The Cult of Apple
You want to know why I dislike Apple?
In large part, obviously, it’s because they’re made of closed-source nubbery1 and both developer- and user-hostile practices. And because they’re the largest pusher of DRM in the industry right now, thanks to iTunes. And because they market mediocre products as being the Holy Grail and Excalibur rolled into one, and sell them at enormously inflated prices.
However, Microsoft does all of that (much of it to a much lesser extent than Apple, of course, but because of their monopoly position, the effects are felt much more keenly), and shockingly, I dislike Microsoft less than I dislike Apple.
Why?
Because of the fanboys.
Case in point, this.
When I first saw it, I thought it was a joke. Perhaps they finally realised how ridiculous they were being, and they decided to parody themselves (as others have done before). Seriously, “thinnovation”? “Rethinking conventions”? “Mobile computing has a new standard”?
Unfortunately, they seem to be serious.
Yes, it’s thinner than other laptops (because what we really needed was flimsier laptops). It also doesn’t have an optical drive, it’s about two-thirds as fast as the average laptop on the market nowadays, it has a 13.3-inch screen2, and it costs well over three times what you’d pay if you got the equivalent specs in a PC laptop.
The only slightly interesting thing about it seems to be the SSD option, only it adds $1000 to the price.
Even if they didn’t intend this as a joke, it should be obvious that it is one all the same.
Except that the fanboys are eating it up. Just like they did for the iPhone. Just like they did for the iPod.3
All of these are overpriced, mediocre products with better, cheaper alternatives, but they’re popular because they have the Mac logo stamped into them.
It’s sad when even people who are famous for their intelligence and rationality fall victim to this fanboyism.
Though the fanboys are often fond of whining about people complaining about the price (which is a nice tactic, since there’s the implicit accusation that if you don’t like Apple, you must be too poor to afford their stuff), this isn’t even primarily about that. I wouldn’t use one of these if it were given to me for free (I’d probably sell it on eBay and buy six real computers with the money). It’s just a shitty crippled laptop.
And don’t even get me started on the software.
Yes, everything “just works”. Everything is supposed to “just work”. Even Windows can generally manage to make everything “just work”, and it’s expected to run on much more disparate hardware. Fuck, even Linux “just works” pretty much all of the time (at least the distros aimed at the general public). You don’t get bonus points for having everything “just work”, especially not when you determine entirely what hardware it “just works” with.
It’s the least we expect.
Now, it’s not all bad. Mac OS is an alright OS for people who are afraid of computers, and people who are a bit slow, and very small children. If you’re the type of person who needs a Fisher-Price computer, Macs are an alright choice (though certainly not the best; maybe they were ten years ago, but not anymore).
Apple used to be a decent company. In the late ’70s, they were great. In the ’80s and early-to-mid ’90s, they certainly didn’t suck hugely. Somewhere between then and now, though, they’ve become a profit-obsessed corporation that makes Microsoft looks friendly.
The problem is just that the older userbase apparently hasn’t noticed (I’m not sure why; perhaps because Apple is an identity4 as well as a brand to many people, so they tend to turn a blind eye to its failings), and with the iPod, a lot of mouth-breathing 14-year-olds were brought in.
Not that there aren’t any Windows fanboys. Last time I checked there were at least four of them (most of them VB “developers”), and they’re at least as obnoxious as the Apple kids. The difference is just that they’re generally ridiculed, and nobody really pays any attention to them.
Linux and the others5 have fanboy issues as well, of course (and Ubuntu and the like are making that worse), but at least they generally won’t bend over while handing over their wallets and looking smug for doing so for the glory of Tux. (We’re just smug because we’re actually better than you.)
Anyway. I forget if I had a point, so my point will be this: I won’t hate you for using a Mac6, but for fuck’s sake, stop pretending your Fisher-Price computer is the best thing ever just because you’re afraid of leaving your comfort zone.
1 But still OSS advocates generally tend to see Apple users as an ally in the War against Microsoft. It boggles the mind.
