I feel your entire post was only trying to say "People buy Apple because 'it just works!'(TM)".
So do everyone else's. It's why I purchase a lot of Asus. I have good experiences with their hardware and they make what I like. But as you pointed out, everyone has their own stuff that they actually care about. To some it's the raw power. To others it's the trackpad. Past experiences contribute as well. Raw power cannot be subjective. Software is (which can make the raw power seem different depending on the person). Even history with the company is subjective to each individual. Trackpads? It depends on the software sometimes, but sure, other times there are clear differences between IO peripherals. Am I going to give the whole thing a better rating for build quality because of a trackpad? Probably not.
Listen, you like what you like and we all have reasons for buying what we do. I'm not going to judge you if you buy it because you truly like it. That's fine. But justifying your purchase by asserting higher build quality is bunk. First, you personally do not have the resources to prove that. The people who do don't find any brand consistently higher than everyone else. That is fact. It's evident in regular tear downs and reviews. Need I remind you that much of the equipment is shared across brands? Grow up.
He didn't solve a dilemna. This argument is completely set up from the start. For one, Apple is one of the richest companies in the world. iTunes is a huge part of their success, but also their Apple branded products. Being as how insanely expensive the majority of it is by comparison, and how much of a choke-hold they had on profit margins whenever their products were sold, I'd say profits was a very large business goal and not just a "side effect". Not that that's bad or anything, it just makes Jobs out to be some kind of saint that was only in it for the inventions when he was actually just one helluva marketing guy. The innovator in Jobs was only a step to where Apple ended up.
After whining about my workstation having only 3.1GB of recognizable memory and my desire to have at least 8, I had a co-worker ask me why I needed more than 2GB of RAM. I asked him if he was really a developer. Yes, he was serious. Yes, my jaw was on the floor.
OK, trying to apply the "don't be evil" mantra to this situation is really reaching. The issue of blocking iframes is security-related, end of story. Second, if a website doesn't like people iframing their shit, they can block it too. It's only a double-standard if Google complains.
Seriously, what is so magical about Mac build quality?
Nothing. It's bunk. Most reputable laptop manufacturers all have comparable build quality unless you're getting the damn thing for free, but even then I'm willing to bet the thing will live long enough for you to replace it because you want something faster, not because it broke down.
A modern MacBook has no mouse buttons since it is multitouch. They are simply the best mouse pad on any laptop currently available.
My feeling having gone the other way some time back is that a MacBook is the cheapest way of getting a decent UNIX laptop with all the hardware working, plus the hardware is well built and the OS works nicely. You can even run Linux on a MacBook if you really want to go that route. The build quality of most PC laptops is so poor that you end up paying just as much for a good Windows laptop to run Linux as you would buying a MacBook.
After the first paragraph... simply not true. Just... ugh. Really? Why deny that Apple's hardware is simply more expensive like 99% of the time? Because it is. I've never once paid more than $999 for a laptop, and I've always gotten top-notch hardware. It's no super high-end gaming rig, but even if I was looking for that I definitely wouldn't be spending up in the MacBook price range. Absolutely ridiculous.
Your claim on build quality is absolutely nuts. Apple people love to throw this claim around like we all will just automatically accept it. It's expensive, it's gotta be the best, right? Complete bunk. I'm not saying Apple is shit here, because it's not. They make perfectly decent hardware. But it's certainly not the best. End of story.
Anyway, I really replied just to say no buttons on something that's supposed to act like a mouse would absolutely drive me nuts.
Samsung was just using their same old design they've been using even in their dumb phones. Go ahead, take a look... a button at the bottom center for the "main" function. It's not novel, and just because two people came up with similar ideas doesn't mean one copied another. Hell, when the device is on it's plainly obvious there's additional buttons, albeit "soft" buttons, but they're still buttons.
As a side note: nobody's going to get confused and accidentally buy a Samsung device when they meant to buy Apple. If there really is someone that stupid out there, it's not really Samsung's fault. Someone that stupid would mistake spray paint for hair spray. They're both in cylinder cans, right?
