While your post was generally reasonable, I wonder if you realize that your second and third paragraphs somewhat contradict each other.
Avoiding cognitive dissonance is pretty universal, and that includes how people deal with possible buyer's remorse. But it's only a subset of people who translate that into active brand loyalty of the sort you describe (Ford vs. Chevy, etc - you know, there's little brand loyalty to Microsoft per se, it's more to the PC as a a platform, if anything.) Just like people who take their sports-teams loyalty to heart, there is something almost compensatory about those loyalties - I think of it as something that people with little social/cultural capital do.
Being a Windows user is less about building a community and culture around shared beliefs and values, and more about huddling together for warmth after being shipwrecked on an island, building shelters from the scrap metal from your grounded vessel. There's an esprit de corps that develops, but it's based on overcoming adversity, rather than having discovered The Truth.
It's a different thing. More like there are Windows survivors than Windows zealots.
I think there really is a lot of gray area with the Israel/Palestine conflict. I'm very pro-Palestinian, but I understand how frightened and frustrated most Israelis feel, and of course, Hamas is nuts.
Same with abortion. I'm pro-choice ultimately, but I can understand the nuances and contrary opinions. There is plenty of gray area there for me.
There really isn't a significant position saying "rape is great, let's have more rape!" so it's kind of a straw-man. But there are still gray areas involving rape. What if someone is tipsy and consents, but then claims she wouldn't have consented if sober. Rape? Strikes me as a gray area again, or at least a graded one (3 drinks? 5?) Statutory rape? 19 year old and 17 year old? Again, not cut and dry at all.
I'm not a fan (I think "fandom" itself is a symptom of a kind of cultural decay, a defective relationship with artifacts that signals a failure of critical thought and the erosion of human intellectual dignity, but that's just me.) But I don't think "Apple fan" and "MS fan" are in any way symmetrical categories.
Most Mac fans are Apple fans. They are loyal to the brand, to the unified experience of software and hardware.
Their "counterparts" aren't Microsoft fans: they're PC enthusiasts/hobbyists who like the mish-mash, hodge-podge quiltwork world of standards, peripherals, and such that is part of the PC world. There is far less brand loyalty, to Microsoft or anyone else. The "hard geek" version are the ones that do case mods and overclocking.
The true "Microsoft fan" is a rather rare thing - Windows is generally treated as a usually-necessary evil by PC fans.
I have to agree. I have a MacBook now. I like it. I'm impressed. But I definitely do not want to be in any way associated with the "Apple community." They're embarrassing. It's like going to a party and not only finding out that someone is wearing the same outfit as you are, but that it's the drunken, boring, abrasive slob who smells like Cheetos that's wearing the same outfit that you are.
The thing is, because I work in a field connected with the arts, I do actually know a lot of the people who kind of fit that stereotype of the hip, creative mac user. And they aren't rabid fantypes. They like their Macs, yes, and many are design aficionados, but they don't care that much about brand loyalty as such.
The people I know who fit that rabid fanboy stereotype are the ones for whom Mac ownership is the hippest thing about them, dorks who think their choice of tech moves them one step closer to the cool-kids table.
I think that there is going to be convergence here, between home PC, DVR/Media Center, and game system. The differences between all of these things are really just interface, as more of the connections become wireless. I can imagine the last "wired bits" being that between CPU/GPU and display. Think of a local "cloud" of interface and display devices.
The problem is one of developing interfaces that make it feel "console simple" to sit down and play a game that is being displayed on your main display (the one in front of your couch) even though the processors used are those used for your home PC, as well.
I give game consoles on more iteration. I expect a PS4, but not a PS5.
As long as it is possible to become a suspect at all, this is a scenario. Yes, it is possible to be innocent and to become a suspect, and the seizure of property is a big hassle. There should be better guidelines for the return of equipment, whatever the possible crime, whether it is child pornography, embezzlement, terrorism, or what have you.
But is it really unreasonable to think that someone who seems to have clicked on a link advertising an image of a man having sex with a 4 year old merits having their computer searched? While there is some damage to reputation for being accused of anything, much of that is repaired with exoneration. And I would rather that there was a gap between suspicion and conviction, myself.
The clicking of the link itself triggers a search warrant. The search warrant, in the case above, produced evidence that indicated that the suspect did, indeed, consume child porn. I would not like to see conviction based on a link-click, but as the basis for a search warrant, I'm not sure that's inappropriate.
I'm not amoral as a consumer. I will not buy products that are based on truly unethical or deeply unsustainable practices, whether it is child-labor producing shoes or unnecessarily environmentally destructive manufacturing processes (when better options clearly exist,) and yes, I'm willing to pay a little more and own fewer things in trying to abide by these principles.
