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The Apple Paradox, Closed Culture & Free-Thinking Fans
waderoush writes "The secrecy surrounding the expected Apple tablet computer is only the latest example of the company's famously closed and controlling culture. Yet millions of designers, musicians, and other creative professionals love their Apple products, and the Apple brand is almost synonymous with free-thinking creativity. How can a company whose philosophy of information sharing is so at odds with that of most of its customers be so successful? This Xconomy essay explores three possible explanations. 1) Closed innovation, overseen by a guiding genius like Steve Jobs, may be the only way to build such coherent, compelling products. 2) Apple's hardware turns out to be more 'open' than the company intended — Jobs originally wanted to keep third-party apps off the iPhone, for example. 3) Related to #1: customers are pragmatic about quality, and the open source and free software movements haven't produced anything remotely as useful as Mac OS X and the iPhone."
This time one of you other guys is going to have to make the "Apple=Gay" jokes.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This is probably the first time in history a cult has been described as "free-thinking"......
Mac users are bought by those that want to distinguish themselves from the rest in terms of money or social class, more in the lines of "I can afford an Mac and you are a poor blue collar bastard"
Dear
Because Apple, and OS X suck slightly less than Microsoft's offerings.
I would argue that most Apple fanboys (the real hardcore ones anyway) only THINK they're "free-thinking." They're original and free-thinking in the same way that hippies thought they were original and free-thinking in the 60's--by acting, dressing, and thinking like every other hippie. Real free-thinkers don't start out with an set ideology, and they certainly don't have a cult leader or product line that they worship.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Most of the "free-thinkers" who buy Apple products are just hipsters who think it's cool to be different, not people with genuinely "free-thinking" or radical minds.
I accidentally ejaculated on my iPhone's touch screen while reading the summary. Does the warranty cover that?
"customers are pragmatic about quality, and the open source and free software movements haven't produced anything remotely as useful as Mac OS X and the iPhone."
No.. they just created what runs on the them, that's all..
Meh.
Eventually wins out in spite of competitive statements and advertising.
If it does NOT work, then the excuses start.
FOSS is built on top of a closed ecosystem: I'm not aware of many Intel or AMD cpus being FOSS.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
"the open source and free software movements haven't produced anything remotely as useful as ... the iPhone"
I'm not sure whether this is due to the difficulty getting make and gcc to construct things out of plastic, metal and semi-conductors - or a lack of configure options...
If *only* there were a freely available OS to us on phones that wasn't from Apple - hmmm
the open source and free software movements haven't produced anything remotely as useful as Mac OS X and the iPhone
Many users of Android, Linux, and many other open source products might have some serious disagreements with that statement.
Apple products are trendy and artisans aren't the social outcasts and special snow flakes they think they are.
Seriously though, my college aged daughter says the PC we sent off to school with is not good enough. She _needs_ an Mac. When asked why she can't say specifically why a Mac would be a better choice other than "everyone" has one. It's the way the product has been marketed - as a tool for the elite or more discriminating user. Translation, status symbol.
Mac users are stupid.
The difference between Apple and say Microsoft, has been that Apple is more like a smooth Vegas hooker taking your money and Microsoft has been more like a crackhead in Atlantic City using a lead pipe.
/.'ers get their panties in a wad about when other companies do it. Proprietary formats anyone? Remember how when Microsoft does it it's bad? Apple = good, Microsoft = bad. It's not that simple and it's naive to think it is.
Apple, as a publicly traded company, only has one obligation: to make a profit for shareholders. That means doing things like closing off Darwin for developers and totally locking down the App Store to only provide apps friendly to Apple, then they will do it and from a business perspective rightfully so. Of course I'm still gonna break my iPhone because I don't care about five apps on the App Store that make my iphone a flashlight. I need tethering and even more useful apps like blacklisting SMS messages and phone numbers that call me who I don't care for.
Apple does and gets away with a lot of things that
That being said, I only use Apple products. Apple makes products that work. That's all I ever wanted from my computer and cell phone. They do it, I'm fine with their business and Steve Jobs deserves all the zillions he's worth. Actually making products that work and listening to your customers forgives a LOT.
buying apple products is not about creativity (how many different products do they have anyway)
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
and the Apple brand is almost synonymous with free-thinking creativity
Yes, just like cigarettes make you healthy and slim, alcohol makes you attractive to the opposite sex, junk food makes you popular, and Nikes turn you into a long distance runner, weight lifter, and all-around bad-boy. Branding is great, isn't it? Of course, it has nothing to do with reality.
Repeat after me, Mac users: "we're all different".
Related to #1: customers are pragmatic about quality, and the open source and free software movements haven't produced anything remotely as useful as Mac OS X and the iPhone.
Funny, I think Apple has never produced anything remotely as useful as the open source software movement, in particular given that probably the majority of the code Apple ships with OS X is derived from other people's open source projects to begin with.
Why do this Apple fan boys always have to oversell their point. Exaggeration is the best way to destroy your credibility. I could have been fine with "free software movements haven't produced products as compelling as...". That would have been a fine strong statement and something most people could accept, but no. This person had to add "anything" and "remotely". So lame.
...can a company whose philosophy of information sharing is so at odds with that of most of its customers be so successful?
Because Apple's products function primarily as a status symbol for people who have schemed enough money to be openly computer illiterate.
From my perspective, getting an Apple laptop is the easiest way to get a nice, portable laptop which runs a Unix system (which, with MacPorts, I can get all the unixy goodness) AND to make sure that the hardware is guaranteed to work. I don't need to worry about whether the new kernel broke support for ndiswrapper, I don't need to worry about the regressions in hardware support that have hit my Linuxy friends, and I have a GUI that gets as close as I've seen to the DWIM pattern.
And I have a scriptable GUI. Say what you will about its syntax, AppleScript allows some wonderful scripting possibilities. And you can call out to a shell script, so it's also powerful :)
:wq
"customers are pragmatic about quality, and the open source and free software movements haven't produced anything remotely as useful as Mac OS X and the iPhone."
Funny thing is Mac OS X is based on Open BSD. I guess OS X isn't useful then.
Just because someone is "free-thinking" and creative in making art, graphics design, music and so on... doesn't mean they are programmers or anyone who would want to hack their computer. Their computer, and Macs specifically, make it easy for them to be creative in their area of focus without having to worry about which dll conflicts with which other one... whether the right glibc is compiled for their favorite software tool... etc. It's nice because it doesn't require one to "be creative" with the computer just to "be creative" in the area one actually _wants_ to be creative with. At the same time, OS X has made it possible to be "more creative" with the computer if you want too.
"the open source and free software movements haven't produced anything remotely as useful as Mac OS X"
This would be the Mac OS X which is based on FreeBSD?
Modding "-1, Troll" is not a proper response if you disagree with me. Try reason.
My personal opinion is that the main reason a lot of creative (both "artsy" types and developers) like Apple's products is because the user interface and the physical products are designed to, as they say, Just work. This includes staying out of your way and letting you get to work but also to not pull the "Microsoft approach" to user friendliness by renaming things to make them "easier". There's a reason the market for customization of the look and feel of OS X is a lot smaller than the market for similar products for Windows.
Of course, there are several reasons why this works for Apple, a couple of these are partially because they have full control over the hardware and operating system which allows for tight integration and coupled with this are the development tools and the user interface guidelines. Another influence which I think is major is that third party developers know that Apple's customers generally expect software to behave in a certain way, something which isn't true to the same extent with Windows and other *nix systems. An example of this would be drag and drop, if a Windows application fails to handle drag and drop properly most people just dismiss the error message, restart the app and think nothing of it, after all, drag and drop is generally hit or miss with Windows apps, if an app for OS X failed to handle drag and drop properly most likely users would complain and consider it a screwup on the developer's part.
So part of the reason is the centralized control from Apple and part of the reason is that users have come to expect little to no user interface issues which forces Apple to make good development tools and developers to put in extra effort to make sure things work.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
4) Slashdot readers and contributors are on the geeky, bleeding edge and do not represent 90% of the population, most of whom could not care less about 'openness'.
Eric
Eric Aitala
www.f1m.com
Whatever happened to "Apple the computer for the rest of us..."
I think creative types like Macs because they know it's technology that will more or less work. They know they can go into a store, buy one system/OS from the same vendor that was designed specifically to work together so they don't have to waste calories figuring the thing out. It gets out of the way so they can continue being creative. They now have the added bonus of having branded stores that they can go into if they really have a problem.
The rest of the hangers on to that culture get to be associated with creative thinkers even if they're just listening to music and surfing the web
If you love your iPhoney there is nothing that I can say that will change you're mind, it's the stockholm syndrome. I was close to getting one myself, but then Nokia released the N900 which, without having open hardware, is as a very open phone. After this I won't get a new phone unless I can open a terminal, do some apt-get'ting and ssh into it!
The statement "haven't produced anything remotely as useful" is also nonsense. Let's see, how about the Internet, including TCP/IP and DNS? Web servers? As far as end-user products, Android phones (including Droid) and the XO are certainly useful. OSS has produced lots of useful things.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
How can a company whose philosophy of information sharing is so at odds with that of most of its customers be so successful?
Really? The first thing you should always question is your assumptions. Does Apple have a "philosophy of information sharing" and if so, what is it?
The company is secretive about upcoming, not-yet-available products. Which is not information that customers require in their day-to-day work anyways. As a user or as a developer, it is information about the current, existing products that you need most. And as both I've always found that to be readily available whenever I needed it.
So how does a philosophy of "not talking (much) about unreleased ideas" merge with the mindset of a designer, artist, programmer or any other kind of creative person? Quite well. A lot of creative people don't talk (much) about their work-in-progress, either, until it's finished. Programmers are about the only kind who feel that putting a half-finished thing out for the public is the thing to do.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
From TFA:
The programs people are inspired to write for the Mac OS X operating system are routinely more elegant and useful and less annoying than their Windows counterparts.
Quite the claim! Yet there are no examples.
I own a Mac. I've not installed much extra software on it. But what I have installed appears very similar to its Windows equivalent.
So can anyone give an example of what he's talking about?
I guess iLife should be showcase software for Mac.
- iPhoto is a confusing mess compared to Picasa
- GarageBand has some pretty neat amp simulation software in it. But the UI is the opposite of intuitive.
- iTunes is clumsy and inconsistent. I've been using it for over 5 years on Windows and Mac, and it still throws me curveballs.
- I once put together a slideshow in iMovie. I still don't know what was going on.
- iDVD is pretty easy to use. But that's because it's basically a wizard.
The real reason that Apple is so closed-off is because they want to stay unique, or at least appear to be unique. Jobs probably fears that Apple will become just another "beige box" maker just like the company was becoming when he first returned to it. It's a decent strategy. It protects them against copy cats so by the time the competition brings out similar products, Apple's already gained a stranglehold on the market. It also gets a good buzz going about what the "next big thing" from Apple is. Contrast that with Microsoft, who prefer to be ubiquitous.
Of course, Apple's strategy has its caveats. Just ask its suppliers, who have to keep their lips sealed or lose their accounts...
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
The 'Apple way' for media gadgets is that you buy their hardware (no hardware cloning), and buy everything for it through them, so they have part of the revenue pie. It is not in their interests to open up their architecture. As such, the argument is not about choice of functionality, but of customers being wowed into buying the product, and then finding themselves OK (or not) with the exclusive media channels, which limits the functionality of their limited-rights purchases. There's one thing that has not yet been locked down: ordinary software for the computers - is that next?
They don't neglect to build visually stunning and usable objects. Yes the secrecy gets annoying, but on the flip side finding out about some new product and then finding out it will launch in two years is pretty annoying as well.
-Xen
Related to #1: customers are pragmatic about quality, and the open source and free software movements haven't produced anything remotely as useful as Mac OS X and the iPhone.
Sure, where useful == high profile cult following. Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to spend the next eight hours working on my current project, which is developing yet another product for my Fortune 500 employer on top of an entirely open source stack. Call me when the iPhone starts letting me pay my daughter's college tuition, would you?
