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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."
Further the notion that "the Apple brand is almost synonymous with free-thinking creativity" is about a decade out of date.
I spend most of my days in various professional recording studios video production houses and you see a lot fewer Macs than you used to.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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
I spend most of my days in various professional recording studios video production houses and you see a lot fewer Macs than you used to.
Funny, all the IT professionals and programmers I meet seem to be using MacBooks these days.
- These characters were randomly selected.
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)
the response i get when i say i would favor thinkpads over macbooks, is that the thinkpads have boring design.
at that point i start to wonder how much of the macbook craze is about sitting at some "starbucks" with a macbook on the table, looking like a up and coming artist working on the next bestseller book or song...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Actually, there is some correlation between creativity and homosexuality; you'll find a larger percentage of gays in art school than studying any other discipline.
I don't remember that many gays (some, but not that many), but there were a lot of left-handers... And crazy art chicks. THAT was memorable.
If you want to take a dip in the gay pool, it's the theater you'll want to visit, rather than the art gallery.
You can't take the sky from me...
The lack of Intel processors the first half of last decade went a long way towards that. Programs like Lightwave and Maya began optimizing their rendering engines for x86. By 2005 there was a stark difference rendering times on PPC and Intel machines with Intel beating the crap out of the PPC. Plus some of the larger shops began supporting Maya on Linux. Especially for their render farms.
That being said, I dealt with those on the small to medium side of the house almost all went Mac primarily for the software. I know a of shops that used dedicated NLA devices for editing in the 1990's and then went to Final Cut Pro. I know many more who switched from Premiere on the PC to FCP on mac because Premiere 6 was highly unstable on a lot of Windows boxes compared to FCP 3. Then Apple acquired Shake and made sure that Shake + a PowerMac/MacPro cost the same as Shake for Linux. And then dropped the price to $500 for OSX three months after I paid $3k for the software....
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
i keep wondering what jobs would have been doing now if he never had known woz, and talked him into selling his computer design fully assembled.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
The exact same thing can be said for Linux fans, Windows fans, or any other clique.
I heard something this morning about the "hidden brain" on NPR's Morning Edition, and the author was explaining how the choices we make may not entirely come from our "rational" conscious mind. I know I'm butchering this up so go find a podcast, but your "hidden brain" is rather dumb and makes its choices by what is sees as prevalent in the environment around them.
So this could be:
"I like Windows - because everybody around me uses windows." or
"I think Apple Users are gay, because I observe that 1) the "creative artists" in popular culture appear to be gay, and 2) I see Apple is creative with their designs therefore they must be gay too." or
"I like Apple because I observe a lot of Windows machines crash and have viruses" or
"I like linux because I observe a lot of nerds uses it and I want to be a nerd too."
Anyway, it's just a theory...
I like Apples myself and I'm not gay and I don't think all my scientist colleagues which use Macs are either... not that there is anything wrong with being gay (Sienfield Reference).
Use what you are happy with, everything else is an illusion.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
That depends on the "you" doing the buying. My daughter is in college, and although she doesn't like to admit it, she wanted her MacBook because of its coolness factor, not just what it can do. That, and she hates Windows. With that being said, it does suit her needs nicely.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
You don't buy a computer because of its culture, you buy it because it serves you purposes better than other brands. For a long time, Apple made the only computers that you could do art on; the Mac was graphic when DOS was text-only.
I'd say it's more because if you're an artistic person, you don't want to fuck around with the technicals that don't relate with what you do. You want to buy a computer that works to your specifications out of the box, because that's more time for artsy stuff. Macs fit that bill pretty well, so of course it's a good thing for the 'technical' side (Apple engineering) to be as closed as possible, letting the artists who use the product actually use it, rather than customizing or working out compatibility issues.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
I just got done hearing a report from a young guy who suffered amnesia in India. He was a Fullbright scholar studying for a year, but when he came to, he had no idea where he was or what he was doing, or even who he was. He got taken into drug rehab because people thought he was a heroin user. He bought into this storyline because he had absolutely no basis for challenging it. He finally called his parents and started apologizing profusely for being a bad son. "We just talked to you on Tuesday".
:)
He said that the only clues he had as to who he was were how other people treated him, so he totally went with it. There seems to be a mental need to conform to your surroundings and other people's expectations of you.
I think this was the last story on This American Life. Yay for NPR!
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Sturdier - since a) apple introduced their unibody aluminium cases and b) lenovo started making IBM's designs into utter crud
That's at least partially true -- Apple's notebooks are quite solidly constructed. However, I never had an IBM-era ThinkPad fail on me, including the one I toted around for ten years for notetaking and word processing long after I'd replaced it with a more recent model for work. As far as I can tell so far, most of the new Lenovo ThinkPads are also pretty good, though there are occasionally exceptions, which is true of all manufacturers.
An excellent track pad, not a track nipple
Every ThinkPad I've had has both, and I prefer the nipple and disable the trackpad. I don't care to waste my time making repeated motions on a trackpad to achieve what I can in a single gesture with the trackpoint.
Really good quality IPS screens
Granted. Screen quality varies pretty widely across ThinkPad models, though I've never had any complaints with mine.
MagSafe power connectors
Whatever. Never had any problems with the connectors on any brand of laptop I've owned.
A really good quality keyboard - with backlighting
Backlighting? That's not a feature, it's a bug. I learned to type thirty years ago. I don't hunt and peck in broad daylight, much less in a darkened corner of the local Starbucks.
If you like Apple's products, good for you. They are not, however, the only manufacturers of decent hardware, and tastes differ. The Apple style that Apple fans like repels me, personally, and no doubt they dislike the appearance of my preferred machines. Big deal. We probably own different cars and different brands of shoes. There are people who affect a stance of superiority over that bullshit, too.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
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.
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.
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.