. The Apple II predated the IBM PC by many years. Perhaps you are confusing the descriptive phrase "personal computer" with the IBM brand name "Personal Computer".
So you're just the fucking same as every other idiot who thought it'd be unique to dye their hair some outrageous colour and get a shitty 'chinese' symbol tattooed on you even though the only thing you have to go on as to its meaning was the drunk with the ink who put it there telling you it was so. You're so non-conformist that you fit right the fuck in with every other "non-conformist".
You'd be the sort of person who chose to use Linux because you're not a mindless slave of the corporate empire, right?
Using an Apple computer doesn't make people any different? Sure it does. Someone actually woke up and made a choice that they weren't going to go out and buy a PC that came with Billware and all of the associated problems. They have different software, a different way of doing things and different problems. I think the fact that they even made a choice says a lot about them rather than everyone else who just buys a PC and gets windows and assumes that's the way it is without thinking about it.
I'm happy with my mac. Not really because it's different, but because it's better. It's quality hardware and the OS is a BSD variant so it's good for doing real work on as well as running the eye candy that is Aqua. To top it all off at least I know that OSX will support all the hardware in the machine (bluetooth, wifi, ethernet, etc) out of the box. I take a gamble with every PC-based piece of crap I buy to run Linux/BSD on.
And no, I'm not an Apple fanboi. In fact I find it distressing that the mentality on Apple is lacking developers and those who are here write software that looks good primarily and functions as a secondary property. I find it distressing that the mentality over here is "Apple did it, why should we reinvent the wheel". There is very little choice when you get to Apple world as to what software you're going to use. At least on Windows and Linux there's a stack of choices for every little app.
I've owned about 10 or so apples (they were gifts. i did not buy a single one) and the same number of PCs and a few other computers with various OSs over the years. Having so much experience, from programming to running applications to upgrading hardware, especially the hardware part, . I have a fairly balanced opinion on, having used so much computers. Apple is one of the worst. Even the new leoptard OS is a pain in the ass to use. Apple is almost as annoying as the old Rat Shack TRaSh-80. PCs, running windows or linux, are so much better, easier to set up, upgrade, program, install software, etc.
And what's with this iPod fad?!@!# Totally crap product. Short battery life, buggers your files, and costs 10x as much as a better-performing generic audio player.
And the only people i see using apples are teenage girls, old people, and homos! Shit apple.
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
A friend of mine is recovering from being homeless. He sells newspapers about homelessness on the streets. He also publishes stories and drawings into small 'zines' and sells them. His income is from these sales and is several orders of magnitude below what is considered to be normal. No one will hire him to do anything, but he gets by.
A social service organization gave him an Apple iMac, one of the blue bubble machines from about eight years ago, IIRC. He wrote his next zine on it and some long 20+ page stories.
Now he can't get the material off the machine to get it published. On any normal computer, the absolute minimum low-end way to get data in and out is by a 3.5" floppy disk. When all else fails, this will work. You can use it to enter drivers to get other faster and better hardware working. You can ZIP your files that are larger than the disk size and copy this single large file onto multiple floppies. You can always get a floppy to work. It may be necessary to test several blank disks to good ones due to the present lack of quality control on current floppies, but you can get it to work. New PCs don't have floppy drives, but they have the connector cable sockets and support ICs on the the motherboards. Take the old floppy from your Windows 98 PC and connect it to your brand new PC. It appears and it works without any problem.
Not on the iMac. As a whim, psychopath Steve Jobs decided that there would be no floppy on his new iMac machine. Old shit, he said. An embarrassing obsolete relic of a backward age...no old junk on my new iMac because this machine is..the..fucking..future! You all remember this Jobs rant since he's been doing it for 30 years.
So this POS iMac was designed to have it be next to impossible to use a floppy. The fact that the floppy is the least-common-denominator means of exchanging data between vastly different small computer systems and that it is and remains solid, dependable, reliable technology means nothing to this schmuck. No floppy, the Jobs god decided it, and that is the end of the discussion. He relented and offered a floppy on a USB cable. But it was so expensive that no one bought it. He just smugly said that its sales failure justified his decision not to have a floppy. It had nothing to do with the fact that it cost ten times what secondhand PC floppy drives were selling for.
