Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Anybody who wants to experience this first hand.. just flame apple on slashdot :) and see your post mod down to hell
to catchup with the Amiga.
..and their ad campaigns.
Seriously, market a product as "stylish", "hip" and "different", and you'll raise a troupe of people to whom presenting themselves as different is pretty much their only end. I personally find it one of the most disgusting facets of consumerist capitalism.
Nobody else has a real live Reality Distortion Field. We're special.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Step 1: Troll Apple users
Step 2: Write an article about all the hate mail you get
Step 3: Ad revenue
Goto Step 1
Dvorak has done this so many times he should be selling his technique on an infomercial at this point.
Don't forget the whining fanboi apple adulations. "Mac OS X is perfect, but I'm going to switch to Windows because of the translucent menu bar!!"
The CB App. What's your 20?
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?
Sometimes evenhandedness is inappropriate. It elevates the wrong position to the same level as the right position. For instance, intelligent design.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You mean it's not rabies? Oh...I guess I didn't need those shots after the last time I called the MacBook "useless" and one of them bit me...
Are you sure you've read the summary correctly AND you know what board you're posting on? You seem to be confusing Microsoft and Apple. One is bad, the other is God.
Hope this helps. Oh, and you might want to cut back on the schnapps.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
+1 Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
Next thread please.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
I think the Linux/FOSS fanboys are trying to wrestle that crown from the Apple fanboys.
I was assualted by a fanboi when I told him my Tapwave was cooler than his iPhone. Luckliy, I had a stylus as a weapon, while all he had was his finger. He didn't want to drop his iPhone either becuase it didn't have applecare.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
I use Apple products all of the time; the only personal computers that I ever have powered on anymore are all Macs. My "promoting" of Macs to friends and family has been more beneficial in convincing some of them to buy Apple products more than any clever advertising. I've even brought Apple into my workplace and who knows, it may even make a decent foothold in the formerly all MS shop. I would consider myself a fan.
But I will point out the negatives in their products where I see them. There is no point in pretending that they don't exist as all that does is give them time to fester. I am a realist. I'll also point out issues with the company when they deserve it. Yeah, praise is better but only if they are going to work for it.
I am more judgmental because I've been in the IT field for years and have used, and I mean really used, many different OSes out there. I also wouldn't have considered calling myself a Mac user before OS X. Sorry fans, but OS 9 was pretty terrible.
I suppose Apple needs the rabid fanbase as they are advertisers that pay the company for the privilege. Maybe Apple should even thank them every now and then for keeping the company afloat for so many years. They also need the realists that speak their mind and truthfully say what is good, what is bad, and what is downright idiotic. Yes, this means that these groups will clash but it is needed.
How else are they going to move forward?
I was amazed at the number of fanboi's that modded it off-topic, only to have it modded it back up, then back down again. Some apparently thought I had committed blasphemy.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
While the employees and shareholders of Apple have every right to boast of its success, I fail to see why fanboys can make any kind of claims as a result. "Hah, I'm superior to you because these people that I am unaffiliated with are better than some other people!" isn't a sane position.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
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.
The real reason Mac fans tend to be overly defensive is that they've felt marginalized by software and hardware vendors for years due to Microsoft's dominance in the desktop computing arena. I'm not blaming the vendors, sometimes fiscal reality precludes making a version of their product for a relatively small market, but it can be frustrating to Mac users who are convinced that their platform is superior to what Microsoft has to offer but still have to wait months or years, if ever, to get their hands on a desirable product.
It's not unlike other minorities--African-Americans, gays etc., (not that Mac marginalization has anywhere near the same significance as the often violent discrimination that gays and blacks have experienced in their lifetimes)--who react to discrimination by the majority by developing a sense community "pride."
Granted, though, many of Apple's fans go way overboard in it's defense. This, BTW, is from a long-time Mac user and recovering "rabid" fanboy who converted from Microsoft way back in DOS days who now uses OS X, Kubuntu and Windows XP interchangeably as necessary.
This ain't rocket surgery.
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!