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Many creatives think exactly like Steve Jobs. The end product looks less like genius if you show the incremental process. Most "designers, musicians, and creative professionals" don't go around showing off half finished work, they hide what they have until it is done so they can get the maximum "wow" effect by revealing a finished project that comes to seemingly come out of nowhere.
Perhaps fans of Apple products consider usability and "Just Works" to be an Essential Software Freedom and likewise consider any software with a bad UI that requires lots of fiddling to work to be "closed" to them.
Of course, one would have to be a free thinker to accept such a heretical idea.
Actually I'm quite amazed at Steve Jobs. He brought the era of desktop computing to the masses, and when they kicked him out of his own company, he founded NeXT and built an OS so good there that the company that kicked him out asked him to return, with said OS in hand, that would be further developed as OS X. How did he not suffer second system syndrome and still manage to ship something so polished? It's more of a management skill I guess, and perhaps of designing a system so forward-looking, it is simple to improve.
But Systems 8 and 9 were quite the pain for end-users, and perhaps an expulsion of a good team from Apple, plus money, to make whatever they want, was the best idea, because otherwise they would be stuck trying to make their legacy OSes modern.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
It gets them press. The tighter they keep it, the more everyone buzzes over the next product. Every tech site on the web could burst out with their "predictions" but until Apple announces it, it isn't golden. And the end result is weeks and weeks of people talking and spreading the word.
I went to visit my wife's family two states away this weekend and they all couldn't wait to talk to me about the coming apple tablet this week because they hadn't seen me since Christmas and know I love Apple. I'd say Apple's plan is working.
The "free thinking" group, artists, musicians, and the like are using the best tools available for their endeavor. It's not about free-thinking. That's like saying an artist is closed minded because his paint brush was made by south-east asian slaves. The "fan boy cult" group, geeks and the like, are not necessary the same set of people. No contradiction here people, move along.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Open or closed software doesn't matter that is not the point. The creative works are not the software itself but what is produced using the software. So as long you can buy software that works and can export your creations freely it does not matter if the software itself is closed.
Apple's products are well designed and work. That, apparently, is the key to their popularity.
On contrast, Microsoft's offerings were crappy — and that fact, rather than their being "closed" or anti-competitive, is why we hated them and the company.
BTW, nowadays Windows seems to suck much less and so newer generations have much hostility towards Microsoft — despite their remaining just as closed and anti-competitive as they were before.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
More like about "screw the BS, here's a quality product."
While I do admire a lot of FOSS projects (for instance Firefox, Adium, Python) I also find that a lot of them just don't stack up to Apple in terms of features.
For instance from the perspective of a graphic designer. OS X has probably the best font smoothing I've seen on any screen. I cringe when I have to use Windows at work. X11 doesn't compare either.
What if I bring a new fancy printer to my ad agency office (or whatever workplace that uses macs)? I know I don't have to go machine by machine and install fancy drivers - because they're all there. I never once had to install any printer drivers on any OS X system. (There's probably an exception if we're talking about highly specialized printers, but I have no experience with those)
Even as a "standard" user. I know my digital camera can just hook up to the computer with "that cable" and I can download pictures to "that program" and do fancy stuff with them with a drag and drop interface or even make pretty websites mom can visit with this iWeb thing. I don't like iWeb, but I've seen a lot of people using it and all they know is some word processing.
Even the more advanced users have something for them. Just last night I quickly created a python script to take text from the command line arguments, string them together and put them in title caps. I made that into a service using automator (call it via shell script) and used System Preferences to bind it to Ctrl-Shift-T. So now whenever I select text and do that keystroke, I get text in title caps.
Speaking of this Automator thing, I wish I could use it at work. I have an excel report I have to prepare on a daily basis for several clients. I made a script at home that I can drag a file on to and it attaches that file to an email, types my standard greeting, puts the correct addresses and puts the date in the subject line. I end up doing that manually at work simply because Outlook/Excel suck at this stuff.
Actually, if my corp's ERP system ran on a Mac, I'd probably bring my laptop... Or maybe I'll virtualize it?
o hai
Presumably, Apple wants the device to be part of the larger ecosystem it’s building around digital content—music, movies, TV shows, apps, and soon books and magazines,..
In the cap class - Strategy - we had a case study about Apple. This was 2004 and the iPod was in full swing. Anyway, the case study by Harvard, no less, was pretty much damning about the PC industry's commodity status, and especially about Apple's over priced commodity hardware and an operating system that was "perceived" to be better than Windows.
I argued the point of something like what Apple is doing now and their work station and computers would keep a high end niche business. The professor asked rhetorically, "In the PC industry?"
Before I could elaborate, this fan girl started to light in to the professor about how "superior" Mac OS was and blah blah blah and when she was forced to us it over Windows, that's when she discovered how superior it was.
The professor then said, "So, you had to be forced to use Apple's products." and continued to spank the fangirl f over the fact that Apple cannot continue to be a viable company in the PC industry.
I wanted to say that is correct BUT they will make their PCs part of an entertainment and computing product family that will be integrated ....basically what Apple is doing now - only Apple did it much better than I could even have imagined.
I'm an Apple business fanboy. I don't use their products but I sure do admire their business sense.
I'd argue that the "free-thinking" aspect comes from Apple's somewhat paradoxical "white box" branding.
Let's start with design. Their products are as faceless and devoid of nonfunctional design features as possible with the exception of the Apple logo (so you have a disk drive, but not one shaped like an alien's face) and consequently the product design is rather decoupled from the user. An Alienware laptop projects a certain image, and consequently Alienware laptop users are going to disproportionately be adolescent male gamers, regardless of the hardware's usefulness as a workstation for making scientific visualisations. An Apple laptop, by virtue of being a big featureless slab of whatever it's made out of, could be used by anyone.
Similarly the OS, hardware and so on are heavily abstracted to make it easier for the user to get on with what they're doing. It's basically a box which does some computer stuff, and if all goes well you don't need an awareness that you're using eighty yottabytes of hyper-RAM and a BMX derivative OS. All that stuff is thrown to the background in much the same way that the case design is made as bare as possible. As a result, things like hacking the OS etc. don't really enter your mind. There are apps, you run them, you get things done... ideally the software ecosystem is such that you never have to tinker around and realise that you're using a platform that's locked down.
Now, this also goes into their corporate image, and this is where it gets really tricky. Their corporate image is the products. You are to think about the processes which went into them as little as possible. This is part of why they crack down on leaks so much. Ideally, they want you to think of the product alone. So naturally, the fact that it's probably made in some poorly-paid factory in China doesn't enter your mind. That's maybe not as true with a Microsoft-carrying machine, where you think of the Microsoft corporate entity and so on.
Essentially, the stink of corporate is less obvious in Apple's products because they put a big fat cloaking device on the corporation. That means that self-described free thinkers, who are likely to be anti-establishment, and thus anti-corporate, and thus repelled by something with an MS logo, go with them by default.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I mean the Iphone is entertaining, but is it really that useful? And what's with all the articles that talk about tablets becoming the next big boom. Is there something other than industry hopes that is so?
Somebody has conflated the kind of "free-thinking creativity" of artists, designers, etc. with the kind of free-thinking of the open software movement. "free thinking" to an artist means the freedom to create her own vision without interference by anyone else, not freedom to collaborate on or elaborate someone else's vision. This artist's "free-thinking" often looks more like the Jobs method of top-down control than like the open-source movement's wide-distribution collaboration philosophy. Which isn't to say that artists never collaborate, of course.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
I don't understand how this is a paradox.
in Century of The Self. This is an amazing documentary that makes me question the motives of everyone trying to sell me something. I only started watching it two days ago and Apple was one of the first companies on my mind and now here's a news article practically about the same thing.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
More info at:
http://www.opensparc.net/
Includes the definition for the original UltraSPARC T2 processor
1 - If they were all open about their efforts on a day-to-day basis, the other companies would simply copy them, make a 90% "good enough" version just before them and then Apple would simply lose their creative edge. ... the latest Palm was tight lipped ... and the developer in his basement developing the latest revolution in whatever he is doing is also (usually) tight lipped about his project.
2 - They have marketing campaigns to make us WANT a new product. Meaning gaining momentum until the product actually ships.
3 - All companies are doing that. Only because Apple is successful in making campaigns doesn't mean the other companies aren't doing it themselves. -- and if it was more profitable in advertising in advance, they'd certainly do it. Like they did for many Mac OS X releases. And yes, the latest Google Phone was also tight lipped
I mean, it's business management 101.
Linux, and many other open source products
Among which the *BSD family of unices, which forms the basis of Mac OS X.
It even looks like the open source movement has produced a viable set of unix implementations for a long time before an (almost-on-the-brink-of-extinction) Apple decide to borrow it, slap a nice interface on it and call it "Mac OS X" to replace the ageing (not-even-true-multitasking) shit it had before.
In fact, I still wait to see OS X on anything but Macs and iPhone. Whereas open source, although often unnoticed, tends to show up discretely in lots of crazy places. Actually it's now getting difficult to find a modem/router which doesn't run some embed Linux - for example.
Opensource movement have achieved quite much. They just don't make a huge marketing fuss about it with an artsy logo slapped on it.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I'm as much a fan of open-source as the next guy and I've contributed to some projects and asked for features, etc. However, I find that the whole "designed by committee" that *many* open source apps have reduces the overall quality. Those OSS apps that truly shine generally have either a strong leader or a single author. You know the old saying, which is true, as well as witty; that a camel is a horse that was designed by a committee.
As far as openness goes, Apple doesn't announce vaporware like most other companies do. This means when they announce something, they are going to sell it. Usually their products have taken old ideas and looked at them from a different angle opting for being very good at a few things rather than poor and many things. Let's face it, Cmdr Tacos' famous assessment of the original iPod is a classic example of how "the masses" would design a similar product. If Apple would release an "alpha" product to "test the waters" like so many other companies do, the iPod (and iPhone, for that matter) would have died at birth or would be so hideously deformed that it would be unrecognizable.
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
...contrary to other multinational and highly outsourced IT companies ?
Wouldn't that explain why Apple fan news (eg. Slashdot) come mainly from the US ?
I don't own any Apple products personally,but certainly you guys are smart enough to see the appeal. Apple's stuff just works and allows people who don't care about how the backend works to do whatever they want to do. The kind of person who uses Apple products is never going to compile their own source or futz with making something work. Openness does them no good, at least not in any direct sense.
Mac OSX GETS OUT OF MY WAY, WINDOWS KEEPS PROMPTING ME USELESSLY. OSX thus gives me more time for creative effort instead of technical troubleshooting.
Apple's history of "just works" allows people more time for creative effort. BECAUSE it is closed, there is not as much complication to have to figure out. There's no registry, no need for scripting, and if something crashes it tends to recover on its own. THAT'S why "creative" types use it, because it allows me to REMOVE one more OBSTACLE to my workflow.
I'm not a "creative" in the typical sense, I'm a neuroscientist. Every time my Windows XP system crashes on me, or my network didn't initiate correctly, that's wasted time, effort, and it means I need to learn a new skill set to correct the problem.
The few times my OSX machine crash on me, it self recovers. OSX GETS OUT OF MY WAY, where as Windows and Linux KEEP PROMPTING ME WITH USELESS STUFF! The fact that fewer exploits target OSX is also a great benefit, and I don't have a billion choices for which hardware to buy so it's easier for me to choose the "best" one available to me. I don't want to spend a month figuring out if the Acer, Panasonic, or Dell is going to be the most ergonomic for my uses. With Apple, it's not even a question, because it's irrelevant insofar as I do not have a choice.
Also, by being an "outsider", there is less push to conformity. I don't know anyone else that uses a Mac, so I'm not being told which software is the "best" or how I should organize my workflow, thus allowing me to make my own decisions about what's important. This is critical in Science, and has been shown to be important in Sociology studies of how Science gets work done. "The Neuroscience of Screwing Up"
Free and Open Source SOFTWARE. Your going to need some serious heat to make Intel or ADM CPUs become soft. A synchrotron can puddle silicon pretty quickly, but who uses a CPU for a monochromator?
