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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."
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.
From the summary:
the Apple brand is almost synonymous with free-thinking creativity.
I think what the article was trying to say is that it's as close to 'free-thinking' as one can get when describing a company or product line. You are painfully correct in that this is a ridiculous use of words but if you think back to Apple's marketing past and present, I think you'd agree that the company sought to enter the market by appealing to people who need something to feel different. And they did and that's why it's 'almost synonymous' and not equivalent. I almost appreciate the fact that they use 'free-thinking' because that title is almost always self appointed ... whether it be to imply that everyone else is 'jailed' but you or the simple fact that no one but yourself can truly know what you are thinking so to describe how you think, only you are the de facto expert.
The funny thing is that every music studio (of five) that I've been in hinge on Mac hardware and Mac software. It's hilariously uniform. Sometimes they even have the same model of Mac with the same (ProTools) hardware and software setup. The 'free-thinking' and creativity comes from what the people do with it and not the fact that they are going against the grain in a hardware and software manner.
My work here is dung.
If *only* there were a freely available OS to us on phones that wasn't from Apple - hmmm
Most of Apple's iPhone and desktop OS is FOSS anyway: the Mach kernel, BSD libraries, the gcc compiler and runtime, and tons more.
I took some art courses working on an undergrad Fine Arts program at 2 different colleges and I didn't see an unusually high number of gay students. I honestly don't know what you're talking about. I suspect you're peddling bullshit stereotypes you picked up from watching some lousy TV sitcoms.
Camping on quad since 1996.
Translation, status symbol.
Maybe yes and maybe no. I'm a university professor and the increase in Apple logos I'm seeing facing me in class is going through the roof. I think it's over half in most classes now.
I've seen group projects get screwed up because although the Mac, which is the underdog, has had to learn to be super-compatible with everything else, the same can't be said of Windows. So you may be hearing the result of the network effects of everyone having Macs and her use of a different OS being a stumbling block to working together easily. I most certainly have seen that.
Don't chalk everything up to marketing. I switched to the Mac about 2 years ago, after 10 years of dismissing it as a pain in the ass. But since they've been on Intel, the amount of stuff you can do (easily) on them has really gone up. You can boot damn near any OS, and there is phenomenal virtual machine software so you don't even need to. Yes, this is only because Apple won't support their OS being used on off-the-shelf hardware, but I think a lot of people are just making the pragmatic decision that they don't really care.
I'm not saying you should buy the girl another new computer--we're all pretty susceptible to trends when we're freshmen in college and trying desperately to fit in--but that there might be more to it.
They obviously never visited this page.
I have some better reasons than that to prefer a MacBook:
Just being prettier is pretty secondary to all of those.
I take it you've never used a macbook. The trackpad is unlike pretty much any trackpad out there. It is a HUGE glass capacitive touch trackpad that has some very very nice gestures built in. Just touching two fingers to it and scrolling up/down/sideways is so nice. Quickly fling all apps out of the way to see the desktop with a 4-finger swipe upwards. Spread all the apps on the current desktop apart with expose with 4-fingers down.
Browsing is nice too with 3-finger swipes sideways to go back and forth in the web history.
You can pinch zoom in pictures, or just put two fingers down and rotate them.
Also, no area is wasted for buttons, the whole pad presses down with a good tactile click.
I've hated trackpads for a long time, but upon using this one, after learning all the gestures etc I could never go back to a nipple(what I had before) or god forbid the old style resistive single touch tiny trackpads of other laptops.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Luckily though, we were discussing MacBook Pros, not MacBooks. MacBook Pros do have IPS screens.
Yep, every single thing costs money.
And there's absolutely no compatibility with any linux software at all.
You're 100% correct.
Wrong. Artistic people generally care a lot about technicalities, and guess what? Apple has exemplary colour management (not necessarily correct colours out of the box), which Linux just doesn't have. It's got a lot of fairly decent audio software that works well on Apple's limited range of laptops. Buying Windows is more of a risk (some times it works, some times it doesn't), and Linux is great if you have the time and knowledge to tailor-make your system to your needs. Some artists actually do that, most don't.
Oh, and the Mac is something of a standard for graphical work. Some people feel it's easier to collaborate with others when they use the same system, just like some people think using Microsoft Office is absolutely necessary in the real world. It isn't, but it can save you from a lot of problems.
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!
I think it's funny. I bought a Mac Powerbook 5 years ago because it met the needs for what I wanted. It was lighter than anything comparable and did what i needed it for. I quickly grew to like it a lot. The main reason at the time? Sleep/hibernate actually worked reliably. That was it.
I then experimented with some other features included with the OS such as photos and videos. I then noticed I spent no time dealing with the OS or application bizarreness, and realized I was starting to use it for everything I normally do in my personal life. I bought a MacBook Pro as it was comparable in price when spec'd out against a comparable Dell or Compaq. (Yes, it really was in fact $200 less for the same basic hardware - CPU/Hard Drive/RAM/Video/Screen Resolution)
I then decided to look at how it would work out with development, and within a couple of days realized that it was far superior, primarily because of the reliability and speed. I'd reboot maybe once every 2-3 months, a darn sight better than my work windows machine, which I then replaced with Linux. The main issue with the linux box I found is I had to spend too much time dealing with OS/application issues. And thus the promotion of the MBP to my full work/development machine. I now spend 99% of my time dealing with what I need to spend time on vs dealing with OS/App issues or rebooting. (Bringing up an entire system that runs 4GB plus across multiple components takes a significant portion of your time if you have to reboot once a day a more often, which I found was the case with Windows.)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.