2 My mom’s $400 Dell has a 15.4-inch screen, and it’s not that much heavier than the MacBook Air.
3 The iPod in particular bothers me, because it actually forced better products out of the market through the magic of DRM-based vendor lock-in iTunes. There are still very good MP3 players out there, but the market is certainly poorer for Apple having entered it.
4 Cult.
5 I haven’t seen any Plan 9 fanboys yet, though. Does Plan 9 even have users?
6 Though I will think less of you for it, especially if you’re old enough to know better and able to make your own decisions.
lolife said,
January 16th, 2008 at 10:44 pm
…slow clap…
Your passion and humor are both admirable. I still maintain you miss the point. Apple makes very well designed and very well engineered stuff. They are not alone but they are consistently one of the leaders in design+engineering in the computer hardware marketplace. They lead and others follow. You know, in your heart, that the Cult of the Mac cannot be explained away as irrational.
They revolutionized the personal computer, legal music buying, portable music players, the phone, all areas where Microsoft and other come a-copying soon after. The Zune? The new iPhone look-alikes. All the various iTunes ripoffs. Face it: Apple actually innovates. The deserve fans. They are not perfect but they do stand apart.
Plus I can do anything on my Mac you can do on your Linux box, including running Linux, and I can do a whole bunch of other stuff you can’t do on your Linux box. That’s why dorks like Macs, ’cause they can do everything.
Just get a mac and drink the Kool-Aid fer Christ’s sake.
Cairnarvon said,
January 16th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
That’s code for “shiny”, isn’t it?
This isn’t 1984 anymore. And even in 1984:
Xerox beat them to their “innovative GUI” by about a decade.
I hope you’re joking.
How the fuck do you figure that?
The fact that Microsoft is unoriginal doesn’t make Apple innovative.
Still, even the Zune was more innovative than the iPod, with its squirting thing. Just a pity it was badly implemented.
There’s nothing in the iPhone that hasn’t been around for years already. If there are look-alikes, that because they’re trying to cash in on the fact that there are a lot of fanboys who can’t keep up with Apple’s ballooning prices anymore, not on any new technological niche Apple discovered.
If you’re ignorant of history, yes, I suppose it might seem that way.
The fact that you can run Linux on Apple hardware says more about Linux than it does about Apple.
Mac OS is a Unix, so it’s hard to cripple completely, but it doesn’t help that it goes out of its way to keep the messy bits from its users. This greatly reduces the power and usability of the OS for anyone except grandmothers.
Hah.
echomikeromeo said,
January 17th, 2008 at 4:50 am
Apple definitely stole their shit from Xerox.
That aside, I like the desktop environment, I like the Unix kernel (hell, I’m slow, and not having to learn a completely new terminal is nice), I like some of the Mac-bundled programs like the iLife stuff. I’m one of those few people who actually likes iTunes as a music organizer, though I certainly never use the “Store”. (Well, actually, I think I might have when I got a gift card a couple times, but that doesn’t count.)
I think I can safely say I don’t need a Fisher Price computer. I can get by on BSD without a GUI if I have to. But I don’t have to; I can use the five-year-old’s desktop. It’s more fun than the Windows desktop, anyway, oozing corporateness as that thing does. And yes, things “just work” on other systems as well - but I have not had nearly as many problems with my iBook as I’ve had with my old Dell laptop running Windows, and it’s been hard sometimes to get things to “just work” in Linux or BSD, especially as someone who isn’t innately good with operating systems and has taken the better part of a year to become even conversant in Linux.
I’m never going to be totally open-source; even on my Linux machine I’m not. If I’m going to use a corporate entity’s closed system, I would rather pick Apple’s. I’m not defending the company, just myself and my choice.
And it’s shiny. That’s definitely a plus.
echomikeromeo said,
January 17th, 2008 at 6:52 am
I forgot to add that the new thin laptop whatsit is lame, because any computer without an optical drive is pretty retarded.
And disclaimer: everything I’ve said here was said after 14-16 hours spent almost entirely on my feet.