Think global, act loco
How can a company whose philosophy of information sharing is so at odds with that of most of its customers be so successful?
Just seems like a non sequitur to me. Or it illustrates the fact that people who gravitate to the Mac are interested in a tool they can use and, say, Linux users are interested in a toy (and I mean that in a good way- I love me my toys) they can fiddle with. Windows users (those who choose it when they don't have to for some reason), well, who can understand them? ;-)
Does a an artist care about the inner workings of the companies that makes paints and brushes?
At least by the convention in question. "Apple is the choice of creative types" is juxtaposed against the "PCs are for techies and nerds" stereotype.
People really are very shallow and most Apple product owners fall for the marketing hype that showing off an I-something is a way of making themselves appear more 'cool'.
by acting, dressing, and thinking like every other hippie.
You clearly were not paying attention; they dressed in a similar STYLE, but there was wide variation. They WERE free-thinking and individualistic compared to the people who went into work wearing the same color shirts (usually white), ties, hats, shoes, slacks, jackets. Streets of major cities at rush hour at the time were a sea of men dressed the same.
Also: anyone who claims Apple has an inside culture of creativity and free thinking is full of shit. A few idea people bring ideas to the top, and everyone else is told exactly how to implement things, with strict parameters. It's one reason a friend of mine left- he spent several years working on Apple's flagship software components and hardware, but had no say in anything. Now he makes less money but at a smaller company, where he also felt his input would matter.
Another culture shift at Apple: remember when there were credits? No more. Apple now refuses to recognize to the public the contributions its employees make, except for 2-3 top-level people. Jobs, Ive, etc.
Both the top-down ideas and refusal to recognize employee work are cashing in short-term profits for long-term stability. I wouldn't invest in Apple long-term if you paid me to; the day Steve Jobs or Ive retire, get hit by a bus, or just drop dead- Apple stock will crumble because everyone is under the perception (correctly) that they are the driving force.
When your brand is as much your top level executives as your products, you have a big problem down the road.
Please help metamoderate.
>> "open source and free software movements haven't produced anything remotely as useful as Mac OS X and the iPhone"
If you cant use KDE, and its softwares for problems of "usability", you can put your brain in a JAR.
"Creative and free thinking" doesn't mean "lets one's entire create process be totally transparent, and broadcasts everything one is going to do months in advance".
As for why so many artsy folks like Apple, I'd identify two main reasons:
1. Microsoft is synonymous with "stodgy corporate culture". Apple gives these folks a way to be "alternative" without having to jump through all the Linux hoops.
2. Apple stuff "looks cool". That's important to a lot of people. They've successfully transformed consumer electronics into an "image accessory".
Windows will always be more secure than Mac OSX. Those patches and updates Microsoft launches aren't always to fix bugs... but to patch exploits as well. PC!
I think this dude explains it very well - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn5K3V62CFQ
I'm a long-time Linux user and even occasional contributor, and most of the development work I do for Hercules is on Linux. My primary desktop and laptop run OS X, though, for one simple reason: they're tools, not toys. I need them to just work when I sit down in front of them to get things done. I find I spend far too much time getting a Linux desktop to that point.
I tell people I'm a Mac user because I'm a Unix geek. OS X, unlike Linux, is a system you can give to your computer-illiterate inlaws and have it be solid and reliable, and not have to spend hours on the phone playing tech support. Being Unix-based, it's far more secure and stable than Windows, too.
So what if it's closed source? It just works, and that matters to me far more.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
I have been an IT support person, a programmer, and a creative professional (digital design as well as audio production/recording), and used both Macs and PCs for all three, and while I may be biased because I have never actually owned a Mac, I really don't think any of the usual arguments for Macs hold water any longer. The hardware is now (as another few posters mentioned) essentially the same as a typical PC (Intel/x86/64 arch), the software is interchangable (by that I mean you can install OSX or Linux or Windows on either machine). The idea that Macs "just work" is preposterous to me, because I have never, ever seen a Mac "just work". Nor have I ever seen Linux "just work" (except for a few simple distros like Ubuntu, where it makes all the decisions for you). And of course it would be foolish to argue that Windows "just works." For me, the choice is still Windows when it comes to professional work (Linux would be a better choice if all the same software apps were available). I have been working on a home recording with a band, where the work is being done on a Mac using ProTools, and every single session there is some kind of stupid technical issue that takes up precious time. At home on my PC, I don't have the same kind of trouble, at least not to the same degree or with the same consistency. What it comes down to is what User Interface you're more comfortable with. Both are equally capable of performing the same tasks. But one is about 1/3 the price and does not require that you go to one specific store to get replacement parts.
Do not confuse free and open. A free thinking person has his own idea's and does not mind what others think of it. A free thinking person does not need constant approval. So the apple way of developing products reflect the way freethinker Steve Jobs works.
The author is confusing "free-thinking" with democratic values. In my experience, creativity usually flows from primarily 1 person. Either that person is alone (like an artist in their studio) or a dictatorial over-lord calling the shots (eg. a stage or movie director, or a music conductor or producer). So, "free-thinking" should not really imply an open, democratic environment. If you think of it this way, these "free-thinking" artists are not all that unlike Apple after all.
"You know the old saying, which is true, as well as witty; that a camel is a horse that was designed by a committee."
I don't get this? What's wrong with Camels? Seems they are well adapted to the desert environments they are native to? For a purpose-specific niche (a beast of burden suitable to survival and use in a desert region) they seem like the perfect design, no?
I often feel like I am battling the Apple computer my employer provides for development work. Window management is a major PITA, IMO. This is no doubt a party personal issue, after years of working on other systems, but I fault Apple for dictating that I interact in the manner that they deem best rather allowing me to choose methods that, whether they like it or not, are conventional and intuitive.
Oh, and the scroll wheel on the mouse just doesn't work because it is not cleanable.
I have two daughters in college. One bought a Dell laptop and the other bought an MacBook. The MacBook as been flawless and the Dell is the biggest lemon I have ever seen. The motherboard, hard drive and graphics card were replaced under warranty. The replacement graphics card is starting to fail (leading to multiple reboots a day). At least compared to Dell, Apple products are reliable and easy to use. If you compare Apple laptops with similarly configured PCs, the Apples are cost competitive. So is works better and costs the same means 'status symbol', I'm all for it.
Think global, act loco
Marketing dollars work, even for controlling "free thinkers."
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
As engineers, we ought to know that sometimes we want things that are contradictory. We'd like this airplane to be strong, but it also must be light. You can't have unlimited quantities of both.
The same goes with creativity. We say we want originality, but that's not really what we are looking for most of the time. What we want is something derivative enough to be certain to work but original enough to be an improvement. Any idiot can be "original". Just take whatever is being done and do it a different way. The problem is that most different ways aren't better.
That's why "creativity" can't be treated as a "core organizational value". It's not something you can pursue in any meaningful way. What really distinguishes "creative" organizations is that they have greater insight into their problem domains.
Apple's most admired products each embody an insight about what the users they are after want to do. The iPod was not the first portable digital music player, nor has it ever been the best going by specs. The user interfaces on the iPods have been well designed and have featured innovations like multi-touch, but the killer feature isn't a feature at all. It's how the iPod, iTunes and iTunes store work together to make managing your media convenient.
That said, nobody can be all things to all people. I hate the iTunes search interface to the iTunes store, because I don't use it the way Apple's target users do. I don't watch TV and don't care about being part of popular culture. I'm more interested in finding oddball, eccentric stuff. If Google ever opened a music store, that'd be for me; YouTube is more what I'm looking for. The iTunes store wants to steer me to the latest episode of whatever TV show is the rage, and discourages me from finding what I want.
But it doesn't matter because catering to the oddball whims of very eccentric people isn't the business model for iTunes.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
....it is largely simply a later version of NeXTStep. The interesting thing about this, is that NeXT WAS an open company. IIRC there were two salary bands only $50K and $70K. There was little if any heirarchy, and according to wikipedia anyways, any employee at any time could go to HR and see what anyone else was making at any given moment. And even before that at Apple, under Steve Jobs, programmers were credited directly in "About" screens in applications, and there is of course the famous "signatures" of all the people who worked on the original Mac. These practices are largely non-existant now at the big A. The change to extreme level of secrecy that came later, seems to be a logical byproduct of the "Oh yeah, and just one more thing" that Steve Jobs has honned over the years to near perfection.
Sorry. Are we talking about the same Macs that run a POSIX-compliant OS of which large chunks (although certainly not all) are open source, talk standard internet protocols, come bundled with a full-featured SDK as standard with full documentation available online? The ones which, using Fink or MacPorts, can run most of the "big name" FOSS projects?
The iPhone, OTOH, is clearly far more "closed". So closed that the smallest developers can, for a paltry registration fee, develop apps and have them distributed via Apple's store. Yes - Apple have to approve things, but in return you get access to a high-profile sales channel. In other news, I can't just walk into WalMart or Amazon HQ and demand that they carry my product.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
"The secrecy surrounding the expected Apple tablet computer is only the latest example of the company's famously closed and controlling culture .. How can a company whose philosophy of information sharing is so at odds with that of most of its customers be so successful?"
The only people bitching about Apple are a certain company in Redmond who Apple won't let 'innovate on the iPod. That is Apple uses its own FairPlay instead of the 'industry standard' Windows Media DRM (ha haa haaa). Apples main crime being making money out of online music without paying the Microsoft tax.
What a nonsense. Only a small percentage of the couple of million mac users are in any creative business. Most of them just use their apple as a pc.
Conversely, what evidence is there, apart from anecdotal, that creative (as in music, art) people mainly use macs? Anything you can do with a mac you can do with windows or linux.
Owning a mac does not (never has) mean that you are part of some kind of hip, creative incrowd; that is just a myth that helps apple sell computers and other stuff.
Apple is just a particularly overzealous American company, kind of like Tupperware. Come to think of it; their products even look a bit like tupperware.
Not much about OS X is original or even made by Apple. I would like to see a chart of OS-X innards, in green and red, with parts made by Apple in red and all of the open source stuff they use but give so very little back to, in green.
Green:
* The FreeBSD kernel
* The MACH microkernel
* The GNU C libraries and gcc compiler
* Almost all of the unix tools
* The networking stack
* Most of the drivers
* numerous background daemons, like ntpd, ssh,
* The konquerer engine on which safari is based
* The CUPS printing system, although they bought that company and proceeded to do next to no development on it. In the network I administrate, the only computers giving real trouble with the linux CUPS server are the macs. OS X clients don't even support cups classes.
* many other subsystems
* firefox, openoffice and numerous other free software titles have been ported to OS X and cocoa.
*
Red:
* The nextstep environment on which cocoa is based (although that is just bought and only further developed by apple and therefor should be made grey or pink or something)
* the display server
* coreAudio
* iLife
Free thinking people dictating what others should think.
Liking closed culture has absolutely nothing to do with free thought or lack thereof. A free thought here or there might confirm this.
If, however, there was a mythical culture of people who instantly start desiring an Apple product as soon as its announced, without any thought or effort put into assessing whether they would actually enjoy the product, that would be a different matter...
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
This is only confusing to the PC Windoze drones.
to enjoy the results.
As a designer, I can appreciate the results of other creative people without needing to know exactly how they got there. As I think about the other things in my life: art, music, furniture, car, food... in all of those cases I take the time to seek out people that have worked hard to develop their own creative processes to make something that I consider wonderful. In the vast majority of those case, I have never asked "how was this created," but instead simply accept that it was and that it adds to my life in a positive way. This very much mirrors how I would hope people would see what I create... so I think it make perfect sense for creative-types to enjoy the work of other creative-types without even considering the process.
Of course, that is not to say those that revel in the process shouldn't enjoy the things that they do... just don't mistake your way of experiencing the world with that of someone else.
Another explanation would be that this behavior is simply in keeping with their brand archetype, the magician. Apple obviously pays close attention to the way their products are received; they've had many failures. However, unlike their competition, they have no trouble burying a bad idea quickly. Do you remember the iPod BoomBox? Do you remember the Motorola Rokr? Apple notices when their stuff isn't well received and then it's gone.
