Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What Is the 'Special Appeal' of Apple Products?
Reader dryriver writes: As someone who comes from MS-DOS/Windows PCs background, I've never quite understood the appeal of Apple's products. I don't think Apple's products are terrible or anything, but I just fail to see what is so special and different about Apple's electronics that many Apple users would never dream of switching to a non-Apple product. Where does the 'special appeal' of Apple products reside? And why are Apple users so very loyal to Apple products, even though with Apple's pricing policy, you rarely get the best bang-for-the-buck in a product?
I have a 2011 MacBook Air that i use at home, and it works as well today as it did the day i got it. This thing has seen some shit, man...and every single component still works flawlessly.
I can't say that about *any* other computer that i've ever owned.
Because as a company, Apple has been very very good at marketing, branding, and perceived value manipulation. To be fair, they also tend to put UX and design ahead of functionality, which helps with their image.
Not everyone is trying to optimize compute performance per $ or any othe sort of technical spec per $. Some of us just want to be happy with our phone and laptops and some of us can afford to pay more than rock bottom prices for them.
There's a lot of weird ego stuff in these discussions on all sides. But beyond that, try to understand that everyone isn't trying to optimize the same things.
I like that the products almost always "just work". That sounds trite, but after dealing with technology that doesn't work properly at work all day long (not Windows, but products under development) I don't want to have to mess with configuration or control of a computer at home.
That said when I want to do something outside the specified user experience I can usually find a way to do it without too much trouble.
I find frustrating to have family and friends ask me "Why can't I do ....?" I can usually figure it out if I am messing with the system (Windows I am talking about you), but it is hard to do over the phone. As often as not the final outcome is I modify what I am trying to do, or modify my expectations. I find that those who use Apple products are so used to being able to do stuff that "makes sense to them" that they are resistant to being told it doesn't work that way.
While it seems weird that is actually a way of saying that Apple gets it right most of the time. After all on Windows they are so used to not being able to do things the way that "makes sense to them" or "not at all".
Ok, /. editor (oh, well, that's why) consider this postable?
Why in the world would a
Besides, is the person who asked like 6 yrs old or something? Or just woke up after falling asleep in 1971 next to his IBM TTY connected to a DEC PDP-8L?
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I used to buy PC laptops and desktops to run Linux and found I was always having issues unless I bought top spec equipment and even then for laptops the build quality was subpar unless you spent a lot of money so I would kill laptops each year with all the hard use and travel. I tried my first Mac back when the G4 iBook came out and that lasted 3x longer than any PC I had had and when I retired it, it went to my wife and continued to work for another 6 years in various uses. That's the thing, the Macs may not be the best bang for the buck but you get a well integrated and supported UNIX on hardware that is built to last so unless you're very cost sensitive at the time of purchase, the Mac will save money and be a better long term experience. Nothing to do with hipster this or shiny that, I'm a scientist working in genomics and the vast majority of my peers also use Macs. PCs running Linux are second most popular and Windows PC are a pathetic third place. We use Linux extensively for computing but for desktop and portable use a Mac is terrific.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
After a long day at work, either smashing my head against against the codeface down the Linux-mines, or being assaulted by a wide variety of sadistic corporate-grade Windows software, I get home tired and worn out.
I can put on the TV, sit on the sofa with my macbook, and not have that paranoid feeling that it's going to do something unpleasant and surprising. It won't interrupt me demanding to update, and then reboot my machine without saving 5 minutes later, despite me pressing the button that looked like it said "Don't do that". It won't shart itself because upstream decided to replace upstart with systemd during the last update, and now it won't load vital start up dependencies.
I don't want my home life to be as arduous as my work life. I have precious enough time to myself without having to fight my computer.
In my experience, it's the customer service. Apple has a couple of orders of magnitude better customer service than the rest. When I had a defective Samsung phone, my option was to go to the carrier store and hope they could help me. Usually they couldn't do so in any way that was convenient to me. When I first got an iPad, after a couple of months, a pixel died. I made an appointment at an Apple store and within 7 minutes of my arrival, I had a replacement device in my hands being restored from backup. Shortly after, I bought an iPhone as a result.
Additionally, most Android devices have a software update life cycle of maybe a year if you are lucky, compared to the 2-3 years that Apple will support their devices.
The Mac is good because you're not forced to update (unlike Windows).
The iPhone is good because you CAN update (unlike Android).
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
During Steve Jobs' era (2nd term) Apple mobile (iPod, iPhone, iPad) products had a great usability, amazing attention to detail, and clean aesthetic design. Steve pushed designers and developers beyond what was imagined, product had to work intuitively. That is why no one else was able to deliver a successful handheld (HP, PalmOS, etc). Unfortunately Apple diluted aesthetic and focus with multiple color versions and self-competing product lines (you can buy iPhone 7+, 7, 6+, 6s, se in 6 colors). On the other hand it always has been a club where you feel better b/c you have "luxury" (aka. higher priced item) than someone else.
