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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.'"
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.
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.
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
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...
Are you one of these 'females' I keep reading about?
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?
The author of the article (yes I actually read it) went as far as comparing the pro/anti Apple crowd to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Yes, he seriously did. And not by briefly alluding to it, but over the course of several paragraphs.
I've heard of some crazy stretches for comparison, but come on, a journalist actually comparing a group of people that have an affinity for a company's products to a deeply-complicated bloody 60+ year old conflict? Talk about going off the deep end.
make world, not war
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?
Anybody who wants to experience this first hand.. just flame apple on slashdot :) and see your post mod down to hell
;-)
Been there, done that. Points drops almost as fast as when you suggest Linux may not represent perfection.
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 think the apple fanboys easily win for the moment. I'm a long time linux user, and often found the zelotry a bit embarrassing. But looking at the comments on digg when apple comes up actually make me feel a bit uneasy in general. It actually can be borderline scary seeing the amount of nerd rage apple stories can unleash there.
Everything will be taken away from you.
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!
I dunno. The levels of insanity reached in both Apple fanboyism and the Israeli/Palastenian conflict seems equivalent sometimes. Hey, you hear that? That's the sound of my karma level going through the floor!
He didn't compare the situations, but he compared people's pyschology, and the fact is we all like to have a tribe to rally around and see others as the enemy. A bit of maturity is hopefully learning when you're doing that and try to avoid it.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
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.
Apparently it's not just Apple Fanboys that can't handle criticism!
make world, not war
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.
By my highly unscientific and unsubstantiated count, the number of highly vocal (postal?) pro-apple and anti-apple slashdotters are about equal.
If I have ato make a choice I'd rather read someone unreasonably gush about something they love rather than someone vent spleen and name call. That is the important divide, not which computer or OS you like.
Luckily there are still a few people posting thoughtful arguments and comments. Those are a pleasure to read. Please save your mod points for them.
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)
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!
"All of my recent posts had been negatively modded so many times that I was actually banned from Slashdot for WEEKS. Weeks. The last I had bothered to count, I had been modded down over thirty times."
You can't mod down one comment 30 times. Nor can one comment be modded down so many times you get banned. If you have a better explanation behind it, I'm all ears, but at least read what I said before passing judgement.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Hah! Wanna see a real shit storm go down? Suggest the possibility that automobiles are not God's Gift to the American people. The merest hint that people ought to think about Public Transportation and the benefits that a robust transportation infrastructure could provide, and you'll hit 0 faster than you can say "RDF." You'll also get a ton of posts about how Public transport sucks from people that have never been to Europe, or Asia, and who's only experience with Public Transportation is "That one time I had to ride the bus when my car was in the shop." Which totally ignores that, Duh, Public transportation in the USA does suck, because everyone is expected to drive a car.
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)
I've heard of some crazy stretches for comparison, but come on, a journalist actually comparing a group of people that have an affinity for a company's products to a deeply-complicated bloody 60+ year old conflict? Talk about going off the deep end.
It's a bit like the word "feminazi", which draws a completely unfair analogy, as it is deeply insulting to any proud member of the National Socialist party.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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.
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.
I don't really want to know where you pulled that one from, but I've never experienced any failure on my boxes, let alone endless fail.
And personally, I disagree with the Troll moderation. That is Flamebait.
No tyrant thrives when every subject says no.
The author of the article (yes I actually read it) went as far as comparing the pro/anti Apple crowd to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Yes, he seriously did. And not by briefly alluding to it, but over the course of several paragraphs.
I've heard of some crazy stretches for comparison, but come on, a journalist actually comparing a group of people that have an affinity for a company's products to a deeply-complicated bloody 60+ year old conflict? Talk about going off the deep end.
Not really - he referred to an academic study on perceived media bias to illustrate his argument; that study happened to use the P - I conflict as its basis. He was interested in the conclusions and how they relate to readers reactions to stories; which is different than the comparison you purport him to make.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I think you're being unfair to the Israeli/Palestinians to be honest...