I have experience administering 12 xserves and 35 OSX clients located in US, UK and india. We ended up using xserves, imacs, powerbooks, and G5 towers because the CTO was an apple fanatic, not based on what was the best product after fair evaluation. From my experince I would never use OSX as a server platform because it has been less reliable than windoz and I am not a fan of windoz. Real unix is not tied to the GUI the way OSX is - a GUI problem can easily lock or crash an OSX server while "real" unix or linux does not have this weakness. Perhaps OSX without a GUI would be more reliable???? While I like Linux it also has it's flaws but using it or a "real" unix flavor for servers will lead to much more reliability. From my experience OSX is great as a client for those who are comfortable with the interface but it is not more stable than windoz which is a serious insult but true in my experience. I can say that OSX is more secure than windoz for a dumb user but a careful windoz user can be as or almost as secure if the right safeguards are in place. Personally I use Linux as primary OS and run windoz in virtual machines when needed. Some day Mac users may evolve to the point where they can use more than one mouse button and/or be able to resize windows from any edge or corner. When simple stuff like that happens I may use OSX more for a desktop, but I do not ever expect to use it for important services. Since the CTO has left we have moved most critical services to Linux and things are much more stable now. It seems like a cult of personality, with apple/OSX being the personality, will continue to prevent the apple fanatics from seeing clearly. I will be serverly trashed for these comments but the ones that are serious about apple know there are many real and serious issues with this proprietary OS/Hardware combo especially for critical services. If you want to solve serious apple issues afp548.com is a great resource for serious information and it seems they do not religiously sugar coat issue as most apple users do.
Why are Mac fans so quick to see bias everywhere? On issues we're passionate about, we all tend to think our own views are essentially reasonable. Thus when a reporter, editor, news network, or pundit mentions the other side's arguments, it stings.
That's basically all the article says. And we knew that, of course. But why are Apple fans so extremely sensitive to criticism? I've said many 'bad' things about Apple on this forum, and it inevitably got me modded down. Apple zealots are even worse than the Linux zealots of ten years back.
-- Cheers!
Whoever would say such a thing hasn't yet learned the joy of preference options! Check out the nifty new option at the bottom of the Desktop preference pane (in 10.5.2 anyhow!).
-- thinkyhead software and media
Oh yes. And don't get me started on the reflections in the new 3D Dock. They're all wrong.
-- Cheers!
His columns for the whole past week were excerpts from his new book. And now he's getting air time from /. His basic thesis is - GEE who's a thought - people on the internet all flock to likeminded opinions to the exclusion of all rational discussion about anything that deviates from their gospel. Wow, never saw that coming.
BTW Farhad is the biggest Apple Fanboy in the world. Before this week 80% of his columns were about iPhones, iPods, Macs and Apple.
You've never met a Lexus owner, I see.
Apparently it's not just Apple Fanboys that can't handle criticism!
make world, not war
You allude to one of the most annoying facets of the fanboy wars in your post. If I criticize anything Apple, I'm always called a Microsoft fan. Yeah, I use Windows, and yeah, I'm fairly happy with it. No, I have no emotional attachment whatsoever to MS. I've used OSX, XP, Ubuntu, and KDE, and XP does what I need while the others don't. For me, it just works. I'm not switching to Vista for the same reason I'm not switching to OSX: I'm NOT an OS fanboy, and accordingly I'm not willing to give up functionality to fulfill my pseudo-religious needs.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
The article starts off fine enough, with notations of the fanaticism of *some* Apple fans. I myself like Apple; if I was buying a pre-made computer, it'd probably be a Mac. Imo, very nice build-construction and quality (aside from their keyboards and mice, which are no-where near as good as MS keyboards or mice). But even more-so than Apple, I'm a big big fan of Lian-Li cases. Yet, I have some complaints: the usb-panels on the V1200 and V2000 are at the bottom of the case, instead of up top, or on-top of it, which is more accessible for big cases (which will likely be placed on the floor); and their new V-series have fixed that, but also reduced greatly the ventilation holes on the front. I doubt there'd be many Lian-Li fanatics bashing me for that.
Some Apple fans do really annoy. E.g., the tendency for claiming that Mac invented everything. They accused Lian-Li of copying the G5's holed case-design; yet, servers used ventilation holes for a long time, and my year-2000 Gateway had them on the front. They also acted like the wire-less hard-drive replacement on the new G5's is some new invention of Apple's: it's juts hot-swap, which has been around forever (and Apple's implementation isn't that great, as you have to open the case to do it).
In any event, those kinds of comments are perfectly fine. They're regarding largely matters of personal opinion. And the issue isn't so much that Apple fans disagree, but the way it's done; provide evidence, don't accuse writers of "ball-licking".
But then the article digresses into the pits of moral relativism with talk about the Israel-Palistine conflict, or the abortion issue. These are issues of right and wrong. There isn't a real middle ground. Either something is right, or it isn't. There is no "plusses and minuses". How about we talk about the pro's and cons of rape, too?
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Have you never been shopping with a woman....oh wait, forgot where I was for a moment.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Almost perfectly wrong.
You can't have been very clever if you didn't figure out you can SSH into a OS X box and manage them via command line. Too used to Windows where that's really mandatory? A GUI never used, does not crash.
