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Media Loves Apple and Its Army of Fans
cgriffin21 writes "Apple is getting more media attention right now than any other technology company, including Google. Microsoft, meanwhile, is languishing in the shadows like Cinderella on the night of the ball. That's the upshot of a study released Monday (PDF) by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, which found that Apple was the focus of 15.1 percent of media coverage between June 1, 2009 to June 30, 2010. Google received 11.4 percent of media coverage during the period, while Microsoft garnered just 3 percent."
Apple was the focus of 15.1 percent of media coverage [...] Google received 11.4 percent of media coverage during the period, while Microsoft garnered just 3 percent.
That 3 percent Microsoft garners is reports of bug fixes and failed projects. Look at recent Microsoft tags on
Microsoft To Release Emergency Fix For ASP.NET Bug
Microsoft Migrating Live Spaces Users To WordPress
Microsoft Says IE9 Beta Demand Overwhelming (Nice but it's free)
Researchers Demo ASP.NET Crypto Attack
etc. etc.
Trolling is a art,
Microsoft, meanwhile, is languishing in the shadows like Cinderella on the night of the ball.
Is this trying to imply that they're going to arrive later as the belle of the ball? Pfft.
As for the main point - anyone who follows tech news at all would have noticed that Apple is getting the most press. I fail to see how this meta-news is news.
which is totally what she said
This is not surprising. Apple and Google cater to consumers. That means the masses, the general public, the hordes. Microsoft's activities the last 10 years and all their successes have been in the enterprise space along with SAP, Oracle, IBM and HP. That makes them boring to most people and that includes the media. Apple creates really cool products that capture imaginations. Even Apple haters want things like what Apple produces - just not from Apple - witness Android phones and tablets. Google touches everybody too. We all use one or more Google services.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
This is my new internet filter. Load news / aggregation site , press "Ctrl+F" in chrome, type "apple" and count. If count > 10 on a single page, I never go there again.
Not the greatest fan of orchards or cider, I gather.
Meanwhile, in Reality Land... Microsoft continues to hold a dominate position in a mature market, targeting business customers Apple doesn't seem to care about. They have a market cap over $211bn and have started paying out dividends. They're in IBM territory now, but the media loves underdogs and sexy startups, and one thing Microsoft has never been is sexy, even when they were a startup. However, I don't really think they care. Not that I really have terribly much use for any of their products, and my personal situation is in no way tied to their fortunes. But to say that only getting 3% of the media coverage is going to hurt them is just kind of stupid. Its almost like Boeing running commercials -- anyone in a position to be purchasing ANYTHING from Boeing isn't going to make that decision off of a 30-second ad. For some companies, media interest is irrelevant, because they're entrenched in their market.
People love apple and it's fabuously high quality ineffebly well designed products. Media's write stories about things people are interested in or find fascinating.
The weird thing here is that somehow people think this works in reverse. That the media is supposed to somehow find something people dont' care about and make it fascinating. E.g. Linux. SOny walkmans, corvettes, and basketball got media attention because people got excited about them about them and not the reverse.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
So right now Microsoft is getting decked out in cool clothes from its fairy godmother, and about to make a stunning entrance that turns everybody's head?
... Inside a carriage made of a fruit with attached mice?
It's a PROPHECY!
The Windows powered IDesktop is coming!
REPENT!
Yeah seeing a guy complaining about how bad the economy is, and that he can barely feed his family while he checks out what's Hot or Not on his new iPad.
All people can be fanbois.
Journalists are people.
=>
Journalists can be fanbois.
Since the return of Jobs to Apple, they have defined the mass-market consumer computing industry. The iMac redefined how computers can look, introducing the concept of high-design into a buyers decision. The iPod and iTunes defined an easy, safe, legal means for carrying your music around and purchasing it online. The iPod Touch pushed into territory previously occupied by PDAs and showed how applications and music players could co-exist in the same device. The iPhone took the Touch a step further and integrated your cell phone. Finally, the iPad leveraged the phenomenal user interface that Apple engineered for its new portable consumer devices and made the screen large enough to be attractive to use in an armchair at home. And during all this, their computers have made major switches to Intel CPUs and OS X.
Everyone else has been just trying to keep up. It has actually been an incredible accomplishment by Jobs. Say what you will about the man or his methods, but he has completely and authoritatively defined the interaction of humans and their computing devices during his lifetime. Apple deserves the attention.