Vlingo seems to work better in some cases on 2.x Android, but the voice actions in Honeycomb seem to have improved it quite a bit (I set up reminders, appointments, and an alarm for tomorrow morning, sent texts, etc). In fact, running through the demos on this development Xoom I have here it seems to mirror what they demoed for Siri almost 1:1.
I already paid for the movie, stop nagging about stealing a car...!
Oh my god no kidding! Who do they think is actually watching this shit anyway? Like a pirated movie keeps that crap in? What I find even worse is the forced previews of their other shitty movies that I didn't want to rent/buy. I'll be sitting through a minimum of 10 fucking minutes of crappy previews before I can get to the actual movie. And yes, I hit all the buttons (skip, menu, etc).
Just to reiterate what everybody else is saying: no wonder why people pirate movies. In fact, here's the new deal: for every movie I pirate, I'll pay you $20 if I keep it, and $4 if I don't (a rental). You don't even have to set it up, use physical media, or provide the bandwidth. It's already there, I don't have to put up with BS, and you're still getting your money. Deal?
Why home buyers figure out that a brand new home in a band new subdivision is nothing but a great big PITA for the next 20 years. Get a nice old home if it's been standing for 100 years it's probably going to continue to do so if make sure the roof gutters and siding are in good order.
Any house requires regular maintenance. Some of the problems the new homes have involve how the house settles. This can cause basement leaks, cracked paint/drywall, and all sorts of random problems. However, unless you made a terrible deal, most of these things are probably covered by some kind of warranty if the house is "new" enough. Build quality differs from house to house but I've never heard of someone who's owned a house for at least 5 years and has never had a single problem with it, no matter how old it was.
Which is completely ridiculous considering how profitable Android phones have proven to be, and how WP7 phones have the potential to be. I realize the iPhone draws up a huge number of sales but not more by itself than everything else together. They surely shouldn't be giving all their other customers the shaft by dropping benefits and customer attention just to please the Great Turtleneck. The rest of us are basically paying extra now just so Sprint can get the damned iPhone.
Also right now these channels that are bundled are not really trying too hard to get viewers. So you get one channel in that bundle that is valuable then the rest are showing repeats, or those fringe anti-science science shows that Discovery puts on every once in a while about alien abduction... over and over again... If we can pick our channels then every station will need to fight for our viewing, and not just do reruns of their bundled partner.
Paying $100+ a month for TV is really too high.
Hey! Maybe then NBC Universal will fire whoever the hell is in charge of SyFy (that name change = fail) and we can get some serious programming on again to attract viewers instead of letting that cancer fester. I don't think many people are willing to pay for 72hr marathons of Ghost Hunters and it's counterparts every single damn week. The filler? Wrestling... what the hell.
This is promising, but wake me up when they actually cure/prevent the disease in a person with this.
My thoughts exactly. I don't demean their research, but realistically I'm not that interested in a play-by-play for the development. I'll consider all this a breakthrough when I can go down to Walgreens and get an AIDS vaccine.
Most likely it'll still be administered in a hospital setting so they can monitor your raging fever when your immune system suddenly is reactivated. Who knows what you'd have swimming through your body unchecked until then.
There's workarounds, but you shouldn't need workarounds.
Hello HTML5? We're BACK into the browser wars, supporting multiple vender extensions... yay for progress!
HTML5 is the next step in browser evolution. It however does not change the fact that Microsoft likes to add their own quirks in regardless, and that they still follow the same old broken box model they always have (though maybe to a lesser extent). HTML5 still has the norm elements. This has not changed. Therefore, IE will still have their 'hasLayout' bugs that will probably be solved with CSS hacks (aka - workarounds).
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily. The point of marketing is to make you want it. It doesn't have to be great, you just have to believe it's great.
I feel your entire post was only trying to say "People buy Apple because 'it just works!'(TM)".
So do everyone else's. It's why I purchase a lot of Asus. I have good experiences with their hardware and they make what I like. But as you pointed out, everyone has their own stuff that they actually care about. To some it's the raw power. To others it's the trackpad. Past experiences contribute as well. Raw power cannot be subjective. Software is (which can make the raw power seem different depending on the person). Even history with the company is subjective to each individual. Trackpads? It depends on the software sometimes, but sure, other times there are clear differences between IO peripherals. Am I going to give the whole thing a better rating for build quality because of a trackpad? Probably not.