Obviously the platform you were used to was more stable.
The whole dig at the single mouse button is so 1980's, since all serious Mac users have been using three button (or more) mice for decades.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's a well-known fact that the more costly a bad decision, the greater the lengths people will go to to justify it. If you spend $10 on a piece of gear and it turns out to be crap you say "oh well, that was a waste of $10" and toss it. If you spend $2,000 on a piece of gear and it doesn't meet expectations, you don't throw it out, because that would be admitting that you wasted two thousand bucks (making you look very silly). Instead, you "find something to love" about it, spend even more money on compatible accessories (or whatever), and tell the world that it's the greatest thing ever. Apple customers are that much more defensive than anyone else, not because Apple products are better than everything else, not because Apple products are worse than everything else, but because Apple products cost that much more than everything else. ;)
Goddamnit where's OUR tribe!
... ...
Apple have got theirs, Linux sure as hell got theirs, but we have to fend for ourselves, and believe me it get's lonely sometimes.
*whimper* Don't leave me!
Apple zealots may be trying, may be annoying, may be pushy, but people.. Apple zealots got *nothing* on old-school Amiga fans. Apple zealots are tame school children stamping their feet in impotent fury compared to the raging, near-psychotic madness that defined the true Amigoid. During its heyday, the Amiga inspired people to dizzying heights of advocacy that I have *never* seen matched. And the weird part was that they were mostly right, so when they frothed at the mouth, they knew what they were talking about. These Apple fanboys these days.. the ones people seem to be complaining about are just parrots. But when you had a worldwide population of millions, all aligned up in the same direction, and augmented with people like Matthew Dillon (of DragonFlyBSD) and Dave Haynie leading them, you have a near-religious movement that I have never again seen since Commodore bankrupted itself.
So *bah* I say.. Give these Apple people a break. The alternatives were quite a bit worse!
of your life. It is a well known fact that people who wear Burberry are much more succesful when it comes to fights in pubs. Individuals who are totally Macced-Out tend (from the observations I made during my years in the Licensed Trade) to fair less well during pub fights. They are usually not amongst the "Early Exiters", that group of society who can exit a pub in the blink of an eye during a fight. This is because their need to carefully pack or stow their branded products uses up valuable time.
Nor are they amongs the "Early Retaliators", that group of society who are able to optimise their probability calculating skills and go for an early, but strategic smack down. They are usually checking that they did indeed transfer the Bjork/featuring Skunk Anansi remix of Army of Me and it is on their playlist.
Unfortunately they are not amongst the "Early Avoiders" either, that group of society who demonstrate advanced cognitive process and geo-spatial awareness by hiding in the corner (or the toilet) and easily avoid flying fists, Doc martens, chairs, bottles or even the MacBook Air. This is because the Macced-Out tend to congregate around the pub juke box in order to complain about the appalling lack of interoperability and/or Portishead's third album. Sadly the Juke Box shares its high fight-loci rating with the one-armed-bandit (although the Macced-Out sensibly never go near that)
This strategic imbalance in pubs is further aggravated by the absence of "target acquisition" and "engage RPG" items on the iPhone Menu. However all of this will change when Apple once again catch Microsoft unprepared with the release of their iChair.
Heav clanking sound of lid closing tightly on my iBunker...
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
I couldn't help noticing how Mac fanatics kept on touting their superior OS, until OS X came along, which fixed all of these problems that they never acknowledged having before.
Windows didn't have an ounces worth of usability and security until Windows 2k was released in February of 2000. When was Mac OS 10.0 released? September of 2000.
Same thing with the switch to Intel. They kept saying how superior their Power PC chip was, then with the switch to Intel they're saying its now working so much better. WTF?
Because the G4's and G5's were superior chips to the Pentium's, especially the P4. The problem is that IBM is a shitty fabber. They weren't able to deliver on what they promised (3 ghz G5's within a year of the release of the first Mac G5) much less continue PowerPC development. If IBM had kept up development and you could get a 3ghz dual core G6 in a laptop Apple never would have switched to Intel.
You're wrong. Details here .
This space for rent.
Yeah, but in the haters' defense his gray font does indeed suck ;)
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Well, square corners slightly bothered me for all of the two minutes it took to find Displaperture.app, which restores the roundness and lets you set how much roundness you want. :D
But, yeah, I do find some amusement with the ultra-super fanbois who simply lack the ability to get over it or find another solution instead of bitching and moaning.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
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.
Why would reviewing a product, for the pros or cons, be taken personally or as trolling though?