By the same token, you don't expect the magician to hang out with the audience after the show. Merlin does not pass out a Rate My Performance card. Nor does Merlin hope to see you at Comdex. Being aloof is simply part of the brand identity, and you can't do that if you let each little division have their own blog.
These aren't foaming-at-the-mouth RMS students. They're artists. They make music, or pictures. They produce a product; they don't stand around going "My mind must be FREEEEEEE and I need to produce music to save the world!" It's a hobby, that sometimes turns into a profitable career, with profit motive.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I have an Apple laptop (more like, portable workstation) and I bought it after numerous computer-generations of all kinds of PC laptops, some quite expensive and focused on gaming/performance. I've had it for a year now and I can say that it is the *only* laptop I've ever owned where I've been completely satisfied with the build and service quality. Having a top-flight desktop with an uncompromising unix shell is quite nice too. For gaming I dual boot.
BTW, for a more mainstream data point, the Apple laptops swept Consumer Reports "most recommended buy" in multiple categories recently.
Despite being from a "closed" company, it gives me a platform that lets me natively run Linux, Windows, and MacOSX. It offers more choices. Development tools are much easier to come by as well.
first thought that comes to mind is hoover's FBI, where the G-man was anonymous, and hoover was the public face of FBI, period...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
As a long time Mac user, I can confidently say that your friend has not learned how to use his computer efficiently. It's getting to be well known now amongst the old-school mac users that Apple is "dumbing down" their OS to make it more palatable for the masses. These include more flags and messages asking, "are you sure you want to do so-and-so?" For those of us who know what we're doing, these things get in our way as really pisses us off, just as the GP suggested. There is a whole subset of users who regularly find the command line settings or hacks to disable this irritating behavior.
Moreover, the entire article is based on a mistaken premise. The fact that Apple is favored by "creative people" has absolutely nothing to do with their company profile or habits of secrecy. The whole reason is because Apple has a design philosophy whose goal is to make the computer a tool for accomplishing what you want to do rather and having the "computing" be as transparent as possible. Microsoft just isn't good at doing this, the OS and the software interjects itself into the user experience far, far too often. This disrupts thought patterns and focus and leads to a hindering of the ability to get useful work done. Case in point, the little animated dog in XP whenever you want to search for something. When I want to search, I want to type a search string into a search field and get rapid, relevant results I do not want to look at animated images asking me cute phrases, it's distracting.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
you cannot hope to defeat the Reality Distortion Field!
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
Try building OS X and the iPhone without BSD. And Apache, MySQL, and Linux haven't been as useful as the iPhone or OSX at all...
Agreed. Just because the maker of a tool operates in a closed manner doesn't mean that the tool itself is closed or that users of the tool are closed-minded.
Yamaha is closed when it comes to production of their pianos. Cross is closed when it comes to production of their pens. And Ford is closed when it comes to production of their cars. But it's no paradox that anybody is creative, productive, independent, or expressive with those pianos, pens, and cars.
The Unix foundations of Mac OS X appeal to technology geeks. The Just Works interface appeals to artistic types who want to create without hacking or fighting the tool itself. And the high quality hardware appeals to anyone who favors reliability and sturdiness.
They are the sort who want something simple that they can switch on, browse the net, without any trouble. May use windows at work but thats a bit tooo complicated. Someone told em Macs were good so they got one. Plesantly suprised you can surf the web and listen to music at the same time.
I maintain that Macs do the minimum amount of work that a computer should do very well. Anything more than that and you are stuck (or downloading random bits of shareware). The finder (10.4) just looked like it was designed on feedback from non tech users.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
Ask a woman that paid more than $750 for a purse why she bought it. It is amazing that many of the same reasons to justify that purse are also used by many people use to justify why they bought a MAC.
On the flip side, take an exact replica of that $750 purse without the brand name written on it or a purse that is functionally equivalent in all ways (weight, size, quality, softness, color, stitching) and sell it for $20. Ask that woman for an opinion on it and why she did not buy it.
There are valid measurable reasons to buy a MAC, there is also a hidden unmeasurable amount of personal coolness that many people are trying to get as well that comes with buying something more expensive or something they think will make them cool or stand out. If Air Force 1's or Oakley sun glasses, sold for $12 a pair, they would not be "cool", at an inflated price of $100-200 and limited distribution, coolness can be had. To be fair, its not just these products though, it is vacation destinations, restaurants, diamond rings, cars, and many more. Not everyone finds these things to be cool. My first impression of someone that talks about their pair of Oakleys, AF 1's, a $1000 purse or even to some extent some people with a MAC is someone making an attempt to be cool which I view as funny but I humor them, "wow, that's nice" and then I hear of reasons why they bought it and most of the reasons are trying to avoid having to say "Because I wanted every one to know I paid a lot for it to try to stand out above the others as someone that is doing well, is trendy, and can afford it".
What??? A big-ticket company like Apple is getting ready to release a major product, and the grip is that they're being too secretive? Get a life.
Customers want high quality computers, Apple sells high quality computers; where does corporate culture come into this equation?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
is this tagged as flamebait? I don't understand.
I switched to Mac from PC because I grew tired of Windows enforcing its dull, witless paradigms on me, but there are many things I actually miss about Windows/hate in Mac culture:
Anyway, at least it *is* shiny.
People talk about Apple's success as if they just sprung from the ether.
However, they have been trying to compete against Microsoft with their
Macintosh line since long before any other current desktop competitors
existed. The Apple brand name is over 30 years old and it's older than
the Microsoft brand. The original userbase for Apple survived well into
the Macintosh era. In those days, Macs were having trouble getting
traction against MS-DOS of all things.
So any discussion of Apple needs to acknowledge it's whole history and
not just the stuff that happened only recently.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Better Marketing.
When you think of Apple, you think innovation, design, creativity, simplicity, shininess.
When you think of Microsoft, you think business, viruses, blue screen of death, gaming.
You might think otherwise, but then you probably don't own a Mac. (Neither do I, but I watch enough TV and know enough Mac and Windows users that the above are essential truths.)
Well, may I suggest another possibility:
4) designers, musicians, and other creative professionals are fashion whores worse than teenage girls or snowboarders.
Blind brand loyalty of apple worshipper is in the same ballpark as those of Vuiton or Oxbow
Seriously - here's the deal...the OS stays out of the users way allowing them to think of nothing else but the task at hand. That's why creatives love it.
There is simply less thinking about how to get the OS to do things that need to be done. The UI is designed to be as unobtrusive as possible. Now Apple has certainly been less strict about this than in the Classic days but still more so than Windows and Linux.
You don't have to be a creative to appreciate that either. I code with a Mac and prefer it for the same reasons. Plus it gives me the unix foundation I prefer at the same time.
I don't feel smarter having to set up text files to get an ssh server going - I know I can do that. It just takes less of my time not to have to. I like having all my apps look and behave the same way. It helps to keep me focused on my work instead of distracting my brain in order to build muscle memory for UI du jour for every app.
Also, there's the obvious. Creatives love beautiful things and Mac hardware is beautiful. There is nothing beautiful, nor wrong, about a run-of-the-mill Dell laptop. Your environment contributes a lot to your mindset.
Would be "A group that likes to think of themselves as free thinking." I've encountered more than a few people like this. They believe that they are free thinkers, open minded, above and beyond normal etc, etc. However they are rigidly locked in to their line of thought. To them, being "open minded" means agreeing with all their points of view. If you don't, you are "close minded."
My sister has (or perhaps had, I don't know if they are friends any longer) a friend like this. She was real big on "open mindedness" she would constantly talk about what a big deal it was for people to be open minded and how she couldn't stand closed minded individuals. However if you brought up anything she didn't agree with, she'd immediately accuse you of being "close minded" and "unwilling to think." When I pointed out that in fact her views of intolerance of any dissent were extremely close minded she got real mad at me.
I think that is the similar sort of thing going on with the hard core Maccies. As you say, they are almost cult-like in their adoration of Apple. They like to think they are extremely open minded, but they aren't.
so a company makes a popular product, but keeps proprietary information like 99.99% of all other companies that make popular products. no contradiction, nothing mysterious, and no correlation between the purpose of the product (which help some people's creativity it is said) and how it is made because it is mostly irrelevant how it is made. Apple uses open API, and has some open source in there, which might be good enough if not ideal. Sure, I'd rather my kid's and wife's Macs were totally open right down to circuit traces and firmware, but ah well, we didn't get that 21st century (and no flying cars)
What makes Apple a success is that Apple fully exploits consumer fanaticism. They have a large number of fanatic followers who will worship every word that comes out of Steve's mouth.
At this point it doesn't even matter if the product is good or not, as long as it has the Apple logo, the fanatics will swear by it. It doesn't matter if the product has battery flaws, headphone plug incompatibility, catches on fire randomly, isn't up to par with the latest technology, isn't compatible with established industry standards, has draconian end user license agreements. It's not about any the product anymore.
It's turned into a religion. Trying to convince someone Apple products have flaws like any other product is like talking to a creationist: it's made by Apple and Apple is the greatest because Apple says Apple is the greatest and Apple's word can not be wrong because Apple said it and since Apple is the greatest Apple can't be wrong about Apple being the greatest.
Gem was first launched in 1985, whereas the Mac was launched in 1984. Apple actually sued Digital Research (and won) because it was such a blatant copy of the Mac's interface. Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Too bad Apple dropped support for that shit like a bad drug habit. Where is your god now?
I bet all the other Macfags shun you and your obsolete shiny. You're not cool anymore.
...Than anything else. I can't help but notice how so many people here on this website make such broad, sweeping generalizations about Mac users, and are modded 'Insightful'. How so many people here on this site act as though they know everything.
If I was as smart or as important as posters here make themselves out to be, my time would be spent running a successful BUSINESS, not posting on Slashdot.
I've always been into computers, and was a die-hard Windows fan until the Intel macs were released. I made the switch, and haven't looked back; HOWEVER, I didn't make the switch "to be cool (as was discussed above)," nor did I make it because windows = bad, apple = good. IMHO, they're both computer industry giants whose main interest is (ding!) PROFITS.
That being said, I'm in the "Free-thinking" business; music is what I do, it's who I am. I choose Mac, NOT because of it's affiliation with the "young, hip, etc." crowd, but because when it comes down to it, Macs are simply more stable than Windows. The MAJORITY of creative software - audio, in my case, but artwork and video as well - is run on macs. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of great software selections on PC; however, when I walk into a studio (and this also goes for film/photo editing) chances are 9/10 times the main computer will be a mac, typically running Pro Tools (which also runs on windows). The reasoning behind this lies in the fact that Pro Tools, and pretty much every major Digital Audio Workshop (DAW) runs incredibly stable on the Mac. Pro Tools doesn't even support Windows 7 yet! The thousands of high quality plug-ins out there for purchase? They all run incredibly stable on a mac, too. Why? Because Mac has become the "creative" industry standard, an attribute largely due to its stability in the first place.
As a music professional, I take great care to make sure my data stays uncorrupted. I back up EVERYTHING multiple times, JUST in case my computer crashes/gets wiped, etc. My computer IS my office. I wouldn't be able to do what I do without one (unless I have an analog studio - anyone want to invest $30,000?). I don't need the cost-effectiveness of a PC, I need the guaranteed stability that comes with buying a mac.
On a different note: Apple's do-it-yourself recording, filming and photo editing software is big business. It remains powerful enough to produce professional art, while remaining cheap enough for practically anyone (college hipster kids included) to purchase. Tie that into a couple generations of internet users who drown themselves in media, and what do you get? A few million you-tube directors who all want macs, because it's what the professionals use, and there's a chance in hell their parents might actually buy it for them.
For MOST people, it is about the quality of the end product. Apple is consistently atop the quality and usability rankings since, well, forever. I've been a happy customer since the 90s.
As much as this article is a troll for Open Source and bait for the fanboys, it is pretty close on #3. Open source just isn't good enough to justify the lack of cost.