Well said, sir/madam.
Yes, yes they do. You're just being ignorant.
Listen, you like what you like and we all have reasons for buying what we do. I'm not going to judge you if you buy it because you truly like it. That's fine. But justifying your purchase by asserting higher build quality is bunk. First, you personally do not have the resources to prove that. The people who do don't find any brand consistently higher than everyone else. That is fact. It's evident in regular tear downs and reviews. Need I remind you that much of the equipment is shared across brands? Grow up.
He didn't solve a dilemna. This argument is completely set up from the start. For one, Apple is one of the richest companies in the world. iTunes is a huge part of their success, but also their Apple branded products. Being as how insanely expensive the majority of it is by comparison, and how much of a choke-hold they had on profit margins whenever their products were sold, I'd say profits was a very large business goal and not just a "side effect". Not that that's bad or anything, it just makes Jobs out to be some kind of saint that was only in it for the inventions when he was actually just one helluva marketing guy. The innovator in Jobs was only a step to where Apple ended up.
Except that if anything, Apple is a marketing machine. They could have sold shit on a cracker.
Exactly. I can totally see how the huge changes it's made since 10 years ago can be confusing.
Then show me the donate button. Seriously, RAM is cheap. If you own a machine that only supports up to 8 however...
After whining about my workstation having only 3.1GB of recognizable memory and my desire to have at least 8, I had a co-worker ask me why I needed more than 2GB of RAM. I asked him if he was really a developer. Yes, he was serious. Yes, my jaw was on the floor.
Not to mention they make it easy to re-claim/export your data.
OK, trying to apply the "don't be evil" mantra to this situation is really reaching. The issue of blocking iframes is security-related, end of story. Second, if a website doesn't like people iframing their shit, they can block it too. It's only a double-standard if Google complains.
Antitrust, at least in the U.S., means you're using your market position to influence the market unfairly.
Antitrust != monopoly.
Seriously, what is so magical about Mac build quality?
Nothing. It's bunk. Most reputable laptop manufacturers all have comparable build quality unless you're getting the damn thing for free, but even then I'm willing to bet the thing will live long enough for you to replace it because you want something faster, not because it broke down.
A modern MacBook has no mouse buttons since it is multitouch. They are simply the best mouse pad on any laptop currently available.
My feeling having gone the other way some time back is that a MacBook is the cheapest way of getting a decent UNIX laptop with all the hardware working, plus the hardware is well built and the OS works nicely. You can even run Linux on a MacBook if you really want to go that route. The build quality of most PC laptops is so poor that you end up paying just as much for a good Windows laptop to run Linux as you would buying a MacBook.
After the first paragraph... simply not true. Just... ugh. Really? Why deny that Apple's hardware is simply more expensive like 99% of the time? Because it is. I've never once paid more than $999 for a laptop, and I've always gotten top-notch hardware. It's no super high-end gaming rig, but even if I was looking for that I definitely wouldn't be spending up in the MacBook price range. Absolutely ridiculous.
Your claim on build quality is absolutely nuts. Apple people love to throw this claim around like we all will just automatically accept it. It's expensive, it's gotta be the best, right? Complete bunk. I'm not saying Apple is shit here, because it's not. They make perfectly decent hardware. But it's certainly not the best. End of story.
Anyway, I really replied just to say no buttons on something that's supposed to act like a mouse would absolutely drive me nuts.
Samsung was just using their same old design they've been using even in their dumb phones. Go ahead, take a look... a button at the bottom center for the "main" function. It's not novel, and just because two people came up with similar ideas doesn't mean one copied another. Hell, when the device is on it's plainly obvious there's additional buttons, albeit "soft" buttons, but they're still buttons.
As a side note: nobody's going to get confused and accidentally buy a Samsung device when they meant to buy Apple. If there really is someone that stupid out there, it's not really Samsung's fault. Someone that stupid would mistake spray paint for hair spray. They're both in cylinder cans, right?