I don't see cries of sacrilege when I post a gripe that SoundBlaster hasn't made suitable Linux drivers for my X-Fi card, or that I give a thumbs down to Belkin keyboards. The very concept that stating likes / dislikes of Apple products should be conceived as trolling rather proves the point that this stuff is taken way too seriously.
I like my Mac.
That is all.
Unfortunately, most of my colleagues are aware that my home PC is an iMac. This means that I have now lost count of the number of people who have walked up to my desk and said "the iPhone is a bit shit" or "the Macbook Air is far too expensive - you'd be better off with a Dell". I don't own either product. I'm not in the market for a laptop and or a new phone.
Where does this reverse-evangelism come from?
Modern journalists are taught that they must always balance their pieces. That there are always two sides. That sounds fine and is fine if the matters they are dealing with are of no consequence. The problem with it is that they tend to equate the two sides even when they are not of equal merit. Sometimes this is because they cannot or will not take the time to become knowledgeable enough about the matter to evaluate the data they have. They find an expert, get some information. Then they say, I need a balancing opinion, and find another source to provide it. Then they find the most "entertaining" way of presenting what they have and give both sources equal weight. But what if one source was an intelligent, dedicated researcher who has spent many years becoming an expert and the other was not...
... It's just... ranting is so much fun.
I can't speak for other Mac users but my experience has been such as to induce a certain vehemence in supporting the platform. I have used Macs, PCs and many other micro-computers since they each became available. Despite its shortcomings it was clear that Apple had had a fundamentally good idea from the moment the Lisa and Mac appeared. CP/M and DOS immediately seemed dated. If you were a Mac user though, the DOS crowd spent years telling you it was a worthless idea... right up until Windows appeared. Overnight the story changed to; it's no big deal, Windows is just the same as a Mac now. But it was not just the same. In fact most of the people saying this had only a very superficial knowledge of the differences. "They both have windows..."
These days I have (almost) given up discussing the matter. Life is too short. It is the nature of people that they do not like to think that they have made an incorrect or ill-judged decision. They will "invest" their own sense of worth in the decisions they have made. It is human nature but it is not science. As it has been most tellingly put: It is difficult to reason people out of something they were not reasoned into. Most PC users today were taught on PCs at school. They use them at work. They never even got to make that "decision" to use a PC. They know many of the idiosyncrasies of the machine. They are comfortable. They do not wish to hear that they have wasted serious quantities of time doing things that could have been avoided had they used a different system. Better to let them discover it in their own time... possibly by watching over your shoulder. Then their disappointment at realizing they have wasted much time may be mitigated by their pleasure at realizing that they have improved their position by their own efforts. In a cynical age, enthusiasm disturbs people. They are suspicious of it. To display it can have quite the opposite effect to that intended.
Enough. More than enough.
It's also pretty safe to assume that migrating from Windows to Linux is a technical challenge for newbie users which therefore leads to the conclusion that most people who use Linux do indeed have greater technical knowledge than the "Joe Average" PC user.
People who migrate to Macs and OS X do not, we are frequently told here, need any additional technical knowledge to do so. So whilst I accept there are some very knowledgeable OS X people out there, most of them will still be pretty average users.
Consequently, when it gets to "my computer is better than your computer" discussions on here, most of the Linux people can put forward fairly reasoned technical arguments and there are enough Windows people globally that even if the tiniest percentage of them are technical people, that's still a lot of them.
However, most of the Mac users are not technical people so they are unable, most of the time, to argue at a similar technical level as the Linux people and the Windows people. Consequently, their only alternative is to get very defensive about the products they've paid a lot of money for & therefore try to use emotion, rather than fact, to get their points across.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Using Macs on and off for a number of years, I think I understand at least some of why the fan boys get so bloody defensive all the time:
In the end, I think the fan boys end up with a superiority complex. You know, a bit little like "driving by a car accident, knowing you're the only one who can really help" ;)
I know I don't make a good sample size (though I have discussed this with my friends and they have experienced the same) but I've been around a bit now and this kind of false premise is getting old.
...they all have their zealots. They are devout defenders of what they love but, at the same time, they are adverse to change. That's why Balmer can say, with a smile, "I think there is value in Windows Vista" when asked about its instability; that's why Apple machines will continue to be more expensive than PCs at similar performance; that's why Linux will fail to go beyond the limits of its little world.
The whole dig at the single mouse button is so 1980's, since all serious Mac users have been using three button (or more) mice for decades.
Too bad my powerbook only has one mouse button built-in... When I boot to Linux, ctrl+click doesn't really work.
Twinstiq, game news
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
The essence of fanatacism is to be enamoured with the venerated things' advantages and willfully blind [deny] the things' disadvantages. To fail at introspection and self-awareness. The same goes for haters who are merely anti-fanatics.