Coren said,
January 17th, 2008 at 9:47 am
I’ll call Barbie over to read this, she’ll get all worked up again (I have similar conversations with her once in a while, mostly simply to see her pissed off
).
For users who don’t want to put some time or effort into maintaining their system, I think a Mac is an ideal choice. I’ve head to clean out half a dozen Windows systems used by clueless people for over six months and it was quite an appalling experience. A Mac would have been clean. Linux, in my experience, is still not quite ready for clueless users. Not even Ubuntu. We’re getting there, though.
For users who at least have some clue what they’re doing, a Mac probably “works” but strikes me as ridiculously expensive and somewhat limiting compared to a Linux system.
Gamers are stuck with Windows anyway, but if I’d have to choose between dual-booting Windows and OSX on an Intel Mac or Windows and Linux on regular hardware, there’s no way I’d ever go for the Mac solution. The hardware choices on Macs are still ridiculously limited. And their pricing is beyond ridiculous.
Let me give an example of the price difference. I tried reconstructing my dream system on the Mac Pro configuration page. My own system would cost me less than 2100€ including the OS, the 24″ screen etc. The same system as a Mac (the processor would be a slightly more expensive Xeon but the screen would be an inch smaller, which just about makes up for it) would set me back 3900€!
There is no way you can justify this kind of price difference. Not with user-friendliness, not with stellar support. I could probably pay someone to take care of my non-Mac system for years with those extra 1800€.
As for shininess, I can build a PC that’s equally shiny if I take and extra 100€ off that 1800€ budget. Sure, I’d have to build it myself. I could also buy a fancy Alienware PC with similar specs and still pay 1000€ less than for a Mac.
As for iTunes, I don’t like it because it brought mediocre quality DRM-infested music files to the mainstream. However, I do think iTunes brought an impulse the industry needed. iTunes and iPods set in motion a whole new generation of portable media players, some of them better and supporting higher quality DRM-free files. I’m not saying Apple invented media players, but they certainly sped up the mainstream acceptance a great deal.
Nowadays they’re also selling DRM-free higher quality files on iTunes, but last time I checked you had to pay extra. Haw.
To Apple’s defence, their DRM system could have been a lot worse and the quality of the files is probably good enough for the regular person listening to his/her iPod on the bus.
I don’t see anything particularly revolutionary about the iPhone, but I haven’t really looked into it.
So my main problem with Apple is that they sell reasonably decent but ridiculously overpriced stuff and that their users still go “ooh” and “aah” over it, bend over, empty their wallets and then have the guts to tell non-Mac users that “Macs are better than you in every possible way”.
Coren said,
January 17th, 2008 at 9:48 am
(assume I edited out all errors in my comment with the invisible edit button)
Cairnarvon said,
January 17th, 2008 at 11:54 am
Except that it’s crippled and awkward. People mistake form for function too often.
Most OSes on the market use Unix kernels. And most of them are free and run on things besides Macs.
(Incidentally, the fact that Mac is so paranoid about running Mac OS on anything but their own hardware should tell you enough about what kind of company they are. They’re trying to enforce vendor lock-in in their own cute little way.)
Anyway, the shell is completely independent from the kernel. Bash has been ported to Windows, even.
I should write a series of blog posts about why Unix sucks, as well. People have beaten me to it, but it’s in need of updating.
I’ve never understood people who want their picture-editing and music-playing software to add another layer of bullshit between them and the filesystem. Keeping track of files is what the filesystem is for. All this archiving does is take control away from you and add to bloat.
I’m not sure how you could possibly try to argue Macs ooze less corporateness than PCs.
At best, you could say it’s a different kind of corporateness, with Windows trying to be a tool for corporations, while Macs try to make their users tools for corporations.
As for the “just working”, again, Macs have more in common with game consoles than they do with real computers. They can completely control what hardware they work with, and generally refuse to work with anything else. Microsoft’s Xbox OS “just works” as well.
You might as well get a thin client to a system managed by someone else, if that’s the sort of thing you need. It wouldn’t surprise me if that were the next step.