Try "Text John Smith" instead, or "Email John Smith". Also works fine on Honeycomb's built-in speech recognition.
Vlingo seems to work better in some cases on 2.x Android, but the voice actions in Honeycomb seem to have improved it quite a bit (I set up reminders, appointments, and an alarm for tomorrow morning, sent texts, etc). In fact, running through the demos on this development Xoom I have here it seems to mirror what they demoed for Siri almost 1:1.
Hear Hear!
I already paid for the movie, stop nagging about stealing a car...!
Oh my god no kidding! Who do they think is actually watching this shit anyway? Like a pirated movie keeps that crap in? What I find even worse is the forced previews of their other shitty movies that I didn't want to rent/buy. I'll be sitting through a minimum of 10 fucking minutes of crappy previews before I can get to the actual movie. And yes, I hit all the buttons (skip, menu, etc).
Just to reiterate what everybody else is saying: no wonder why people pirate movies. In fact, here's the new deal: for every movie I pirate, I'll pay you $20 if I keep it, and $4 if I don't (a rental). You don't even have to set it up, use physical media, or provide the bandwidth. It's already there, I don't have to put up with BS, and you're still getting your money. Deal?
Why home buyers figure out that a brand new home in a band new subdivision is nothing but a great big PITA for the next 20 years. Get a nice old home if it's been standing for 100 years it's probably going to continue to do so if make sure the roof gutters and siding are in good order.
Any house requires regular maintenance. Some of the problems the new homes have involve how the house settles. This can cause basement leaks, cracked paint/drywall, and all sorts of random problems. However, unless you made a terrible deal, most of these things are probably covered by some kind of warranty if the house is "new" enough. Build quality differs from house to house but I've never heard of someone who's owned a house for at least 5 years and has never had a single problem with it, no matter how old it was.
Which is completely ridiculous considering how profitable Android phones have proven to be, and how WP7 phones have the potential to be. I realize the iPhone draws up a huge number of sales but not more by itself than everything else together. They surely shouldn't be giving all their other customers the shaft by dropping benefits and customer attention just to please the Great Turtleneck. The rest of us are basically paying extra now just so Sprint can get the damned iPhone.
Also right now these channels that are bundled are not really trying too hard to get viewers. So you get one channel in that bundle that is valuable then the rest are showing repeats, or those fringe anti-science science shows that Discovery puts on every once in a while about alien abduction... over and over again... If we can pick our channels then every station will need to fight for our viewing, and not just do reruns of their bundled partner.
Paying $100+ a month for TV is really too high.
Hey! Maybe then NBC Universal will fire whoever the hell is in charge of SyFy (that name change = fail) and we can get some serious programming on again to attract viewers instead of letting that cancer fester. I don't think many people are willing to pay for 72hr marathons of Ghost Hunters and it's counterparts every single damn week. The filler? Wrestling... what the hell.
This is promising, but wake me up when they actually cure/prevent the disease in a person with this.
My thoughts exactly. I don't demean their research, but realistically I'm not that interested in a play-by-play for the development. I'll consider all this a breakthrough when I can go down to Walgreens and get an AIDS vaccine.
Most likely it'll still be administered in a hospital setting so they can monitor your raging fever when your immune system suddenly is reactivated. Who knows what you'd have swimming through your body unchecked until then.
And the left-wingers would want to raise taxes 5% and force everyone to take it.
There's workarounds, but you shouldn't need workarounds.
Hello HTML5? We're BACK into the browser wars, supporting multiple vender extensions... yay for progress!
HTML5 is the next step in browser evolution. It however does not change the fact that Microsoft likes to add their own quirks in regardless, and that they still follow the same old broken box model they always have (though maybe to a lesser extent). HTML5 still has the norm elements. This has not changed. Therefore, IE will still have their 'hasLayout' bugs that will probably be solved with CSS hacks (aka - workarounds).
They don't even give you a recovery CD any more. Now you have to build your own if you want one, or order one off their website. Pretty crooked, eh?