In the case of Apple, they have relatively superior User Interface design, and very robust hardware design and manufacture. They are also secretive, autocratic, non-open and high priced.
Yeesh. Well, if you decide not to draw conclusions from a data set of one, I'd encourage you to look at one of the replies to my original post. I talked about what happened in more detail. If you still think it's BS, that's cool, don't care. It's not like I require you to believe it to prove that it happened.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, all he was saying was that the CLI is inseparable from the GUI.
A shame that people keep saying that, since it is wrong.
The Mac has a window manager too, just not an X11 window manager. And as with any UNIX system you can disable processes you do not want or need.
If you leave the GUI up, but no-one is using it - what exactly is it then going to do to cause a crash? If it's not in use it's not really "running", or at any rate not changing state.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't want to inject too much seriousness, but... It's amazing how the little things can bother people. Perhaps we're all spoiled or just have no control over the big things, so the little things seem important.
Though I'd like to think I was/am not this bad, I learned a lesson two years ago when my wife died of a brain tumor. Twenty years together ended in just seven weeks (diagnosis to death). We did almost everything together over the years and I spent almost every moment with her over her final weeks both in the hospital and at home. I took care of her and gave her the meds 4 and 6 times a day (even the IV meds). I was there 24/7 the last week when she was in a coma, even sleeping next to her in the 8 inches between her and the railing.
Even now, I remember everything.
The little things don't bother me anymore.
[Remember Sue...]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The only safe way is to run the machine without a GUI. Is this possible on a Mac?
Ofcourse it's possible.
Either you can disable the gui entirely, booting straight into text-mode console:
http://www.oreilly.com/pub/h/348
Or you can boot to a console + gui mode, where it doesn't load the full gui, but you can still launch individual gui apps:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=24259
The architecture of OS X is not that different from other unices, except that instead of running X for the graphics, it runs Aqua, and instead of using init and a collection of shell scripts, it uses launchd and a collection of xml files.
People will think that you are:
a) Slightly retarded
b) Slightly gay
c) The same person
Either way, you fail it.
By the way, I have to chuckle at the fact that the only way you can get your sockpuppets to be modded up is to dispense the usual "M$ Windoze LOLOL" tripe. I can almost see you hyperventilating when you have to spell them correctly.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
In the early days of Slashdot, Apple got no respect. Mention Macs in Slashdot and you were dismissed out of hand as being hopelessly wedded to the past or a particularly clueless, nontechnical moron. This was well before the iPod and the iPhone and the "I'm a Mac" ads. The popular perception in Linux and Windows circles was that the Macintosh was essentially dead.
The Mac started gaining cred with the tech elites when Mac OS X shipped. Over a period of several years, with each software and hardware success, Apple gained more respect with geeks and more visibility with non-geeks. Now it is commonplace to hear people talk about Mac users and their vile, insufferably smug attitudes. But before Apple gained this respect, to be a Mac user meant that you were constantly assaulted with comments belittling your intellectual capability and your choice in computers.
In my experience most Mac users who weathered the 1990s aren't very smug about Macs. They are just happy that they're no longer being constantly questioned for using a particular computer platform. Even so, there are plenty of myths about Macs that persist. After you've heard them over and over and over and over, it gets a bit redundant and annoying.
I use Windows and Linux, and as both of those OSes have changed, so has my perception of them. Back in the day, WindowsNT rocked. I was able to do many things with NT that I simply couldn't do with pre-OS X versions of the MacOS. Windows ME sucked, but generally I've been pleased with Windows 2000. By the same token, when I first started using Linux I wondered how it would ever compete with Solaris. I certainly never thought it would be a usable desktop OS. Obviously Linux has matured, and so has my evaluation of the OS.
But there are still people who should know better who proclaim that the Mac is a great machine if you're just concerned with eye candy. They also frequently state that Macs aren't good business machines, which is ironic given that the growth of Windows has been helped in large part by the games industry. I'm not going to say that serious gamers should buy Macs - that would be absurd. But when I hear that Macs are spec-for-spec always more expensive, and that Macs are "more proprietary" than Windows machines, it grates on me. The Mac has changed over the years, just as Windows and Linux have changed.
It is also somewhat amusing that nobody ever got raked over the coals for being consistently anti-Mac. If you enjoy something and feel an affinity for it, you are punished. If you hold a consistently negative opinion of something, or refuse to consider trying something new, you are protected by your majority status and are considered perfectly normal.
Since the tone of responses to the parent post seems to be, "It's about time someone hit back at those annoying Mac users," I have donned by asbestos suit. ;-)
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