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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."
It's no joke.
They are not being different. As soon as they own an Apple product they tend to go out of their way to stick it in people's faces to show them how awesome it is. I.e. they do exactly what the last douchebag they saw with an Apple product did.
You don't buy a computer because of its culture...
That's right. You buy an MP3 player or phone for its culture, duh! ;p
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
Which is why I can't really understand the endless Windows vs Linux fighting here on slashdot. We have spend all this time fighting and completely forgot to laugh at how stupid Mac OS X users are.
Hi fanboy,
Since you may not know....
Do you start to build houses on the ground or do you lay a foundation first?
Say, a kernel?
So... Apple does what everyone else does, they take what is out there and nobody faults them for that.
That happens to be open source software.
They do a few tweaks, add some gawky brushed metal to it and you guys gobble it up as some innovation.
Now, do you think that Apple could just build their OS without having a complete, functional kernel with drivers?
Of that I have no doubt but they opted to take a free, open source kernel and use it.
They did not do that.... and denying the fact that the kernel and other tools that make up that operation system are all BSD at the core is just the response I expected from an uneducated fanboy.
I just to cheer for Apple over Microsoft, the problem is now the tables have turned, who do you think I would rather cheer for?
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.
This isn't a troll, it's pretty accurate. Using Mac and believing it's "open" is no different than believing that BSD is the same as GPL. Yet you'll notice significant issues with MacOS being on BSD vs Linux with GPLv3.
Look at it this way: every single thing on mac costs money, and very little is compatible. Yet everything on linux is free, and a whole lot of it's compatible - in fact there's more issue with Microsoft products being compatible with linux than vice versa.
You are of course correct. Go to any developer's conference and see who is using what, particularly any gathering of Unix people.
Anyway, judging by the comments posted for this story, people are alarmingly bitter and jealous about Apple and its mythical "fanatics". I guess desktop Linux really is that bad.