Macs are shiny and thus status symbols and thus people want them. One of our student workers is a law student. Now being a law student you are pretty much required to have a laptop, they don't officially mandate it, but they might as well. You type an amazing amount of stuff on your computer, and all tests are taken using test software on the computer, and they don't have enough to go around. Ok well for writing, you need Office (that's the only format they accept) so no problem either way. However the test software is Windows ONLY. They note that and warn people of that. You'd think then that everyone would have Windows laptops. Wrong, tons of Mac users and they are chronically having problems. They have to go buy a copy or Windows from the bookstore so they can run the software in bootcamp (it won't run in a VM). They then have problems setting it up, and sometimes the test software acts up and of course the software maker won't support it since they don't support Macs.
All in all, a Windows laptop is what you want for this law school. It is just what they support, what they are set up to deal with. You would think that would be what people would buy, since it is a tool for their degree, much like people get TI calculators in the math program because that is what they are set up to deal with. No, they get Macs only because they are a status symbol. They are harder to work with in this context, but people get them anyhow because they want the shiny computer, not because there's a real need.
Having filtered out all the standard "Apple => groupthink", "Windows crashes", "Get a life" etc posts in this discussion the most noticeable theme that stands out is the juvenile homophobia of a reasonable fraction of the readership here. Macs are for gay people? Come on, grow up.
The simple reason is that art centric programmes have always been the focus of Macs. Adobe Illustrator as flagship and many many more have originated there, and the Mac hardware has traditionally supported that better. Sure you can buy great Win/adobe stations ATM, but for a long time Mac was King of DTP and A/V.
Most of its advantages have shrunken, but they havent gone completely away, and why would art people change?
Well they do, but slowly.
I read an interesting series of psych experiments on rationality in decision making. The upshot was that thinking rationally about choices upsets carefully arranged heuristics that do a pretty good job. The caveat is that an expert in a particular field will have the ability to make the right choice --- and articulate it rationally.
Participants had to choose a poster to place in their dorm room for 6 months. After 6 months, they filled out a questionnaire on how satisfied they were with the posters. The control group just choose their poster from a collection of posters. The experimental group had to articulate rational reasons for their choice. The control group were more satisfied with their choice.
A similar experiment was done with jam tasting. When people were asked to give reasons and critically evaluate the jams, they produced results inconsistent with their enjoyment of the jam, and also with expert opinions about the jam. However, when those internal heuristics were left to do their thing -- people made better choices.
I think it is fair to call this gut instinct -- don't over-think the problem. Not applicable to experts within their field of choice, nor to every situation, but generally application to most people in most situations.
As computer programmers, we generally have powerful ability to manipulate abstract thoughts -- that is not generally developed in Joe or Jane Average. Thus, we have a bias towards thinking about things, in the same wielding a hammer makes everything look like a nail. The architypal computer programmer is a bit of a braniac.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
This implies that people who use PCs are single-minded drones. Apple has harped on this for a while, not only with the superbowl ad, but when they switched to intel chips, they say "these chips used to be in dull little machines, performing dull little tasks" which is such an insult to all the amazing things done with technology (most of it on PCs!), they didn't sequence the human genome with macs.
This is the most boring argument on the internet. But I will say that I switched to Mac because I could afford it and because I was tired of the same-old with Windows. I paid about $300 more for this Mac than I paid for my last PC, which was about a thousand bucks. I bought the basement Macbook. It wasn't until I bought my first iPod in 2008 that I even considered buying a Mac. I first got an old iBook and tried it out, just to get a feel for the system. Then in March 2009 I finally bought this Macbook, and I have no intention of going back. There are very few times I've been anywhere near as frustrated with this system as I used to be on Windows. I also think the prevalence of people who pirate Windows is very telling: you love it so much but you're not willing to pay for it. It's like stealing a car with three wheels. I get all my work done faster and more efficiently on my Mac. I'm less distracted by viruses and other things that used to suck up an exorbitant amount of time in my computing. Since I've switched, three of my friends have switched when it came time to buy new computers. They of course gave mine a try first. The truth is that most people aren't wanting to play games and do all this other bullshit that Windows users are talking about. The other truth is that the crazy Mac users you're talking about, the ones who think they're better than everyone else, they are more easily identifiable by their @me.com or @mac.com e-mail addresses. That shows true, baseless loyalty. I can think of two times I got angry at Apple. One of them was unrelated to my experience, the other was directly related. In both cases I made my resolutions. I own more Apple products now than anyone I know. And I see no reason to switch back to the wide and virus-infested world of PC computing. I also have a Linux netbook and an IBM thinkpad, both running Ubuntu. I use those for specific purposes. This Mac is my general purpose computer, and pound for pound I spent a lot less on it--I won't upgrade for another three years, you'll surely be upgrading next year. Shit, the iBook would have suited me just fine had it about 200Mhz more. And that's the truth, and that's all I have. Fuck Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. I make my decisions based on my needs, not my image, and people who criticize me for using a better computer well, fuck you too.
PC represents rough and tumble, for the person who loves freedom and flexibility and is willing to compromise on fit and polish to get there. Linux is taking that to an even more extreme end. Mac represents surrendering your freedom to someone who has better taste than you. The thought of that gets my nose out of joint. Be that as it may, there's not that many places where I think Apple made seriously wrong calls on design and UI, and this is coming from a PC guy. I still think iTunes is sent to us from the dev.null and don't understand how people think it's intuitive or easy -- I find it annoying.
I think for most users, Apple truly represents less headache. Sure, there's very slick marketing but that job is made easier by having a product that people really, really like.
I do think what we see in Apple right now is the result of enlightened tyranny, someone you may not like but find difficulty arguing with because he's usually right. The question remains what will happen once he's gone -- will it turn into an arbitrary tyranny or will the power structure balkanize? That's the stage they were at when Jobs came back, the engineers were as smart then as they are now, it's just that they couldn't get anything done because management had formed into a circular firing squad. Nobody had the authority to crack heads and tell them to stop shooting.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
who would buy one?
Do any of you have a reasonably modern car? It's been a while since you were able to do much servicing to them yourself, everything is just computers and sealed systems these days.
But people tend to buy them anyway.
As for price and all that, the difference between a Mac and an equivalent PC is not much, especially given things like magsafe power connectors, the body build etc. of a MacBook. Complaining that Apple have no computers in the low end market is like complaining that BMW does not make any cars in the Fiat 500 segment.
I bought a mac initially because I didn't want to support MS any longer, and buying more iterations of their OS and products is supporting them, by definition. They're a force for stagnation - stagnation just allows them to continue printing money basically, they have no incentive to take risks or rethink an OS and a set of office applications that has long ago made most of them rich. They have no real motivation to make anything better. Noone over there even cares that I'm not having any luck finding printer drivers or unlocking software from some "virtual locker" I bought from them six months back. Apple has really gone out of their way to make things work in their OS, to make things work better, to experiment with new form factors for devices, with new UIs etc. Take a look at the blase, apathetic way Steve Ballmer presented his me-too tablet device at CES, and compare that with what Steve Jobs will be doing wednesday afternoon. One of them really believes, and is excited that, technology can be transformative and can make society better, the other can barely enunciate what he is up there doing. So why does this qualify me a being some kind of shallow hipster, exactly?
blog
The TFA misses the point by miles. It's a false dichotomy.
All these "free-thinkers", artists, musicians creative professionals, etc, are trying to get shit done with minimum distractions. They couldn't give two shits if the software was FOSS or written by enslaved monkeys. They are trying to accomplish a project on a deadline or write the music when feeling inspired. The last thing on their mind is the computer.
The article is basically complaining that people who just want a car from A to B are choosing numb, non-sporty Toyota Camry automatics to commute to work. Why oh why won't they choose a little sports car with a shift stick, so they could experience the joy of carving out every corner and onramp with the control of a manual transmission?
Oh yeah, those people just want to get from A to B. It must be a cult!
Essential truths? Sound more like outdated stereotypes.
When the Intel Macbooks came out, I got my boss to buy me one as I supported (as an on-site consultant) a fair number of Macs in addition to Windows (something like a 20-80 split). Anyway, BootCamp was ideal and allowed me to have the best of both worlds. Until it fell apart.
Within 8 months, the Ethernet jack was so loose that only a homebrew drop cable with a little epoxy ridge would hold a connection, the DVD drive stopped working, and the plastic trim around the edges had nearly completely fallen away.
I took it to an Apple store and was told I could leave it with them for a few days and if they found anything wrong, they would order a new motherboard but I was looking at a couple of weeks without my computer.
I ended up getting a Vostro (the cheapest thing I could find). Within six months of owning that, it developed a problem where it was hard to turn on (you needed to pull the battery and only use AC power). I called Dell and had the mainboard replaced, IN MY HOME, within 30 hours. As it happened, the mainboard wasn't the source of the problem -- after the tech replaced it, I still had the issue; the tech called Dell's inside support line, had it diagnosed to the power switch board, and I had that replaced the next day and had no more problems for the next year and a half (I upgraded to a E6500 at that point and returned the laptop to work).
The issue isn't the Dell being less troublefree, the issue is the Apple repair process assuming you're an idiot and not being able/willing to provide Dell's level of service.
You clearly were not paying attention; they dressed in a similar STYLE, but there was wide variation. They WERE free-thinking and individualistic compared to the people who went into work wearing the same color shirts (usually white), ties, hats, shoes, slacks, jackets. Streets of major cities at rush hour at the time were a sea of men dressed the same.
Brown/beige/black/blue/gray jackets and slacks. Brown/Black/Burgundy shoes. Ties back then were probably less varied, and matched the jackets. Hats couldn't have all been the same. I doubt it was a sea of Men in Black, except maybe on a rainy day with trenchcoats.
Apple users embrace the "free-thinking" mantra because that's the image Apple's served up. In short, they were told that using a Mac makes them free-thinking. And no, I'm certain the irony is not lost of those of us who abhor Apple's general policies, which are nothing of the kind.
Apple found themselves, entering the early 1990s, as the lone major computer platform other than Windows, and they had arguably better graphics and a few pretty good music applications, which were struggling to actually function on the PC/Windows until well into the Windows 95 era (UNIX-like OSs didn't do audio well at all... you needed a DSP subsystem, as on the SGIs and the NeXT machines, to do audio at all in the very non-realtimey, who-cares-about-interrupt-latency versions of UNIX/Linux at the time).
So they used this as a sales pitch. The PC equals Windows, it's from IBM, and it's used in business... thus, its only uses are business-related. They weren't selling Macs to computer experts who knew this to be false, and certainly not those of us who actually did the PC work as well, then better than the Mac on media content creation of all sorts. They're selling to users who are fairly clueless about PCs.
Apple always had very good marketing, and both that, and their message, continue today. They were selling a slightly more capable 8-bit machine, back in the early 80s, versus Commodore and Atari machines at 1/5th the price (they had slots... that's the "more capable" part). The Mac came in, with hardware so oversimplified it was actually kind of creepy (the "Ready" pin on the SCSI controller drover /DTACK on the 68000, for any bitheads in the crowd) and cheap, but got huge margins. Today, a Mac is exactly a PC in a fancy case without a battery door... there's nothing different about an Apple PC, and yet they still get 2x-3x the cash. That pays for a ton of brainwashing.
And it's also something like human nature. As some may know, I was a senior hardware designer at Commodore on several high-end models of the Amiga computer. There was a time when the Amiga was the best (only) personal computer for color graphics or video work. Like, the mid-to-late 1980s. Today I do my video stuff on a PC running Windows 7 and Sony Vegas, with 8GB of RAM, a Quad-core CPU, and Terabytes of storage. But I still hear from people talking about how the Amiga IS better (not was, but IS).
When you join an exclusive club, you immediately embrace all the positive memes associated with club membership, and you employ these to justify your decision. This isn't restricted to computers, it's found in Video software (Vegas vs. Avid vs. Premiere vs. FCP, etc), cars (Ford vs. Chevy vs. Dodge), still cameras (Canon vs. Nikon), videocameras (Sony vs. Canon vs. Panasonic vs. JVC), soft drinks (Coke vs. Pepsi... sorry, Rock Star rules here, folks), etc. And sure, the cultier that club's culture becomes, the more the users grab hold of it.