Could we please have a bit more bias in our summaries please. I mean, things like "Apple and Its Army of Fans" and "Microsoft, meanwhile, is languishing in the shadows like Cinderella on the night of the ball." don't quite make it obvious that the story is trying to make a point. Feel free to throw in references to Nazis, if necessary, to make the story bias more obvious.
sigh... I know it's a pipe dream, but I really do enjoy story submissions that just cover the details and let me make up my own mind on how I view the information...
Let's go right to cars.
I bet if you couldn't up all the coverage about cars you will find that Porsche, Ferrari, and Bugatti get a lot more press than they should based on market share.
That is because people are interested in them more than Chevy's and Kia's.
If you look at models you will see that that there is a lot more coverage of the Mustang than the Focus even though the Focus probably out sells the Mustang 10 to 1.
When you look at computers it is also much the same. You just don't see a lot of coverage on low end Dells and HPs.
It is all interest driven. A lot of it is also we are interested in what we don't have.
I really don't need to read about Windows XP or Windows 7 much. I use them everyday.
I do like reading about Supercomputers, BSD, and VMS because I don't have them to play with.
So no Apple does interesting stuff and do not produce commodity PCs. Apple is more in the BMW range than say Ferrari or Bugatti IMHO but Microsoft is Kia or maybe Honda.
BTW being Kia or Honda isn't a bad thing. It just isn't all that sexy and interesting.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
We need Apple around to steal good ideas from. However, it would be a disaster if they were the predominant force in the industry.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
When all of these "fashionable" people turn against apple
Wow, cool, I've never, in my life, been called "fashionable" before... pragmatic, sure. Focused on actually Getting Things Done, as opposed to fiddling around with inferior solutions, yes. Matured past the need to paint entire groups of people with the same brush in order to make myself feel superior, yes.
But never fashionable.
Apple doesn't do anything for less money.
Whether or not it "does the job" is another matter. More than likely, it only "does the job" because the requirements of the job have been restricted to the point where success is a lot less meaningful.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Well, according to TFA, this includes ALL coverage of Apple, whether it is good or bad.
:)
That means all the negative Apple articles and Apple bashing will be counted in as well. No wonder Apple got the highest number in the media coverage count, I am pretty sure there are very few companies that are so emotionally charged either way right now, so those articles tend to draw huge reactions either way
Also, the media selected for this survey is a bit odd. Of the 52 news outlets, 12 are websites, six are television channels, but a whopping 10 radio stations? That seems like the wrong ratio to me.
And we see another example of this phenomenon, as news outlets rush to report how news outlets cover Apple.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
i remember when Windows 95 was released and the geeks not only lined up to buy it but they spent hundreds of $$$ buying RAM, hard drives and other upgrades to run it. This is back in the days when $150 per MEGABYTE of RAM was a killer deal. MS freed geeks from the tyranny of overpriced IBM and Sun hardware. in a few years Windows became boring and something you have to buy.
same thing with Apple. in a few years smartphones and maybe tablets will become something everyone buys like a computer or blu ray player and someone else will have the spotlight
And how many people buy the boxed version of Microsoft Windows, as opposed to just getting it with a computer? That's the point; how much does a computer with Windows cost compared to a computer with Mac OS?
Because on a lot of places there would be dozens of articles on that very issue - which would significantly push up the percentage.
Save for Windows 7, the latest Xbox, and the Kinekt - nothing much has really happened from Microsofts end - and Apple I expect should be able to match those articles with various product revisions of their own.
As for Google - they tend to be on the forefront a lot in general - search update here, mail changes there, new service here - and so on, not to mention its somewhat different compared to physical product businesses as well.
It is safer to play the "wait and one up" game but the publicity goes to the innovator.
Right now the innovation and engineering is coming out of Cupertino so they garner all of the attention. Everyone else, in the table/mobile market, is playing wait and see whats good and copy/one up.
Snow White was layed out by the poison apple, Sleeping Beauty was done in by the needle of a spinning wheel.