Apple's "asshole system of management" doesn't rise to that level. For one thing, too many firms have "nice" management for the university-educated white-collar work force, but then turn around and offer betrayal, abuse, exploitation and layoffs to their blue-collar employees. I wouldn't want to work at Apple (unless I was a super-star industrial designer) but that's a culture-thing. A lot of people thrive in that kind of environment.
Apple-as-assholes and Apple-as-evil are somewhat separate thing - the litigious nature of the company has a lot more to do with the latter, particularly its willingness to use lawsuits to squelch free speech in order to control its trade 'secrets.' That's the behavior that could tip Apple to my "do not buy" list someday, as could horrible sourcing practices (which Apple isn't particularly guilty of.) The well-paid, well-educated professionals who get the brunt of Job's bombast have plenty of options and pretty much can handle it: I'm not too worried about them.
I couldn't agree less. I used to use Linux extensively (BSD and Solaris less so); a change in milieu has me around Mac users more. They do not care about the BSD underpinnings. If they have problems, they make an appointment at the Genius Bar at their Apple store. Yes, I like the BSD underpinnings, too. But it wasn't a dealmaker, its absence would not be a dealbreaker. The growth of the MacOS is from Windows users (which I was and still am - games, mostly, and other only-on-windows interactive media), not from Linux users.
Apple's product design in the mid-90s wasn't as good as you remember it, I'm afraid. The value-to-price proposition wasn't attractive to me, and I find pre-MacOS X to be clunky and idiosyncratic.
Bad technology will sabotage good industrial design, yes. But as long as the technology is sound, it is the design - in a broad sense of the term, which includes the functionality of the interface and interoperability of components as understood by the user - that will make or break you in today's market.
Dell is Texan, but Intel was created in and is still HQ'ed in Silicon Valley, with origins in Fairchild Semiconductor, a seminal Silicon Valley firm. It's about as Silicon Valley as you can get.
As far as I'm concerned, Apple is successful for one reason, and one reason only: they have hired some of the greatest designers in history to work for them, just like Google has hired some of the greatest programmers.
I love Apple design. But that delicious, creamy center is wrapped up in all the corporate avarice, control-mongering (DRM, lawsuits etc), and nastiness that the contemporary corporation is capable of. I think that they are actually worse than Microsoft in this regard.
The NHS is a mess. If you are going to compare the US and the UK health systems, I'd prefer the US unless I was uninsured.
However, my experiences with the: French, Spanish, Japanese, and even several South American healthcare systems was excellent, and there's every indication that they are viable. The outcomes are better than the US for most socialized care systems.
What is needed to make a healthcare system work is accountability. There are a lot of ways to get accountability, and the free market isn't one of them. You may have little idea how much of the quality of healthcare that there is in the US is a result of the possibility of medical malpractice suits.
I share your sense that the values that are being enforced are silly, that obscene language is a ridiculous thing to get upset about.
But I don't share the belief that it is inappropriate to actually regulate air broadcast media. Broadcast frequency spectrum is a limited, and yet very public, resource. It is not like cable or other direct-to-viewer media. Without some kind of regulation, it would become unusable, the equivalent of those ungoverned campus bulletin boards in which every flier you post is covered up by another within minutes.
The term "nanny state" is getting overused and losing much of its precision of meaning. The state is a mechanism of administration, and in a democracy, a mechanism of mutual self-administration. The case needs to be made that this or that type of regulation is an inappropriate measure, but just out-of-hand calling any regulatory practice as that of the "nanny state" is a sign of lazy thinking.
The "ethnic cleansing" of territory to ensure that a state retains its ethnic character is the immediate and direct consequence of conflating ethnicity and state. This is a result of treating the state as serving a people (not all people,) rather than treating the state as simple an apparatus of administration for the people who are already within a place. When a state exists to promote the interests of an ethnicity, even when that ethnicity does not live in the state's territory and never did, over the interests of other ethnicities living within the same territory, the result is injustice, expulsion, apartheid and worse.
When my career changed from IT to academia, I also moved from Linux to Mac. I spend a lot of time tinkering around with my systems - and not only did I need to tinker to get it to do what I needed to do, I really enjoyed it, because it helped me stay interested and aware of the finer points of system behavior. Now, I really can't be bothered - that kind of cognitive posture is now counterproductive. When I ran Linux, I would often spend 3 to 6 hours tweaking a perl environment, or configuring mail. That would be an unacceptable use of my time at this point.