Apple is one of the few remaining exclusive clubs in computing, and they're perhaps the cultiest and most exclusive there is in just about any discipline. Ok, Amiga fans could have given them a run for their money back in the early 1990s, but not since... the Mac hardcores have expended to embrace the iPhone. The iPhone has delivered new converts to the alter of Mac. There's a persistent meme that "Windows is hard", bug ridden, full of viruses, and of course, MacOS is impervious to any and all problems, the only way to do media content in computing, and so simple your cat can use it without reading a manual. Apple works very hard to keep these memes alive, in the general population to an extent, too, not just among the Apple Faithful.
Another factor, among those in a successful cult, is that they reinforce one another and don't pay much attention to the outside world. You can stay blissfully within your world of Apple -- magazines, web sites, etc. and never hear more than frightening stories about the world outside. This is also something that Apple cultivates...they were among t
-Dave Haynie
As an IT professional, I own an Apple laptop because it is the only tool that lets me support my Windows, Mac, and Unix clients on 1 platform (Mac OS and BSD you get by default, and I run XP, Vista, and 7 on it via virtualization...) on one computer. To not have to bother with performance robbing anti virus/spyware/worm/trojan software, and daily security updates from Microsoft on the primary OS is also a bonus.
What I love are the comment-wars this type of paragraph invariably generates. Adherence to certain brands of technology, mac vs. pc., iphone vs. blackberry, are the closest things to religion we seem to have in today's "advanced" western cultures. These adherents appear to want to start the new religious wars of our times.
People love to be told they are smarter, hipper, sexier, and ironically more independent thinkers than other people. Sothey gladly fork over big wads of cash to this man who has raised selling sizzle from beyond an art form into damn near a religion.
>>> It takes several hours of tweaking a *nix box to undo these stupidities and get it back to a proper Unix-style desktop as were common in the 1990s...
KDE started 1996 and was barely usable 3 years later. Gnome was not available in the 90s.
The Unix/Linux graphic environment in the 90s was xterm with a windows manager. There was indeed one and only one desktop environment called CDE. It cost thousands and was just a pile.
You are sucking it straight from your rear, dear...
Is anyone really confused about the difference between closed/secret development and closed/proprietary products?
Apple, as a publicly traded company, only has one obligation: to make a profit for shareholders.
It goes beyond "obligation" in a couple of important ways. For one thing, obligation or not, it's quite simply the existential proposition for a publicly traded company, a cold hard reality that Apple had an ample chance to consider a while back, if the analysts of the mid 1990s are to be believed.
But for the other thing, that's where the list of motivations start, not end. Some companies exploit opportunities that don't create a lot of value for everyone involved. Some companies take or make opportunities for unfulfilled needs and wants. Which decision you make may not matter to investors, but particularly since making money isn't an existential question for most company leadership (by the time you get to that level, chances are you make or have made enough money to retire in middle-class comfort within a short period of time), the choice is generally one of values rather than obligation.
I think it's pretty clear that whatever flaws Apple's leadership has, they're not simply in it for the money, they're interested in bringing about a certain product vision. I'm glad we live in a world where people who don't like that product vision have choices (sometimes their vision doesn't align with mine), but the fact is that if Jobs only cared about money, there's probably lots of places he could invest his time and cash where he'd get a better purely financial return.
That means doing things like closing off Darwin for developers
You might mean OS X. Darwin is open source.
Tweet, tweet.
"Yet millions of designers, musicians, and other creative professionals love their Apple products, and the Apple brand is almost synonymous with free-thinking creativity"
Designers? Musicians? most of them are of course creative and thus focused on their creations. To the outside world they may seem to be technologically challenged. Apple provides them with solutions ready to use. The creative types are happy to pay extra premium price to the Apple. We, mere uncreative mortals would go rather for a PC, download a pirated app and save a couple of bucks in the process.
Only fags and jews use apple.
Apple' innovation would be quickly copied by the Open Source cloning community. Apple's use of an Open Source foundation is based on a clone of a closed source UNIX from Bell Labs. And Firefox is a clone of Mozilla which is a clone of ,,, (you get the idea). Telegraphing innovation before it is ready is bad business in a world of cloners.
Apple learned the lesson that killed IBM's PC. Apple tried allowing controlled cloning, but found it to be a bad way to go. IBM fought the cloning of it's PC's BIOS, lost and now is out of the PC market entirely. Allowing clones wasn't a winning idea on the IBM PC side of the world, either.
Don't sweat the high cost of owning Apple's next new thing. The cloners will be there with their copies soon enough. Cheaper and with all the quality and innovation you expect from a knock off Rolex.
Apple's Developer conference releasing information on the upcoming Tiger OS lead off with big banners saying "Redmond start your copy machines". Apple gets how the real world works. They release quality products based on significant innovation into broken markets that have lost their way. Apple's first steps often look naive in retrospect, but they are groundbreaking when the first appear. I can't wait to see what version 2.0 of this thing looks like a year or so from now once they have a chance to make real world adjustments to their innovations.
I would expect to see market baskets of magazines and newspapers on a model similar to Cable TV. Pay one price and get subscriptions to lots of print channels. You've already seen the future look of newspapers in the Harry Potter flicks. And, kids will no longer be breaking their backs lugging hardbound school materials. Apple will be back in schools in a profound way. Homework and quizzes all integrated with the schoolroom. Paid for by cheaper book subscriptions. Killing off the used textbook market completely.
I've asked a few people I know who use a Mac and it's not that the Apple one was a better choice for them, its that they think Apple products are the only ones who can do anything. I've had some tell me that Macs are more exprensive because they use the fastest parts with RAM having the fastest speed rating and you can't get RAM as fast or faster on anything but a Mac, and how Mac CPU's are the fastest with the biggest cache and nothing like these could ever been seen for at least 6 months later on a PC. Had another Mac user watch a homemade video on YouTube.com and pointed out that because it was using a camera and had to cut frames it could only have been done on a Mac since they have some video editing software on them and it was just impossible to do that from Windows. Other tell me the impossible like Macs aren't ever out-dated even after 10 years, no program bugs (was hard to tell the one musician friend of mine when his entire Mac wiped itself of a years worth of work was because of a Snow Leopard bug http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2142272 and no buying another couple hundred dollar attachment isnt a solution to a software glitch), there are no malware on a Mac like trojan (http://www.intego.com/news/ism0901.asp) that just impossible because its a Mac. And they refuse to see any other option, hell one screamed at me when I compared prices and hardware from Alienware and Apple and how the prices were cheaper on the Alienware and they parts were better then the Mac's. Amazing the power of a good marketing campaign. On a side note though, does anyone know if PC from I'm a Mac I'm a PC have any legal meaning or is it just a nod of the hat to those old Our Product vs Brand X? where Brand X has no legal weight and can be made to look bad on purpose? Because while I know they are suggesting and implying Windows, but since they aren't exactly saying Windows then in the eyes of the law I'm pretty sure it's not considered to be Windows, and the rare time they mention that Windows has X problem I've noticed that the Mac is very quiet and never says Macs don't suffer those problems too since that would be false advertising.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
I wouldn't invest in Apple long-term if you paid me to; the day Steve Jobs or Ive retire, get hit by a bus, or just drop dead- Apple stock will crumble because everyone is under the perception (correctly) that they are the driving force.
Two years ago, I would've signed that statement. Today, I'm not so sure anymore. I think (and Steve's speech at Stanford confirms it in my mind) that since that cancer thing, Steve has thought quite a bit about his own mortality and also about what Apple will be without him. And if he didn't, I sure hope the board and shareholders pushed him to.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Yeah, it sucks that I can't get all of my work done on this cheap computer because it is running linux instead of OS X (nevermind all the folks who use Windows - I'm sure nothing of use is ever done with those solitaire machines, since they don't run OS X). But at least I'm not bothered by lots of phone calls, emails, and other communications sent by people bugging me to get a real OS so I can get work done, since my useless phone runs Android rather than being an iphone. And now that I've mentioned iphones, I feel even more need to get one today, since the only network they are available for is so much more reliable and useful than mine, even though I've never had a problem with T-Mobile.
Man, talk about flamebait. How did that even get posted? Must have been done on an iphone or Mac.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Another culture shift at Apple: remember when there were credits? No more. Apple now refuses to recognize to the public the contributions its employees make, except for 2-3 top-level people. Jobs, Ive, etc.
That's because the head-hunters circled like vultures around everyone that appeared in those credits.
Name a company that announces an upcoming product? When you can find one, please find one that isn't vaporware. Apple goes through rigorous work before they even launch the product, having to get the product through the famous Steve filter. Reportedly, this is the umpteenth Apple tablet since at least 2003, and Steve has rejected each one.
Notice, these are rumors, which can't be confirmed. Now, when you're a bunch of engineers working on a new product, you get walled off from the world, like the Mac, like the iMac, etc., and nobody knows anything until the release day. Of course, rumors leak out -- but they're so few that there's a thriving business making them up. Now, how many press releases and ads have you seen about the new launch this Wednesday? Nada. Well, one. "Come see our new creation." Probably a leak or two to the Wall Street Journal. I think.
How would the world be enriched by the next tech object being designed in public? I don't think it would at all. The process of design is boring. The idiotic information leeches would still be gossiping about it all the time, spreading rumors to prove idiot's thesis a or b. It would be a reality show, and you know those are anything but. They're just "don't pay the writers" shows. The design would be the product of political compromise and consensus. Let Obama tell you how well that works.
Openness, meaning the ability of the user to access any information he wants while using his information appliance, sure. Meaning the ability to compile code, to get free software, etc.? Yeah. Meaning the ability to boot other OSes? Sure. Meaning, sitting in on the meetings where Steve criticizes and belittles the bad designs? I don't think anyone would want to be there if they weren't an engineer.
Jobs is a very gifted man, after all. A genius. Look at his track record.
I must have always landed on the "miss" part of the hit-or-miss curve when trying drag and drop on Windows. I was never able to get it to work, so I just assumed it wasn't a feature.
My wife was wrong, Slashdot is not a complete waste of time, I actually learned something new and useful on Slashdot today.
Switzerland is a rich country and, perhaps not surprisingly, it has one of the world's highest percentages of Mac users. Partially, I think it's because the Swiss often really do enjoy flaunting their wealth, but partially it's also because of the word of mouth advertising: Macs have a reputation of having less troubles and being easier to use than Windows, true or not. I admin a 50 plus user company here that is 80% Mac and Macs certainly do give me the impression of needing less admin overhead than Windows. That said, even though I own a Mac Pro myself (I am extremely happy with this computer and plan to get another one when this one eventually dies), I find the Mac snobbishness and the mindless Buy-Whatever-New-Apple-Gadget-Comes-Out mentality tiring.
That is not Window's fault that you can't figure out how to properly use a computer. It's like a guy at work the other day trying to blame Outlook / Exchange because he couldn't figure out how to make an archive properly.
Yes. That's exactly what it's like. Blaming the computer because the computer is hard to use. If you think computers need to be hard to use, then it is YOU with the elitism problem, not Mac users.
The few times my OSX machine crash on me, it self recovers.
Really? When I've had OS X crash on me, it's always been a "the system is so screwed up that you have to hold the power button to turn it off" situation.
Anecdotal evidence cannot invalidate other anecdotal evidence. Quit wasting time.
OSX GETS OUT OF MY WAY, where as Windows and Linux KEEP PROMPTING ME WITH USELESS STUFF!
With Windows at least, you can turn that off. You claim to be a neuroscientist but you can't take 5 seconds to find out how to turn off UAC?
Again, the answer is Yes. And I claim to be an audio engineer, and I can't be bothered to take thirty damned minutes to figure out how to use the proprietary network driver's stilted crap UI to turn on 802.11, enter a WPA key, set my service order, and turn on DHCP. AFTER I've used the built in Windows Network UI to connect to a wireless network and had it mysteriously fail, twice, because the network driver stubbed out Windows' own API for the hardware when it was installed at the OEM.
You know what it takes to join a new wireless network in OS X? ONE SINGLE DAMNED CLICK, on a menu whose icon LOOKS LIKE AN ANTENNA, then a password if necessary. THAT'S IT.