YMMV:
* Command key instead of Control key means I can do my typical cut/copy/paste shortcuts, and still have "ctrl-c" for break in a Terminal window.
* Command key with thumb more ergonomic than ctrl key with pinky.
* Terminal.
* Real file system without 256 character path limits - I know ntfs has recently patched this one.
* Symlinks. I mean real symlinks.
* Touchpad gestures
* Unix based vs. unix added on (MS moving in the right direction now with bash)
I will consider my parenting to be a success if my kids never end up thinking like this.
That's pretty much why I like and use Apple products. I have used three laptops in the past 14 years: a high-end HP laptop, a mid-range from Lenovo, and the MacBook Air. HP's laptop worked fine for two years, but things started to get messy after that. Opening more than half a dozen tabs on Chrome would turn the laptop into a room-heater. Ubuntu never really worked with issues on that laptop. Lenovo's laptop worked fine for four years, but it started to run into same issues after a point. I have been using the MacBook Air (2013) for last three and a half years and I have had zero issues with it. It just works every single time. I would like to give something else a try as soon as this device dies. Windows 10 and Ubuntu run better on Paralles (a VM) on the MacBook Air than any laptop I have tried them on.
It took me less than three days to feel home on OS X (now macOS). Coming from Ubuntu and Windows, things were a lot different, but my impression OS X is just a dumbed down version of Windows in terms of complications. Everything is in right front of you. While I see no use of Siri that they introduced last year, and all the bells and whistles around PiP, and things like having two windows placed side-by-side, working on OS X has never made me feel frustrated. Again, for the things I need a laptop for, the MacBook Air has continued to deliver, so I have no reason to look elsewhere.
Resale value, as in, >2 year old Macs actually have one.
Which is a good reason to buy 2 years old PC for $0.
I've been a Mac user for a really long time. I've owned a lot of them over the years. And a lot of PCs.
I used to support Windows and Linux machines (servers/desktops) in various capacities at various employers. (Federal and state government and corporate.)
I really enjoyed having a machine that worked consistently every time I turned it on. (or now, when I wake it from sleep. I reboot so rarely these days). Predominantly, the only time my Macs exhibited strange behavior was when they had hardware issues.
It wasn't like Windows 95 which would refuse to acknowledge some random accessory because a change had been made to the registry by some other app. I never had to worry about some $.30 interface chip crashing the machine because the vendor had cut corners writing the driver software and I bumped into a crash situation trying to do an every day task, like printing. Or plugging in a USB device.
Or Windows 98 which was a slightly more stable house of cards.
Or Windows XP which was a breeding ground for viruses and system compromises no matter how securely you locked the system down. I remember when you would race to install Service Pack 3 on Windows XP before the IP scanners would compromise the machine. Never had to worry about that on the Mac.
I've never had to deal with Microsoft's wavering tendencies to see how invasive their software could be on your machine. Yes, I'm looking at you, Internet Explorers 4 through 7. And you too, Active Desktop.
And before you hold Linux up as the shining jewel of computing perfection, I have two words for you: dependency hell.
Side note: My personal uptime record is on a Linux file server. 253 days without a reboot. A nice Dell box with a SCSI RAID array. Supporting a 200 user design department the entire time (server hosted home directories and a few other services, not just a file server.) Stayed up just a hair longer than the school year. Then I decided to perform a package update. It took 3 days to get the machine back to its former state.
My Macs have always "just worked" more often than most PCS. Yes, they've had their problems. I ran a lab of them in a student environment for years. Many of them worked perfectly fine in a fairly abusive situation. And yes, there were a few machines with problems. There was one Mac G4 that had all of it's internal components replaced twice. The only original part was the external case, and it still never ran 100%. But even at 90%, it was more consistently reliable than most of the Dell's in the lab across the hall.
A week ago, I finished an 11 day Deep Dream render on my MacBook Pro. (No NVidia card, so CPU only). I continued to use the machine for my daily tasks while that render ground on. It never hitched, I never had a problem. Even though it was eating up CPU resources like crazy. Heck, I even let it go to sleep a few times and accidentally let my battery run to zero after forgetting to plug it back in. And when I woke it up/restored it from suspend, everything continued on as though nothing had gone wrong.
Yes, Apple, Macs and the OS have their flaws. But they're consistent flaws. Yet they still offer the one thing I've struggled to find in the Windows or Linux worlds: A user experience I can trust.
Reeses
... To be fair, they also tend to put UX and design ahead of functionality, which helps with their image.
I consider the user interface to be the single most important part of functionality, so the fact that they prioritize UX is not "image" in my opinion.
You've apparently never used iTunes then.
What I've noticed from users is that a windows user will blame the computer every time even if it is their own mistake, and an apple user will blame themselves every time even if the hardware failed.
Apple users know they have the Fancy Name Brand that Cool People(TM) use, so they have multiple levels of psychological aversion to blaming it for anything. They would be less cool by extension. And the brand image doesn't place any value on being capable of using "regular" technology, so they take no hit to their hipster image by blaming themselves.