At one year, your child cannot read yet. I don't know what you were doing with Linux, but I doubt it has much to do with anything resembling computer use as we know it. He has the motor skills required to move a mouse, but that's about it.
The Koenig memorandum, and the entire discussion revolving around the "demographic threat" to Israel (specifically, the population rate of Arab Israelis) is the most straightforward example.
Refer to the references at the end of this wikipedia article. Also consider the nature of the right of return - any Jew in the world, anywhere, can not only get automatic Israeli citizenship, but is given generous bonus allowances to do so. Pressure is placed on non-Jews (especially Arabs) to leave Israel, and someone of Palestinian ethnicity born in what is now Israel is not allowed to immigrate, even as people who speak no Hebrew, and who have not had anyone of Israeli residency in their family for centuries, are subsidized for immigration.
It is not an absolutist state when it doesn't feel the need to be: if you are European or Jewish, it generally behaves like a liberal democracy. That is the nature of the contemporary state, of course - it doesn't actually engage in absolutist behavior until that moment when it is in its own interest to do so.
Incidentally, my own position is that the two states should be a single, completely secular state without either a religious or ethnic identity, with two official languages - and that there should be massive compensation for seized Palestinian properties, enough compensation that the beneficiary could buy comparable property in the same neighborhoods. Not that anyone is taking my calls on the topic.
See, the memory of the Holocaust is exactly the contested currency. It has been turned into the signature of moment of anti-Semitism, the confirmation of the world's hostility toward Jews and the basis for an armed and aggressive posture.
However, others view the Holocaust as a sign of the dreadful power of absolutist states and the conflation of ethnicity and nation. The Germans weren't just interested in exterminating the Jews: they essentially destroyed the Gypsy population in Europe, wiped out populations of Slavs, and also took aim at the ideological position most inimical to their dream ethnic-nationhood: the Communists. We see the Holocaust not foremost as a moment of Jewish (or Gypsy or Communist or gay) history, but really as a moment in the history of modern state and of Europe. And it is in this sense that we see Israel as a continuation of this history.
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While your post was generally reasonable, I wonder if you realize that your second and third paragraphs somewhat contradict each other.
Avoiding cognitive dissonance is pretty universal, and that includes how people deal with possible buyer's remorse. But it's only a subset of people who translate that into active brand loyalty of the sort you describe (Ford vs. Chevy, etc - you know, there's little brand loyalty to Microsoft per se, it's more to the PC as a a platform, if anything.) Just like people who take their sports-teams loyalty to heart, there is something almost compensatory about those loyalties - I think of it as something that people with little social/cultural capital do.
Being a Windows user is less about building a community and culture around shared beliefs and values, and more about huddling together for warmth after being shipwrecked on an island, building shelters from the scrap metal from your grounded vessel. There's an esprit de corps that develops, but it's based on overcoming adversity, rather than having discovered The Truth.
It's a different thing. More like there are Windows survivors than Windows zealots.
The death threats, however, seem to come from the Apple fans, not the haters.
Funny how there is little controversy about rape.
I think there really is a lot of gray area with the Israel/Palestine conflict. I'm very pro-Palestinian, but I understand how frightened and frustrated most Israelis feel, and of course, Hamas is nuts.
Same with abortion. I'm pro-choice ultimately, but I can understand the nuances and contrary opinions. There is plenty of gray area there for me.
There really isn't a significant position saying "rape is great, let's have more rape!" so it's kind of a straw-man. But there are still gray areas involving rape. What if someone is tipsy and consents, but then claims she wouldn't have consented if sober. Rape? Strikes me as a gray area again, or at least a graded one (3 drinks? 5?) Statutory rape? 19 year old and 17 year old? Again, not cut and dry at all.
I'm not a fan (I think "fandom" itself is a symptom of a kind of cultural decay, a defective relationship with artifacts that signals a failure of critical thought and the erosion of human intellectual dignity, but that's just me.) But I don't think "Apple fan" and "MS fan" are in any way symmetrical categories.
Most Mac fans are Apple fans. They are loyal to the brand, to the unified experience of software and hardware.
Their "counterparts" aren't Microsoft fans: they're PC enthusiasts/hobbyists who like the mish-mash, hodge-podge quiltwork world of standards, peripherals, and such that is part of the PC world. There is far less brand loyalty, to Microsoft or anyone else. The "hard geek" version are the ones that do case mods and overclocking.
The true "Microsoft fan" is a rather rare thing - Windows is generally treated as a usually-necessary evil by PC fans.