Stuff like this makes a REAL difference. Take your haughty incredulity and shove it up your ass.
If it takes you more than an afternoon to find out what the best system is, you're doing something horribly wrong, and I think you're beyond help if you spend a whole month looking for the best system.
O RLY? As an avid bicyclist, I can tell you, that if it takes you LESS than an afternoon to purchase a new bicycle, then YOU are doing something horribly wrong; because if the decision is that easy for you, you obviously don't know enough about how to properly fit a bicycle.
Be careful with your analogies.
Just a note for everyone else, I use all OS's and they all have ups and downs. I have nothing against OS X, but I find this particular persons reasons for using Mac's to be pretty bogus.
What constitutes "use" to you? Did you install 10.5 on a hackintosh for an afternoon and diddle around in TextEdit, before declaring yourself an expert on all things OS X?
Did you know that in bash, the default shell for OS X, you can hit "ctrl-A" to move to the beginning of a long command line?
Did you know that EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THE OS X UI, even including text boxes in Safari, you can hit "ctrl-A" for the exact same behavior?
No, you didn't.
As I said before, stuff like this makes a real difference.
4). They advertise a lot.
Respect the Constitution
Except of course for gcc, gdb, most all of the other system internals in OS X, bash, zip, tar, ssh, wireless utilities, the objective C tooling.... I could ramble on and on without end..
Without open source Mac OS X as it is simply wouldn't exist.
You do realize that it was originally mostly open source when it was NeXTStep (re: openStep) right?
And that underneath it all at the lowest levels, its mostly a 'second cousin' of BSD?
Have you been suntanning in job's reality distortion field again?
Just because YOU don't know what or where the open source stuff is, doesn't mean it isn't there and wasn't needed to create the things you use.
> How can a company whose philosophy of information sharing is so at odds with that of most of its customers be so successful?
Well, because not every computer user is a computer geek. Some think of computers as an appliance to get a particular job done, and don't want to know what goes on inside any more than they want to know how their television works.
I'm not a particular fan of Apple, but this should be self-evident, at least to non-geeks. Apple sells appliances (at a substantial markup) to get creative stuff done, just as one buys an easel to paint or a Maytag to wash clothes. If the creative stuff you want to do is to build a washing machine from scratch or gut one and upgrade it, then you're probably not going to appreciate this.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Inherent in these kinds of stupid arguments against the Mac is the false idea that the PC, whether it's running Windows or Linux, is technically equivalent to the Mac for creative people. It is not. Even if Linux is "more free", we cannot use it. Richard Stallman is on The Setup right now rocking a 9-inch Yeelong that is not at all suitable for music or video production. I respect what he has done for computer science, but he doesn't make audio tools.
All you have to do to setup a music studio on a Mac is run a few installers and plug some gear together. It takes less than a half hour to be up and running making music. Virtual instruments and effects plug into the system, digital audio workstations plug into the system, audio and MIDI hardware plugs into the system, and the system manages it all. The Mac knows all the music gear and just recognizes it when you plug it in. I often run 2 full digital audio workstations and 2 separate audio interfaces and they all just work together seamlessly, including working with all of my virtual instruments and effects, including working at very high sample rates and with perfect timing. There is no other platform that offers anything like this.
For years I worked at a studio complex with dozens of studios. Most of the studios had Macs in them, but some had PC's in them. There was an I-T consultant who worked with the PC guys, and they paid him well, and they were still always having problems. The Mac users just made music.
So you can whine on about software freedom or whatever philosophy you hew to, but it doesn't impress me compared to the freedom to make music, the freedom from technical problems and technical hurdles, the freedom to participate in digital art without having to take a computer science degree. If you can make a better system for music and video producers, then make it, or STFU already. Pretending like you are offering an equivalent technical system that is somehow more free is disingenuous. You are not. Windows and Linux can barely do consumer audio.
Me, I actually can code, but I spend my time coding HTML5 to share my work, I spend my time coding AppleScript to create reusable creative workflows with various Mac apps passing grunt work around between them so I don't have to do anything but actually create new stuff. But the idea that a musician should have to learn to code to make music is outrageously offensive. What if you couldn't do computer science if you didn't play a musical instrument? It's offensive.
There's just nothing worse than a nerd pushing their tech on you like a cat offering a mouse. If you think a Mac and a PC are the same at all, then you don't understand the Mac. It's not at all the same. The PC and Mac are not technically equivalent. The only thing they have in common is they are both computers. So is a car and a PC these days, they are both computers. Would you like it if I told you to do your coding on a fucking Ford dashboard, because then you'll have the "freedom to travel" while you code? It makes no sense.
What's worse is to hear this from open source advocates who know full well that the core operating system of the Mac is open source. The "open source Mac" is the Mac. The parts that need to be open source are open source. The Mac talks to the Internet like BSD, it is a great network citizen. It does not create botnets, it does not infringe on the freedom of Linux users to have a virus-free Internet. You coming down my pipe and telling me what I should run is bullshit. I have absolutely no interest in telling you not to use Linux. But I also have absolutely no interest in pretending Linux is suitable for music production.
Finally, what's ignored in this article is that the Mac is ridiculously standardized. Apple WebKit is HTML5 and 100/100 on Acid3, ISO MPEG-4 is standardized QuickTime, even though Apple could have pushed proprietary QuickTime down our throats with iTunes Store. The Mac is a full Unix, including Apache2, PHP, Python, Perl, and much more. USB, Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, Displ
or 4) APPLE IS NOT OPEN, THE WHOLE OPENNESS THING BEING ADVERTISING BULLSHIT AND A COMPLETE LIE. They are in practice far worse the MS or Sony, with proprietary formats and built in obsolescence. Pricing their good to rip off families around the US.
I love Apple too. If I could afford a MacBook and get that fanless bottom, LED screen, and sexy (though a bit tired and toyish) look cool in Airports, I would do it. But, I wish I could get one without the MacOS tax. I would rebuild it with Ubuntu, so having to buy MacOS is a drag.
with new regime (like Apple now) or regime changes: at the beginning, you get very good guys (like Jobs obviously is). THen after a while, fast or slow, it starts to deteriorate, because of hubris, lack of motivation, greed, changing circumstances that make yesterday's good strategy bad...
Apple are bringing 2 things to consumer electronics:
- sexy design (put a Macbook next to a Dell... you've got the point)
- ease of use (try and use an iPhone, then a WinMob phone)
- plus an understanding that computing is no longer the preserve of Knowledge Workers, but their kids, parents, and other relatives... which is funny because they coined the phrase.
They are NOT bringing
- features (Apple stuff doesn't do anything you can't do with windows. it only requires a lot less tinkering)
- performance (same hardware, no faster OS)
- quality (really, it's not better or worse than similarly-price wintel stuff... better than el-cheapo stuff, of course)
- openness (they manage to be even worse than MS)
The issue is, it's very dependent on design, especially since Apple never creates a market, they barge in as late comers, to take advantage that early suppliers couldn't design nor market their way out of a 2-inch puddle. When someone else finally wakes up to the importance of design and ease of use, things will get hairy. Hopefully they'll have enough people locked in to iTunes and AppStore by then.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
and legions of apple fans are posting their incessant apple fan posts in open source forums like phpbb, sites like postnuke, running on apache webservers and mysql databases working on linux operating systems all around the net. doing all the promotion with their incessant rambling and linking that apple couldnt do if it spent tens of times of its all existing capital ....
yea definitely os didnt provide anything useful ...
Read radical news here
Consider "Think Different.".
Does anything seem wrong about that sentence? I'm referring to "wrong" in the grammatical sense, not the glaring, unintentional irony created by a horde of devout fanatics clinging mindlessly to a slogan, a saint, and anything shiny.
If you were educated in the English language during or after the 1980s, you may not notice it.
Consider the following sentences:
"Emily sings lovely."
"Sarah is acting foolish."
"Your dog smells funny."
The first sentence should be "Emily sings lovelily", the second should be "Sarah is acting foolishly", and the third is correct. If, however, we are talking about a precocious canine who had an odd habit of sniffing things in a humorous manner, then the third sentence should be "Your dog smells funnily.".
Going back to the original example, it becomes immediately clear that "Think Different" should in fact be "Think Differently".
The death of the adverb is not a simple "evolution of language" as some often say. People are actively out to destroy the English language. These are the people who consider it acceptable to say "I could care less" when expressing disdain for something. These are the people who think inflammable means non-flammable. These are the people who think that "irregardless" is a word. These are the people who think "literally" means "figuratively".
To these defilers of language I say "NO MORE!". I will continue to use adverbs when appropriate. I will not cede to an incorrect tool that underlines my "errors" in a glaring red; I will wear that underline as a badge of honor. I will not capitulate to an auto-correct suggestion for a simple search query. I will refer to a pre-1980, physical, unabridged dictionary for reference. The active deletion of adverbs from online and physically published dictionaries will not affect me.
The fact that our nation's public schools actively fought against teaching proper grammar and spelling (and continue to do so) is a travesty. I fear that they have irrevocably damaged the language.
Now, really. People don't care about Apple, but they try to get that out really loud and would like to discuss it. Hmm.
The thing about Apple is that they do something that is almost unheard of in recent computer time: They think. Whatever you like or hate about Apple and Steve Jobs, but they always had a way of re-thinking things everyone takes for granted that is just appealing to people. Call it "vision", call it "a mission", but they just put the PC industry to shame. Because all this industry does is nothing than "do whatever all others do and try to do it cheaper". There is no fun in that.
It's not so much that there's something special about Apple but there's something very much unspecial about the IT industry. Computers have become boring. Really. It's 2010 and we STILL USE PCs! Even the most recent netbook and "Tablet-PC" is still a faster, smaller, cheaper IBM PC. Still a "general purpose computing device". People are sick of that. They want a tiny, shiny piece of the future and not just a 20th century office machine with a painted lid.
And I can't blame them.
Only on slashdot can a reply to a comment on a thread I started get marked redundant.
Dear moderator: I am the OP! I am the person the Parent was responding too. Should I not respond because someone posted the similar thoughts?
Yet millions of designers, musicians, and other creative professionals love their Apple products,
Look - the guy fixing your jet motor cares about his tools and he buys the best he can, because they enable him to get his job done quickly, with pleasure, and a minimum of fuss. He doesn't care about the company that produced them, much, as long as the tools are the right ones for the job.
Likewise millions of designers, musicians, and IT guys. A Mac is a means to an end, not the end. It's just a tool.
Display some adaptability.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
The Unix/Linux graphic environment in the 90s was xterm with a windows manager. There was indeed one and only one desktop environment called CDE. It cost thousands and was just a pile.
Sorry, my little ignorant AC, but it's clear you weren't actually there. The Unix graphic environments in the early 1990s were powerful and diverse, and included Motif, NextStep, OpenWindows, DecWindows, and IRIX. FVWM was the free version that got the most play, but proved early on that free software tends toward mediocrity: FVWM-95 marked the beginning of the end, with its Windows 95 emulation and adoption by RedHat as the standard Linux desktop.
I've heard of plenty of professional photographers who'd very much rather use a small, lightweight camera system that produces high-quality results. The problems they have are two:
I guess the analogy here is that some people would very much rather have a Macbook Air than a Macbook Pro. (Or the time when I traded my work-issued MBP 17" for a 15" model, because I just felt that the 17" was too big and heavy.)
Not really true in the case of top-end DSLRs. An $6,000-$8,000 Canon 1D or Nikon D3 doesn't really have much more functionality than a $2,500-$3,000 Canon 5D or Nikon D700. They're mostly just a hell of a lot more rugged, and have longer battery life.
Are you adequate?
I don't know why it's become an accepted truism that Apple wanted to keep 3rd party developers off the iPhone. There is just no way that the SDK, iTunes, the App Store, and all that infrastructure weren't planned way, way in advance of them becoming available to the public.
The fact that weblets were being pushed as an alternative just indicates that the 3rd party developer story wasn't ready to go when the iPhone itself was.
Essential truths?