Cairnarvon said,
January 17th, 2008 at 11:55 am
It’s not just the edit button that’s invisible, apparently. >.>
I’ll see about finding a plug-in that lets people edit their comments, actually.
Edit: Oh, your comment got caught in the spam filter. Sorry about that.
I disagree. For the vast majority of users on mainstream hardware, Ubuntu is a much better choice. It’s not any less userfriendly than Macs, it’s much easier to upgrade (and upgrades are free), and it’s much more secure.
Not to mention that if they do need someone else’s help, they can get someone knowledgeable without requiring him to spend half an hour getting used to the interface, since he’ll also be using a Linux.
The main problem with Linux now isn’t usability, but drivers. Many hardware manufacturers still refuse to publish their specs, and a lot of even relatively common hardware ends up without good drivers. My Broadcom wireless card is stuck using a proprietary driver, because Broadcom is made of cocks. It works, but it won’t ship with a vanilla Ubuntu.
The community is definitely catching up, and I don’t think this is a problem with Linux so much as it is with the manufacturers, but it’s a problem all the same. However, all it means is that the average person will need some help installing their OS, which they’d need anyway, so it’s not a huge hurdle anymore.
(And of course, with companies like Dell offering Linux systems now, you’re pretty much guaranteed all of the hardware will have working drivers anyway.)
http://www.winehq.org/
The iPod was already a sub-standard MP3 player when it came out. The only reason it was popular was because of the Apple logo. The reason it stayed popular after that was because of vendor lock-in through DRM.
The iTunes store only got away with its DRM schemes because of the fallout from Napster. By the time people realised how shitty it really was, their entire music collection was already tied up.
There was certainly no shortage of MP3 players when the iPod came out, and it was inevitable they’d continue to improve and become more widely used as the technology involved got cheaper. If anything, the iPod slowed the whole process down by lowering the standard for quality and maintaining inflated prices.
They could have people come around to shoot you in the neck if they suspected you might be listening to music, sure. That doesn’t excuse anything.
Coren said,
January 17th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
I do understand that, actually. The Windows filesystem (because that’s the only one I know well enough) is not good specialized enough to give me all the functions I need when working with my music files. I’ve got my music in folders by artist and subfolders by album but what if I want to play only those albums I have in surround? Or only albums in a specific genre? Or only albums I purchased in the last month? Doing this by simply using the filesystem would be hopelessly complicated.
Which is why I use foobar2000. Does everything I want and more with a minimum of bloat.
Cairnarvon said,
January 17th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Not really. Even NTFS supports that kind of metadata.
This is a problem with your software, not a fundamental limitation of the filesystem.
Coren said,
January 17th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Kay. Then they just need to make the software better. And strip down media players to their absolute minimum or the whole thing would be pointless anyway. I doubt you’d be able to make a player even less bloated than bare players like foobar, though. Removing the Media Library function wouldn’t make all that much of a difference, in this case. Monsters like iTunes or WMP are another problem altogether, though.
Coren said,
January 17th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
I agree, actually. Driver hassle and general incompatibilities is the main reason why I don’t think Ubuntu is ready for the clueless user.
And yes, you keep mentioning Wine, but from what I gather from various forums and from Wine’s very own Application DB, I’m very sceptical that it’s a decent alternative for any moderately serious gamer. But I’ll be sure to try it for myself once I get that new system built.
Cairnarvon said,
January 17th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
The average user won’t ever be setting that up himself, though, any more than he’ll be dicking around with the Windows drivers CD-ROM or downloading Windows drivers off the internets.
And even if he is, with Ubuntu it’s just a matter of checking a box in the Restricted Drivers Management. That will get him adequate (if not awesome, often) functionality 99% of the time.
And the point is moot if you’re careful about picking hardware from decent manufacturers, of course.
echomikeromeo said,
January 17th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
I have had pretty much zero luck with Wine so far - but that might be due to my own hardware limitations.
What I meant about Macs seeming less “corporate” is that Windows is designed to be used in an office. I prefer it when my bedroom *doesn’t* resemble an office, personally.