I have to agree. I have a MacBook now. I like it. I'm impressed. But I definitely do not want to be in any way associated with the "Apple community." They're embarrassing. It's like going to a party and not only finding out that someone is wearing the same outfit as you are, but that it's the drunken, boring, abrasive slob who smells like Cheetos that's wearing the same outfit that you are.
The thing is, because I work in a field connected with the arts, I do actually know a lot of the people who kind of fit that stereotype of the hip, creative mac user. And they aren't rabid fantypes. They like their Macs, yes, and many are design aficionados, but they don't care that much about brand loyalty as such.
The people I know who fit that rabid fanboy stereotype are the ones for whom Mac ownership is the hippest thing about them, dorks who think their choice of tech moves them one step closer to the cool-kids table.
I think that there is going to be convergence here, between home PC, DVR/Media Center, and game system. The differences between all of these things are really just interface, as more of the connections become wireless. I can imagine the last "wired bits" being that between CPU/GPU and display. Think of a local "cloud" of interface and display devices.
The problem is one of developing interfaces that make it feel "console simple" to sit down and play a game that is being displayed on your main display (the one in front of your couch) even though the processors used are those used for your home PC, as well.
I give game consoles on more iteration. I expect a PS4, but not a PS5.
As long as it is possible to become a suspect at all, this is a scenario. Yes, it is possible to be innocent and to become a suspect, and the seizure of property is a big hassle. There should be better guidelines for the return of equipment, whatever the possible crime, whether it is child pornography, embezzlement, terrorism, or what have you.
But is it really unreasonable to think that someone who seems to have clicked on a link advertising an image of a man having sex with a 4 year old merits having their computer searched? While there is some damage to reputation for being accused of anything, much of that is repaired with exoneration. And I would rather that there was a gap between suspicion and conviction, myself.
The clicking of the link itself triggers a search warrant. The search warrant, in the case above, produced evidence that indicated that the suspect did, indeed, consume child porn. I would not like to see conviction based on a link-click, but as the basis for a search warrant, I'm not sure that's inappropriate.
The OS is part of the design. At least, the UI and the stability part of it is.
The MBP also boots windows, which helps a lot, and is closer in price to its competitor.
I'm not amoral as a consumer. I will not buy products that are based on truly unethical or deeply unsustainable practices, whether it is child-labor producing shoes or unnecessarily environmentally destructive manufacturing processes (when better options clearly exist,) and yes, I'm willing to pay a little more and own fewer things in trying to abide by these principles.
Apple's "asshole system of management" doesn't rise to that level. For one thing, too many firms have "nice" management for the university-educated white-collar work force, but then turn around and offer betrayal, abuse, exploitation and layoffs to their blue-collar employees. I wouldn't want to work at Apple (unless I was a super-star industrial designer) but that's a culture-thing. A lot of people thrive in that kind of environment.
Apple-as-assholes and Apple-as-evil are somewhat separate thing - the litigious nature of the company has a lot more to do with the latter, particularly its willingness to use lawsuits to squelch free speech in order to control its trade 'secrets.' That's the behavior that could tip Apple to my "do not buy" list someday, as could horrible sourcing practices (which Apple isn't particularly guilty of.) The well-paid, well-educated professionals who get the brunt of Job's bombast have plenty of options and pretty much can handle it: I'm not too worried about them.
I couldn't agree less. I used to use Linux extensively (BSD and Solaris less so); a change in milieu has me around Mac users more. They do not care about the BSD underpinnings. If they have problems, they make an appointment at the Genius Bar at their Apple store. Yes, I like the BSD underpinnings, too. But it wasn't a dealmaker, its absence would not be a dealbreaker. The growth of the MacOS is from Windows users (which I was and still am - games, mostly, and other only-on-windows interactive media), not from Linux users.
Apple's product design in the mid-90s wasn't as good as you remember it, I'm afraid. The value-to-price proposition wasn't attractive to me, and I find pre-MacOS X to be clunky and idiosyncratic.
Bad technology will sabotage good industrial design, yes. But as long as the technology is sound, it is the design - in a broad sense of the term, which includes the functionality of the interface and interoperability of components as understood by the user - that will make or break you in today's market.
Dell is Texan, but Intel was created in and is still HQ'ed in Silicon Valley, with origins in Fairchild Semiconductor, a seminal Silicon Valley firm. It's about as Silicon Valley as you can get.
As far as I'm concerned, Apple is successful for one reason, and one reason only: they have hired some of the greatest designers in history to work for them, just like Google has hired some of the greatest programmers.
I love Apple design. But that delicious, creamy center is wrapped up in all the corporate avarice, control-mongering (DRM, lawsuits etc), and nastiness that the contemporary corporation is capable of. I think that they are actually worse than Microsoft in this regard.
