Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
"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.
"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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
... and Safari is a pretty thin wrapper around WebKit.
OSS's "remotely useful" contributions just keep cropping up.
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?
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.
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.
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
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"
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.
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.
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!
For the record, I've had OS X crash on me more often than Windows XP. But then I'm neither the typical Mac user nor the typical Windows user.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.