Err...yah. I was sort of making fun of the people who don't get beyond the marketing hype. Maybe HTML6 will have sarcasm tags?
Frankly, no. The company is just very often secretive for no good reason. The unreleased products part isn't as clear-cut as you make it, because (a) Apple makes many products where the developer community could definitely benefit from a lot more information before the release, and (b) Apple does share such information with hand-picked outside developers before a release (folks from the companies that they bring into their announcement events, to advertise games under development for the iPhone and such).
Granted, the unreleased product examples aren't the best ones, because they're examples where you can easily argue either way. But there are other examples where Apple is excessively secretive about existing products for no good reason that I can discern. Here are two that I've personally encountered:
Are you adequate?
Thanks man, that was a great post.
"Blah blah blah." - [citation needed]
Which is entirely irrelevant. I'm an "IT Professional and programmer" and I carry a Thinkpad.
"Think pad"? Are you a bloody girl? Hahaha!!!
(This is solely in reference to all the "Mac's iPad" postings all over the net when the name "iPad" was suggested for the Apple tablet. Sorry for that, I just couldn't resist.)
Indeed, this essay misses the most obvious answer: that it simply isn't true. Let's take a look:
millions of designers, musicians, and other creative professionals love their Apple products
True, like many companies, they've sold millions of products and these people love their products.
Although less clear is whether there are millions that fall into the category of "creative profession".
Apple brand is almost synonymous with free-thinking creativity
Not at all true. Where did they pluck this nonsense from? And if they immediately notice the contradiction, then surely this is a proof-by-contradiction that the claim isn't true in the first place. But instead, they blindly assume it to be true, and then make up all sorts of assertions to try to explain it away.
It's like the Apple version of the Problem of Evil.
It's also misleading to compare only to open source. Most commercial companies don't try to milk the media with rumours whilst maintaining secrecy - and hence are more open. And most closed source platforms including Windows are more open, in that the company doesn't get to choose what I run on my own damn hardware. Remember the fuss on Slashdot about Vista and DRM? Yet with Apple, Slashdot posters lap the Iphone right up!
For a long time, Apple made the only computers that you could do art on; the Mac was graphic when DOS was text-only.
When was that "long time" exactly?
Unfortunately it seems common of Apple fans to rewrite history as if Mac and DOS were the only platforms around. Just as these days we have people thinking the only mobile phones in the market are the Iphone and Android...
Did you have fun doing art on a two colour Mac? Given that that was the OP's criterion for dismissing DOS, it's a bit unreasonable to then refer to a black and white computer.
And since when was a whole four months "a long time", as the OP asserted?
Macintosh didn't get colour until 1987 - that's a long long long long long time after many systems available in 1985.
Apple actually sued Digital Research (and won) because it was such a blatant copy of the Mac's interface.
Which shows Apple for their true colours. Why innovate, when you can just sue the competition? And they don't even play by their own rules (e.g., their recent use of Nokia patents without permission).
OSS projects = lots of developers who each concentrate on small pieces of the system but often a lack a coherent direction of the overall system. Result: a pile of crap made of golden bricks. Examples: most Linux distributions with lots of very high quality components (GNU tools, gcc, vim, emacs, the kernel) but a lack of direction in the user experience (compare gnome/kde to os x or even windows).
Many closed source projects = strong direction from the top to go in a certain direction, but a lack of focus on the components. Result: a decent system with some crappy components. Examples: Windows generally has good/coherent overall usability, but lacks quality in some components (IE, office, any command line tool you try).
OS X = the best of both worlds. Based on high-quality OSS components (BSD, GNU, Mach), but has the coherent direction of closed source resulting in a user experience nobody else can touch.
I cant make the association between free thinking and Apple.
Everyone I know who bought Apple did so because of the marketing, the artist "says" it is better but is completely unable to quantify it beyond "but everyone says Mac is better". Most Mac do not understand computers particularly well, thus they turn to an OS that limits what they can do. We call Apple a cult for a reason. I really cant see Mac users being "free thinking" about tech, especially as one of Mac's biggest selling points is that it Just Works(TM) meaning that you arent meant to think about using your computer..
I know a few designers having done tech support for a Marketing company before (so glad I'm out of that gig now) and the most talented designers can do everything they can do on a Mac in Windows, unfortunately the reverse isn't true due to the limitations of the Mac OS, it's not hacker friendly and was never meant to be.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Openess is a fine thing, but let's not forget the tyrany of the mob. No Open Source project is a free-for-all. Apple was never billed as a open source company. Never. Darwin had as much to do with OSX as a stripped down car does with it's fully outfitted luxury brother.
Apple's modus operandi is providing tools and a platform that allows createive and not-so-creative types to perform tasks that 90% of users want to accomplish. Apple made the P.C. into a toaster. A very nice toaster. If you want total control of the OS, I recommend the Linux-From-Scratch project.
Ubuntu would probably not satisfy the true *nix/mage anyway.
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
The problem with your argument is that Motif was explicitly designed to have Windows-like UI conventions --- it's right in the manual and everything..
I think one could make a strong argument for the benefits of conformity in the early GUI market. But the real reasoning was probably an informal corporate alliance of MS and workstation manufacturers against Apple, who was suing every other GUI maker in sight.
You're right about FVWM95 being ass, but at the same time the *nix world really didn't have much of an independent GUI tradition.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Apple used to leak like a sieve. We employees used to read MacWeek to find out what the agenda for new projects were. There's a reason you can date PC laptops within six months of the release of Apple ones and I think we can guess why that is.
The engine of Apple's economic success is innovation. Unfortunately, there are companies sitting on pins-and-needles waiting for that next idea so it can be copied and capitalized upon. Secrecy maximizes Apple's advantage when their products come to market. That's not an opinion; it's an observable phenomenon--Stock Price Pre-Jobs vs. Stock-Price Post-Jobs.
And part of that success is keeping their mouth's shut until it's time.
BECAUSE it is closed, there is not as much complication to have to figure out.
I'm not sure whether you're talking about the source code or the platform; but certainly windows is closed source, and you point to complications there.
In some sense Linux is a closed platform: most people stick to what's in the repositories, no third party applications. And you point to complications there too.
So exactly in which sense does being closed imply lack of complications?
I'm not saying you're denying complications on OS X, or exaggerating those on Windows and Linux, or being biased in your reporting. I'm just asking for clarification, and questioning the causal relationship between being closed and not having complications.
See, I would think that the lack of complications on OS X comes from being restricted to a limited set of hardware (so there are virtually no driver issues), combined with a strong user-centric top-down design, usability having a high priority, and good quality assurance.
If you think differently, would you please explain why?
Yes, because Windows is such an open, user accessible, DRM-free OS from an open, user accessible, DRM-free software company.
Everyone I know who bought Toyota, BMW, or Mercedes did so because of the marketing, not because those products are of dramatically better quality than GM or Chrysler.
And I know that in order to drive my car, I need to be constantly thinking about internal combustion mechanics or I will run off of the road.
For the sake of your former Mac-using designer clients, I'm also glad you're out of that gig now. And, yeah, it's a shame that the UNIX based OS X operating system is so much less versatile and secure than Windows 7. I mean, all it's really good for is developing iPhone apps, and everyone knows what a dead end that path is. Better to stick with Windows and Windows Mobile.
Ask Me About... The 80's!
Unfortunately, many mac user in my experience as accurately described as smug assholes wrt to computers. I've been guilty of creating quite a few of them by recommending Macs to friends and relatives over the years when asked advice about purchasing a computer.
It is ironic and annoying to have someone ask my advice about computers, take that advice, be very happy, and then later proceed to tell me how terrible my choice of computer (Linux) is and how much happier I'd be with a Mac. I've never met a mac user who could be convinced that I actually *prefer* Linux to a mac. They simply think I just don't know any better or am being willfully ignorant. At the very least, they think I should buy a mac just for the hardware.
I've always found it interesting that people present the artificial *restriction* of OSX to only Apple hardware is actually a benefit. Apple provides more choice! The makers of other hardware get dinged for a decision made by Apple. Amazing.
Apple is a "Master's Workshop" set up in the spirit of some of the world's great architectural firms. There is a visionary who leads and provides the Passion that allows others in their roles to feel like they're doing the Lord's work. There are very capable lieutenants, but the vision of the master rules the day. The master knows he's beholden to the effort of his lieutenants, and makes sure they are motivated by the Passion and well-compensated for their effort.
Great things aren't made by committee, at least not in the crowdsourced sense. When you make your money providing a consistently great user experience, more is not better. Again, this goes back to the "Master's Workshop" structure. Great architecture is not made via the blended vision of 25 individuals; it was one person's vision, well-executed by a team of 25.
The reason for the one voice is also strategic. Fewer leaks = more hype. You'll notice the clamor for the Apple Tablet started over a year ago, and none of it came from Apple. It still doesn't, and we're a day from the likely announcement of the device. Unlike some companies who announce products with world-altering features and nebulous shipping dates, Apple doesn't announce until the vision of the product is perfect - and only then on their terms.
So people can whine about Apple's closed nature if they want. The company's restricted access and the use of Apple's products by creative, free-thinking individuals have nothing to do with each other. This is perhaps ironic in only the most cursory definition of the word. In order for them to create the products they want to create, on their schedule, this level of control is not just desirable, it's essential. Great products are visions, not zoo exhibits, regardless of how butthurt the people who don't have access to the vision feel about their roles outside the process.
Mac OSX - Really? ...REALLY? It is crap compared to Ubuntu...
As much as I loved my macbook, it couldn't do basic tasks I need to do as an information security professional.
No promiscuous mode. Tools like wireshark, aircrack, fakeap, etc all didn't work properly due to issues with closed source wireless drivers.
There were two things keeping me on OSX for a while: iTunes and Photoshop.
Well, CS3 now runs in Wine, which left iTunes. I used to like iTunes as a music player, but lately I only keep it around to sync my iPod - songbird has gotten quite mature.
I after years of having utter disdain for "smartphones" I caved in and bought an iPhone. Initially I loved it, but little things like the inability to say, listen to last.fm in the background while tooling around in iCal really is starting to grate on me. I already do most of my day to day college work on a netbook, and when I graduate and can afford a new laptop and my phone contract ends, I will probably be sporting a Thinkpad and some sort of android phone.
Apple's hardware turns out to be more 'open' than the company intended -- Jobs originally wanted to keep third-party apps off the iPhone, for example.
This is a poor example. It has been Apple's policy forever to not acknowledge their intent before they are ready to present it. While Jobs scorned people for suggesting video iPod, he's been working on iPod and deals with movie companies. While he pushed Safari as the "iPhone platform", his team has been working on the iPhone SDK and documentation. While Jobs openly mocked the Kindle, he's already been working on the Apple tablet for over an year.
If one can't see past these basics of marketing at Apple, I wonder why would I trust the rest of the analysis in this article :P
...from you, Dr. Phil.
Apple users embrace the "free-thinking" mantra because that's the image Apple's served up.'
Or because Apple made an effort to get into media editing back in the 80's and 90's? Or because they put a lot of work into photo, video and music editing apps that they bundle with their computer? Or because Apple embraces open source networking standards with a UNIX operating system?
Nah, it must just be the marketing.
Just because you're too stupid to use Google doesn't mean they don't exist. Hell, Macintouch has been around since the Paleozoic age of the internet, 1994.
single-button mouse?
Any complaints that aren't six years out of date?
like having the apple key (core to most actions) only on the left side of the keyboard
WTF are you talking about. Both the Macbook Air (smallest laptop) and their minimized wireless keyboard have the command key on both sides of the spacebar.
Apple's no-competition-when-playing-in-our-house philosophy (message: Apple, your iPhone email app sucks big time; no marking 'all read', no 'send only' accounts, no .... you get the idea)
So use Google's. Or Yahoo's. Or pull your head out....
The intellectual vacuum that exists in fanboyism causes the same sort of negative progress in the Mac arena as the self-entitlement that Windows brought to its own products. If you can't question God, how can you evolve?
Damn your palms must be hairy after that rhetorical masturbation. Could be dangerous with all that projecting you're doing....