One small problem as my friend discovered. There's no way to get data files in or out of the iMac now. My friend has a cell phone but no service. He has to buy cards for its use. He can't plug the iMac modem into the wall because there is no landline telephone service to his living space. Who would he call to upload his work? He can't save to CD-ROM because the drive is read-only. He can't plug this iMac into a network because there is no network. We tried a crossover network cable between this iMac and my PC network jack. Nothing. Is there a serial port or a parallel port on this? There are no standard serial or parallel connectors, only weird Apple connectors. We can't print because we can't load printer drivers. We can't use USB flash disks because the iMAC OS doesn't recognize them. We can't download flash disk drivers from the web using a PC and transfer them to this iMAC because there is no floppy.
We have no idea of how to get his work out of this piece-of-shit Apple computer. I'm stunned and amazed that this situation can be so bad for a professional level computer that is less than ten years old. And it's all because of the nitwit decisions made by this stupid asshole Steve Jobs. Every single person who works at Apple is scared shitless of being randomly and groundlessly fired by this guy, so no one will tell him that when he's doing absolutely stupid things.
I just can't believe that anyone would buy anything from this company. I've been watching this company for thirty years. I'm amazed that they are still in business.
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" "*#&%@)$@#"
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
I recently blogged about a Visit to an Apple Store and no one bothered with it. This is despite all sorts of ACs posting the thing around here to call attention to it.
Taking apart M$ spin on the other hand has earned me "Karma Hell". That's what the ACs who taunt me have to say about their obvious abuse of the moderation system.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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
* Very low score (2.7) of all on Greenpeace e-waste list. [http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/toxics/electronics/how-the-companies-line-up] (Worst as of December 2006). Has improved to 5.3, but still poor rating.
* DRM shipped with hardware (notably iPod) without user warning.
* Are responsible for the [http://www.freetype.org/patents.html FreeType bytecode-interpreter software-patent trouble].
* Threaten to sue bloggers. [http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/07/01/16/1717220.shtml]
* One of the companies that pushed DRM the most. DRM in iTunes, iPod and QuickTime.
* iPod does not follow portable media player standards. Only works with iTunes. Does not work with third-party software.
* Update kills unlocked iPhones.
* In 2005 Apple filed a lawsuit against college student Nick Ciarelli who ran the 'Think Secret' website. As a result of the lawsuit, in December 2007 Think Secret was forced to shutdown.
* In 2007 Apple lawyers send angry letters to Fake Steve Jobs. Intimidating him by saying if he don't comply and stop making information publically available they will sue him, and suggests he will loose his house, mortgage, car, boat and that his kids will loose their college funds. [http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/12/first-carrot-now-stick.html]
* In 2007 Apple crippled their DTrace port so users cant use DTrace on iTunes, etc and other software that use P_LNOATTACH. [http://blogs.sun.com/ahl/entry/mac_os_x_and_the] Also crippled GDB so that users cant debug iTunes, etc. [http://steike.com/code/debugging-itunes-with-gdb/]
* In 2007 Apple censorship. Apple deleted threads on the forum about defects in the 20" and 24" iMac displays. [http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/12/19/apple_display_update/]
* In 2008 Apple sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Hymn Project who host files to uncripple DRM-crippled content. [http://hymn-project.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=17241]
* Mac OS X only runs on Apple's own computers (vendor lock-in).
* 2008. iPhone SDK forbids Ruby, Python, Perl, and Java. Alternatives web browsers such as Firefox are not allowed. VoIP will only be allowed over Wi-Fi, will be forbidden over cellular network. [http://www.cnet.com/8301-13739_1-9889159-46.html]
* March 2008. iTunes auto-update tries to push Safari onto users. [http://www.efluxmedia.com/news_Mozilla_CEO_Says_Apples_Safari_Update_Undermines_Users_Trust_15429.html]
http://vendors.bluwiki.org/
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