It is really the same as any other name brand item. If a person buys name brand jeans and they tear, they're going to blame themselves for not taking better care of something expensive. Another person who buys a different brand gets mad that it didn't last longer because they only tried to use it in the "normal" way.
If they blame it for anything, even its own real failings, then they lose the snob value.
Apple aren't perfect - their current hardware line up leaves much to be desired, which lead to me recently having a fling with a MS Surface Book: I wanted to mess with the tablet/stylus idea for a project I'm working on, plus the Surface range seemed like the closest thing to a windows "reference platform" that should showcase WIn10 at its best. The Surface Book failed within the 30 day "easy returns" period - now, other people have had good experiences with the SB so I'm not going to knock it on that basis, but there were other more fundamental reasons why I bailed and got my money back rather than accept the offer of a new replacement machine.
I'd also note that I've used DOS, Windows and Linux, MacOS and various others on and off since forever (ISTR there must have been at least one occasion when I used WIndows, MacOS ('classic' and X), Linux, RiscOS and VMS. Windows 95/NT5/2000/XP was my daily driver from about 1996-2006 before I switched to Mac, and I've always had a Win7 VM on my Mac for testing websites and stuff. What I'm saying is: this is not "eek, the keys are a bit different" - I can cope with things being "a bit different", I already mostly know how to use Windows (I've developed for Windows, whereas everything I've written on the Mac has been crossplatform) and I'd been getting real work done on the Surface before it failed.
Mac advantage 1: Mac OS and Mac OS apps are, typically, just nicer: they're responsive (click the mouse and, generally, there's an instant response - even if its only an hourglass you know you've clicked something). On windows, frequently, there was no sign of anything happening for a second or so. Apps tend to be consistent and designed with more "attention to detail" than you see on Windows.
Examples: Apple Mail is not the best Mail client by a long chalk and receives much abuse, but select part of a message and hit reply and you get a new message with just that text quoted. How else should it work? I now know where all those silly huge chain emails come from - because that's what Win10 mail and Outlook force you to do. Someone on the 'To' line ought to be on 'CC' instead? Just drag them - the App recognises each address as a discrete object. On Windows, carefully select the email address by hand, copy & paste, being careful not to mess up the separating commas. Outlook 2016 is feature-rich but usability poor - not even properly integrated into the Win 10 notification or calendar system and I had to install a third party plug-in to stop it quitting (and hence stopping checking for new mail) every time I closed the window. Outlook wouldn't talk to my Google calendar or address list (and Outlook 2016 still doesn't do Google 2-factor login). Win10 Mail/Calendar/Contacts did a bit better - and knows about Google - but its feature-restricted (failed me when I needed to drag a message from my Google account to an Exchange folder) plus it has a horrible, space-inefficient design that assumes you're going to run it full-screen.
That's one example. There are, of course, lousy Mac OS apps, too, but generally they adhere to a much higher standard of 'thoughtful touches' than Windows.
As for Mac vs. Linux - Linux rules for server-side, but when it comes to GUI everything nasty you can say about Windows' responsiveness and attention to detail applies to Linux with two scoops of ice-cream and a cherry on the top. Linux GUI's design brief is "give us a horribly over-engineered windowing system, make it networkable but so clunky that VNC is a better solution for remote access, add a desktop manager that looks like - but doesn't work like - NeXTStep because I'm a Unix hacker and as long as I can run 6 copies of vim and 6 bash shells side-by-side I'll be in hog heaven." Or at least, that was the situation until Gnome 3 and Unity came along - which was like being rescued from the Titanic by the Marie Celeste.
Mac advantage 2: Win10 is still a ghastly hybrid of Windows 7 and The UI Formally Known as Metro. It didn'
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
BMW is a better car analogy. Porches are nice little sports cars but BMWs are amazing everyday drivers. They're perhaps the only daily driver built completely with the driver in mind—the way the shift, handle, the engine harmonics, the cabin design. Everything is tweaked for an optimal driving experience.
When I bought my BMW my wife was skeptical. She didn't want me to get it because she didn't want people to think we're snobby. It only took one ride for her to realize there's a reason people get attached to them. Sure, there are lots of people who drive BMWs because it's fashionable and they want to be seen in an expensive car. But the reason most BMW owners consistently buy BMWs is because almost everyone has to drive a lot. When spend a lot of your time doing something you want to enjoy it.
Guys who like to work on cars don't like BMWs. A mechanic looks underneath and wonders, "Why the hell are there two control arms and a giant ass trailing arm on the rear end? Changing those bushings would be a nightmare." An engineer looks underneath and thinks, "Damn that's the most symmetrical undercarriage I've ever seen."
Macs aren't designed for those who tinker under the hood. They're not designed for cheapskates who value money more than experience. They're designed for those who want to do work (or whatever) on their computer rather than work on their computer.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."