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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.'"
..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?
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
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.
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!
Tribe of Apple, meet the Church of the Amiga.
:)
BOOYAH!
IMO, the Linux zealots are less scary.
It's a difference in philosophy. Linux is about freedom and choice. If you say "Linux lacks X", most of the time if you get a negative reply it'll be something like "well, go fix it, the source's there". You generally won't be flamed to a crisp for daring to suggest that say, the state of audio in Linux isn't ideal. Constructive criticism could get a positive reply. Take the guy who did Linux boot benchmarking -- it quickly resulted in optimizations of the process.
Now try to do the same with Apple. Apple is about the "experience". Either you get it, or you can go look somewhere else. If you try to suggest the iPod, iPhone or something else isn't ideal you'll often get a reply from somebody who thinks nothing Apple makes might be a bit imperfect, and that if you don't like it, something is wrong with you. Mac OS was perfect before OS X came out. I've never seen a fan reply to the complaint of the iPod's lack of ability to play Ogg Vorbis as "You know, they should really include that". If it was a Linux device somebody would have added that within a month of the iPod's release.
I see two mistakes in your comment. First, black*, foreign (whatever country you are from; I'm assuming U.S.) and (arguably) gay people are born the way they are; they cannot change that, and even if they could, many, or most, wouldn't. On the other hand, a consumer has the choice to either spend more than he earns in a month (and, believe me, it happens more often than not down here in the Third World) on an item he believes (often correctly) that will give him more social status, or spend half or two-third his monthly wage on something that will be useful to him, running some OS and graphic DE that is at least as beautiful as Apple's.
The second mistake I see is that the Free and/or Open Source (internal feuds do exist; let them sort themselves out) Software fanboys are even more plentiful than Apple ones. Being one of those myself, I think the reason is that we believe in an ideal, fulfilled by the hard work of those seeking recognition among their peers, or money, or plain and simple sense of self-fulfillment. Yes, there are very vocal FOSS fanboys out there, but they are either novices to the belief or prophets of the cult; most of us fall in-between, prowd of our sense of judgement, knowing what is good and what isn't for our families and for our our stranded relative's PHD about-to-be-lost-to-a-virus thesis.
* That PC crap hits my nerves; I'm black, but I was born in Brazil; I'm not a fucking African-American, I'm BLACK, thank you very much! And I wasn't born in a "developing country", I was born and live in an UNDERDEVELOPED country; the notion that we are in a "developing country" has deluded our leaders to think we are "getting there". No country "gets there" when 32 million of its population STARVES.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
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)
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.
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.
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.
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