Oh, did I mention the most important reason why I use a Mac? Because it’s the brand my parents buy.
Saythings said,
January 17th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
i like shiny things.
I also thought it was funny that my ibook has a great big fisher price sticker across the front of it.
(from one of last year’s fisher price jobs, of course)
6 years ago, a mac was the best choice for video editing, which was what I bought my (used) powerbook for. When, 4 years later, it finally packed it in (after 3 trips around the world, and far more abuse than a laptop ought to get), it was familiarity, comfort and respect for its durability that kept me a Macfag.
I’m sure that now there are really good PC-based video editors, and I don’t do that so much anymore anyway, so it’s no longer a valid arguement, but it was.
And did I mention I like shiny things?
Mao said,
January 17th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
Hey, Cairn and I actually agree on something. To all those craving thinnivation: save 800 bucks and buy a macbook if you are that entrenched in OSX. Same specs, less price. I don’t think the extra inch or so will kill you. Or, better yet, buy a laptop that has the same specs as a macbook but costs 300 dollars less. Compromising performance and complexity for shiny and simplicity doesn’t work. Find a balance.
Saythings said,
January 18th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Because with that $300 you save, you can buy a can of chrome spraypaint.
Mmmmm, shiny.
lolife said,
January 20th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Let me word this so you can agree, Cairnarvon: Apple brings innovation to the marketplace.
The iPhone IS an innovation. I know you are smart enough to see that. For example, every phone-based web browser sucked ass prior to the iPhone.
iTunes was the first viable non-pirated downloadable music store on the web. You’ve ignored the fact, too, that Apple is anti-DRM except they know they don’t have a store without content providers. Apple is driving people to DRM-free content as fast as they can.
Everyone on earth, practically, has an iPod. A sign to you that it sucks? C’mon…
Macs don’t just run unix, they also run Microsoft, Adobe and Apple software. I love Linux but for someone like me, it is a worse choice for an OS.
You still sound to me like someone who has not spent very much time in front of a Mac. Ignorance does not create the best reviews. You’re just mad that we like our Macs. I’m not mad that you like Linux.
Cairnarvon said,
January 20th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone
The fact that you mistake chrome for functionality in a cell phone browser doesn’t make the iPhone’s crippled Safari implementation not suck ass. A lot of cell phone browsers have issues, but the iPhone’s isn’t much of an improvement.
Add to that the closed platform (which Apple would only very reluctantly open months after the initial release, when it turned out not even most fanboys would put up with their shit), the exclusive contract with AT&T, the repeated bricking of unlocked phones, and the price, and, well…
MP3.com never existed, amirite? And it wasn’t the only one.
Keep telling yourself that. Apple is a saint and it’s really just the big meanies at the RIAA forcing them to do it.
Everyone on Earth, practically, runs Windows. What’s your point?
It’s hardly the first time a sub-par product has forced better ones into obscurity, or out of the market entirely. As long as it’s just barely adequate, the ignorant will stick with it.
I can run Microsoft and Adobe software on my computer. I don’t, because better alternatives exist.
As for Apple software, I’ve yet to see a single piece of software that doesn’t have better alternatives and isn’t just chrome.
“Jesus loves you anyway. I will pray for you.”
Thanks for proving my point about fanboys. People like you are impossible to satirise.
echomikeromeo said,
January 21st, 2008 at 6:03 am
Cairnarvon, I actually find myself agreeing with all that. The point where we differ is that I am a slave to all things shiny.
Anonymous said,
January 24th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
> Now, it’s not all bad. Mac OS is an alright OS for people who are afraid of computers, and people who are a bit slow, and very small children. If you’re the type of person who needs a Fisher-Price computer, Macs are an alright choice (though certainly not the best; maybe they were ten years ago, but not anymore).
Oh, you troll, you.
Congrats, you just proved you never tried to use OS X seriously and that you eat Apple’s marketing all up. Despite of what those horrible ads try to tell you, OS X is a TERRIBLE choice for new users. They’ll want to run some program they just bought on a store, it won’t run and they won’t know why.