The NHS is a mess. If you are going to compare the US and the UK health systems, I'd prefer the US unless I was uninsured.
However, my experiences with the: French, Spanish, Japanese, and even several South American healthcare systems was excellent, and there's every indication that they are viable. The outcomes are better than the US for most socialized care systems.
What is needed to make a healthcare system work is accountability. There are a lot of ways to get accountability, and the free market isn't one of them. You may have little idea how much of the quality of healthcare that there is in the US is a result of the possibility of medical malpractice suits.
I share your sense that the values that are being enforced are silly, that obscene language is a ridiculous thing to get upset about.
But I don't share the belief that it is inappropriate to actually regulate air broadcast media. Broadcast frequency spectrum is a limited, and yet very public, resource. It is not like cable or other direct-to-viewer media. Without some kind of regulation, it would become unusable, the equivalent of those ungoverned campus bulletin boards in which every flier you post is covered up by another within minutes.
The term "nanny state" is getting overused and losing much of its precision of meaning. The state is a mechanism of administration, and in a democracy, a mechanism of mutual self-administration. The case needs to be made that this or that type of regulation is an inappropriate measure, but just out-of-hand calling any regulatory practice as that of the "nanny state" is a sign of lazy thinking.
C.f. "Bantustan"
The "ethnic cleansing" of territory to ensure that a state retains its ethnic character is the immediate and direct consequence of conflating ethnicity and state. This is a result of treating the state as serving a people (not all people,) rather than treating the state as simple an apparatus of administration for the people who are already within a place. When a state exists to promote the interests of an ethnicity, even when that ethnicity does not live in the state's territory and never did, over the interests of other ethnicities living within the same territory, the result is injustice, expulsion, apartheid and worse.
I refer you to this essay for more.
I do not expect to change your position. But I will continue to identify it for what it is: a form of ethnic chauvinism.
When my career changed from IT to academia, I also moved from Linux to Mac. I spend a lot of time tinkering around with my systems - and not only did I need to tinker to get it to do what I needed to do, I really enjoyed it, because it helped me stay interested and aware of the finer points of system behavior. Now, I really can't be bothered - that kind of cognitive posture is now counterproductive. When I ran Linux, I would often spend 3 to 6 hours tweaking a perl environment, or configuring mail. That would be an unacceptable use of my time at this point.
At one year, your child cannot read yet. I don't know what you were doing with Linux, but I doubt it has much to do with anything resembling computer use as we know it. He has the motor skills required to move a mouse, but that's about it.
Do you not know what horrors occur in the name of "providing a refuge" for a people? You have confirmed exactly my claim.
The Koenig memorandum, and the entire discussion revolving around the "demographic threat" to Israel (specifically, the population rate of Arab Israelis) is the most straightforward example.
Refer to the references at the end of this wikipedia article. Also consider the nature of the right of return - any Jew in the world, anywhere, can not only get automatic Israeli citizenship, but is given generous bonus allowances to do so. Pressure is placed on non-Jews (especially Arabs) to leave Israel, and someone of Palestinian ethnicity born in what is now Israel is not allowed to immigrate, even as people who speak no Hebrew, and who have not had anyone of Israeli residency in their family for centuries, are subsidized for immigration.
It is not an absolutist state when it doesn't feel the need to be: if you are European or Jewish, it generally behaves like a liberal democracy. That is the nature of the contemporary state, of course - it doesn't actually engage in absolutist behavior until that moment when it is in its own interest to do so.
Incidentally, my own position is that the two states should be a single, completely secular state without either a religious or ethnic identity, with two official languages - and that there should be massive compensation for seized Palestinian properties, enough compensation that the beneficiary could buy comparable property in the same neighborhoods. Not that anyone is taking my calls on the topic.
Witness the collision of two types of sense of humor: the wry and subtle versus the explicit, obvious and leaden.
See, the memory of the Holocaust is exactly the contested currency. It has been turned into the signature of moment of anti-Semitism, the confirmation of the world's hostility toward Jews and the basis for an armed and aggressive posture.
However, others view the Holocaust as a sign of the dreadful power of absolutist states and the conflation of ethnicity and nation. The Germans weren't just interested in exterminating the Jews: they essentially destroyed the Gypsy population in Europe, wiped out populations of Slavs, and also took aim at the ideological position most inimical to their dream ethnic-nationhood: the Communists. We see the Holocaust not foremost as a moment of Jewish (or Gypsy or Communist or gay) history, but really as a moment in the history of modern state and of Europe. And it is in this sense that we see Israel as a continuation of this history.