As opposed to buying other consumer electronics "made in sweatshops by people paid so little they choose to commit suicide so their family can get the little bit of death benefit cash." That company makes most of the mobile devices on the market, not just the iPhone. Not that I'm defending the situation, but acting like Apple has some kind of monopoly on Chinese sweat shop labor is disingenuous at best. The reality is that the western world wants cheap products and right now countries like China and India are willing to work people to death in order to provide those cheap products. What needs to happen is that we all need to accept that all our gear *should* cost 50-100% more than it does, so the people making it and providing the raw materials can having a living wage. Any takers?
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
A MacBook is "just $999" (thats a quote from their page.. "just")
That has a 2.4ghz Core Duo, 2GB DDR, 13.3" LED, and a 250GB Hard Drive.
A quick check of Dell reveals the Inspiron 14 for just $725.
That has a 2.5ghz Core Duo (better), 2GB DDR, 14" OLED (better), and a 320GB Hard Drive (better).
Both come with an OS..
Now, you can take your $275 in savings for the better gear, add $25 and also buy a Inspiron Mini 10 for $300 (that ALSO comes with an OS)
Face the facts, fanboy. Macs are way overpriced. If the OS is as cheap as people claim, then why the fuck is there such a disparity in price? Looks to me like the REAL price of OS/X is $275 more than the price of Windows 7.
"His name was James Damore."
Microsoft, meanwhile, is languishing in the shadows like Cinderella on the night of the ball.
Are you kidding me? Microsoft is like a wicked stepsister!
Apple produces plenty of free upgrades. There's one waiting to install on my machine right now. It contains a new web browser, a new iTunes, and updates for my Logic Pro and Aperture software. That's the Apple equivalent of a service pack.
All you're doing is getting confused by the different naming schemes between Apple and Microsoft. Apple releases 10.X, there will generally be a lot of new features, capabilities, etc. And they'll charge you for them. Microsoft, on the other hand, releases something with a new name, and they'll charge you for that. And it will have new features, capabilities. Apple releases 10.X.X, there will generally be bugfixes, driver support, etc. And its free. Microsoft, on the other hand, releases something called a service pack, and it'll be free. And it will generally provide bugfixes, driver support, etc.
Both companies follow very similar paths. The differences that have your panties in a bunch are simply semantics.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
By then, computers will be exotic pieces of machinery only used by scientists and engineers. Everyone else will just automatically network through their black turtlenecks.
iTunes isn't fast at all, and it's about as efficient as the United Nations. We're talking about a ~100MB music player app here. It consumes vast amounts of RAM and disk space, has extremely poor support for formats not officially sanctioned by Apple, and for music players not produced by Apple. For its extreme bloat, it's not very feature rich. Oh, and you have to use it if you want to use Apple's latest gizmos. There's a lot of hatred of iTunes out there, jfgi. I thought it was a Windows only thing, but many Mac users seem to agree. Another thing is that iTunes dominates the Mac platform to such a degree that no one has developed a decent mp3 player for it.
Finder: Just not as good as most of the others. Windows Explorer, Dolphin, Konqueror, possibly even Nautilus. How about doing even the simplest things? Slow, sometimes unresponsive w/spinning beach ball.
The BSD subsystem is just poorly done. There's a reason why many of its userspace utilities are replicated by package collections like Fink: the ones in OS X suck. Is python still compiled without readline support?
Hardware support: Yes, let's stick to buying overpriced crap from Apple only. Like any other cult, Apples don't get to hang with the cool guys.
Obsolescence: Now try running this years software on a five years old Mac. It's obsolete.
I'm a hater, yes, but I hate fanboys, not Apple's products. Many of their products are fine (the laptops especially; I've owned one), I just happen to be fed up with the frauds who advertise them at any opportunity. There are tons of those here on Slashdot, often hovering at +5, insightful just for saying they love Apple products. I'm fed up not with their products, but with how they're supposedly "revolutionary" while doing absolutely nothing new, and few things better.
re: market share, we were talking about Apple's supposedly extreme popularity here, which is effectively debunked by their market share. Their profits are entirely irrelevant. You should ask: who cares about their profits? Their stockholders, and the stockholders only, should be the answer. Customers taking joy from the fact that a big corporation makes a profit on them is absurd, yet you see this all the time ... but only with Apple's customers. Why? Because they're fans, rooting for one corporation as if it were a hockey team. But it's a giant tech corporation, and being a supporter of one of them is simply delusional behaviour.
re: massively overpriced tech stock: the stock market is rarely right when everyone has jumped the same bandwagon.