OS X “IS” UNIX. It’s up there with AIX, HP-UX and other real Unices. Something Linux never will be. Not to mention that every single program you can run on Linux, I can run on OS X as well. Don’t get me wrong, I love Linux on the server, but I enjoy being able to run both proprietary applications (Adobe and Microsoft) and everything Linux/BSD can run as well on the same OS, with the bonus of not having to struggle to get accelerated graphic drivers or WiFi working.
Also, yes. The iPhone sucks, the MacBook Air is overpriced hype and I dislike the direction this company is taking. OS X is the only decent thing they make, it saddens me that Apple is neglecting its only good product, hyping crap and trying to pass wrong messages that only hurt their image.
If you’re a programmer or a sysadmin and you’re able to ignore the fanboys, OS X is the best OS for you. Without a doubt.
Cairnarvon said,
January 24th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Mac OS X may be certified Unix, but that doesn’t mean all that much. The certification test suite is broken and incomplete, and in the end it’s mostly just a brand name nowadays.
It’s true that it has much of the power of Unix hidden beneath the chrome (and I do mean hidden), but it’s also true that it’s closed-source and, contrary to what Apple likes to believes, far from bug-free. If something’s broken, you’re stuck with it until Apple decides to get around to fixing it, and when they eventually do, you’ll generally be paying for it as well.
As for graphics and wifi drivers, like I said, that is indeed the biggest problem Linux still has to tackle, but it’s mostly a problem with the hardware manufacturers, not with Linux itself, and indeed can be avoided entirely if you’re at all careful about picking your hardware.
It’s not that hard for Mac OS to include drivers that are guaranteed to work with the hardware, since they also get to decide what hardware Mac OS will run on. Linux and BSD (and, to be fair, Windows) are expected to run on much more disparate hardware.
You cannot make the case that programmers or sysadmins are better off with OS X, especially not “without a doubt”. You might be able to make it for graphic designers who’ve been trained on nub software and can’t be bothered to get used to open source alternatives, but that’s about it.
Anonymous said,
January 24th, 2008 at 10:44 pm
> If something’s broken, you’re stuck with it until Apple decides to get around to fixing it
So? Are you telling me that you would fix a bug in the Linux kernel or in libc if you found it? No, you wouldn’t.
Over half of the applications I use daily are open source. The first thing I do when I log on is to open a terminal. Installing open source software is as easy as compiling from source tarball, or, if you want a package manager, you just have to Google for MacPorts (if you want something that behaves like BSD’s ports system) or fink (if you like apt-get).
> It’s true that it has much of the power of Unix hidden beneath the chrome (and I do mean hidden)
Haha, hidden? It’s as hidden as your average Ubuntu default installation. Nothing stops you from editing config files directly, in the case of software with Unix roots, like Apache, Samba, MySQL, vim, emacs, etc, etc, they’re even *in the same path*. Hell, I could run KDE on top of OS X if I wanted (yes, it works).
But it’s ok, you clearly never tried to use OS X beyond poking icons around in Finder. It’s not really your fault, really. I blame Apple for their stupid, shitty elitist marketing that only appeal to people who only drink Starbucks.
OS X acts very much like a BSD system with a really nice GUI and proprietary vendor support. Despite its flaws (it does have flaws, I’m not even going to bother to deny it. Some inexcusable that should be fixed right away, but the same could be said for every OS), it’s still the best Unix-like OS for desktop usage. As long as you’re not a FSF freak, that is. Why do you think you see so many BSD geeks with MacBooks? Because they’re generally more open minded people who can see through Apple’s bullshit.
I really do hate the way Apple markets OS X, it doesn’t make their product any justice at all. I agree with you on all those points, I hate the hype, the overpriced useless products, the “iLife”, “iPod” and “It Just Works” “lifestyle” that makes fanboys cream their pants, the “cult” created around a brand that makes zealots feel like they’re part of some “ultra elitist secret club of fun”. I could go on, in fact, if I wanted to make a “I hate Apple” blog post, I could write a lot more than you.