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Of course, Apple can improve things.
What I'm saying is that the fanboys' perception is that whatever is current is the absolute perfection. Take OS 9 for instance, where you had to set manually the amount of memory an application could use. If you brought up that setting memory is an oddly unfriendly characteristic for an OS that aims to be user friendly, you'd get a reply along the lines of "Lets see, I select the app, "get info"-->Memory and then set the amount. What's hard about that?"
Of course now that OS X is here, it's OS X what became the definition of perfection. I get the impression that many people refuse to acknowledge the existence of any faults until they're fixed, then the subject is quietly forgotten. For instance:
Everybody swore that a mouse with more than one button isn't needed, until Apple suddenly released a computer with one.
The memory limit was an "advantage", because Windows would die a swap death, and "Whgat New user is going to jump in and go manilulate large excel files?", anyway?
etc.
This attitude turns many people off, because: It creates a feeling that there's some sort of apple collective that many people aren't interested to join, because for them computers are a tool and not an object of religious worship. It creates the feeling of that it's hard to get a honest opinion about anything because many people are dedicated to sweeping faults under the rug. And it creates an impression of inflexibility: Either you accept the package in full, or you'd better not get it at all, because there's nothing in the middle.
Karam is an arabic word, but derived from the Sanskrit "karma" actually. It means the fruits of our actions.
Essentia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
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
And looking at that profile page, he's certainly been modded into submission -- ten posts in a row of the last 24 modded down as trolls, when they were in fact nothing of the sort. I'd say he's got a fair point that the
I had an excellent karma. I decided to ban the "Apple" section (I don't know why there's only ONE single section of a brand, and the others are generic, quite suspicious). However, by the time of the iPhone release, they decided to place iPhone articles on "Hardware", "IT", obviously on "Apple" and I was getting a little upset about it, more when I don't share the belief that Apple does everything right.
However, I posted on one of them, and that was the end of my excellent karma. Since then, I stopped posting on Slashdot for a while, and decided that I can only read some "funny" comments and that's it.
The "mod" points are falling into wrong hands at some points, and some people only reads comments feeling they are offensive. (It appears that I'm sarcastic, and that makes things worse).
I can't agree with you more, and now that I have mod points, I try to use them wisely (Always trying to put funny ones). Good luck with your karma, cause it took too much to me to be an excellent, and took only 1 second for a person to take it down.
Secondly, I guess you haven't been paying attention, but comparably spec'd Macs are generally +/- $100 of the competition. Just because Mercedez-Benz doesn't make a $12,000 economy car doesn't mean their cars are expensive. All the entry-level luxury sedan cars cost roughly the same and the same goes for Apple's products compared to the competition.
The last thing I'd like to point out is I find it interesting how PC users constantly talk about the need for Mac users to justify their expensive purchases, when most Mac users don't really put cost at the top of things to consider when buying a machine. Apple doesn't really pander to cheap people because that market is already flooded.
I always wondered "Who goes on Slashdot and spends all of their mod points modding stuff down?" I've never modded anything down; it seems pointless. I'd rather build up a good (or funny) comment than destroy something I disagree with, and could never understand the psychology of people who do as such.
It's all starting to make sense now. It's Apple users. Perhaps its the inferiority of their computer of choice that compels them to live so negatively. Perhaps its the knowledge, buried deep in their subconscious, that they support a platform that nobody in the IT world takes seriously that causes them to act out in such counter-productive ways.
"Ha ha!" The Mac user says. "I have mod points. I will protect the Slashdot community by searching out 'first post' comments and modding them as trolls! The world is safe for another day!".
The Internet is generally stupid
People will think that you are:
a) Slightly retarded
b) Slightly gay
c) The same person
Either way, you fail it.
By the way, I have to chuckle at the fact that the only way you can get your sockpuppets to be modded up is to dispense the usual "M$ 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. ;-)
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