But honestly, don’t say OS X is only for “grandmas, children and graphic designers” without trying it from the point of view of a Unix geek. That’s like saying “Windows is only for stupid gamers” or that “Linux is only for hippies who have long beards and don’t bathe.” I use Linux, Windows and OS X daily, and I prefer OS X for regular usage. When I used Linux, I ended up switching between Linux and Windows too much. I don’t feel that need anymore, other than when I want to play certain games (or when I’m forced to use stuff like Visual Studio, sigh).
Cairnarvon said,
January 24th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
If it bothered me enough I would. Hasn’t happened yet, but having the option is certainly nice.
And even if I wouldn’t, there’s a massive community out there that would, and often does very quickly once a bug’s been reported. Apple, on the other hand, is notoriously slow when it comes to fixing bugs (hence the necessity of the Month of Apple Bugs), and is prone to calling what should just be service packs new releases and charging out the nose for them.
I have no love for Ubuntu either, though I do use it on one of my machines.
Conceded. If you look at the OS through the command line, it’s Unix-like enough to be useful.
Still, for day-to-day use, OS X’s GUI, which is the thing most people like to rave over, gets in the way far more often than it helps.
You can run GNOME on top of Windows as well. It doesn’t excuse the default GUI.
I don’t. Do you?
I’d dislike OS X far less if Apple wasn’t so paranoid about having people only run it on and with Apple hardware. That suggests it’s far less robust than an OS should be.
And the fact that it’s not open source is a significant disadvantage, especially since Apple’s developers seem focused on fancy GUI effects more than on actual functionality and security.
I’ll concede that as an OS, it’s probably good enough (but really, so is Windows, if you add a decent shell), but not that it’s better than other OSes available, or that it’s worth what Apple charges for it.
(Also, what’s the deal with /prog/ people and legitimate comments? If I’d used a /b/ meme in my theme, I’d have been DOSed fifty times over by now, but both /prog/rammers that have found my blog since the theme change have been surprisingly civil. I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me, but it does.)
lolife said,
January 26th, 2008 at 4:49 am
Well, Steve Jobs said:
“Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.”
Sounds to me like the problem is not at Apple.
Cairnarvon said,
January 26th, 2008 at 4:56 am
Is that why other stores do manage it?
The RIAA and its ilk are despicable, but Apple isn’t a victim, it’s a co-conspirator and an enabler. You know as well as I do that if Apple pressured the industry to provide DRM-free music, they would.
Trying to dodge responsibility by blaming the victim is disgusting.
lolife said,
January 27th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
What do you think Jobs was doing with that letter? Did you read it? He was pressuring them to provide DRM-free music and soon after iTunes was able to start offering DRM-free music. You must have been very happy with Apple at that point, right?
To be clear: Apple is not a saint. They make money by selling stuff. They are not socialists. They want to get people on their proprietary technology. I agree with you on that. But to expect Apple to run their business like GNU is naive. Apple is no worse and probably much better than other companies its size.
And PS– scientists, engineers and system admins are using Macs more and more. That is, of course, because they are stupid fanboys, right? How convincing to you think that argument is? Our Macs can do everything your linux box can do and then some. That is a fact. Oh, and here’s the source: http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/
Cairnarvon said,
January 27th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Did you read the date on it? How long had Apple been running iTunes at the moment?
It’s a token gesture because even fanboys were starting to complain, nothing more.
Why is that? Are you suggesting the OSS business model doesn’t work? If so, I suggest you lurk moar.
Or is this just an implicit admission of the fact that Jobs is a douchebag?
Wishing does not make it so. Apple has been consistently less ethical about its business practices in the past decade than even Microsoft.
And even if they weren’t “the other kids are doing it too!” is not an excuse.
By more and more do you mean less and less? At one point Apple was pretty much the only real option for personal computers for people who needed more than BASIC, and look where they are now.
And Windows can do everything your Apple can do and then some. The important part is how it does it.
You may think your Kool-Aid joke in your first comment was just a joke, but it’s becoming clearer and clearer that it is, in fact, just the sad truth.