Our city name starts with an "S" and they started a "Mac Users Group" called "SMUG".

Awesome.

Sooo true.

Genius sift you got there. =]

June 7 - June 11 is official Apple Hate Week in the USA, thanks for this contribution.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

The platform wars are getting bizarre. The level of disdain seems weird to me. Mac evangelism is also strange - and I'll admit to doing some of it.

I do not own a Macintosh but I do not actually harbor disdain for them. I wouldn't want to get stuck on one for work (though I think I could survive). The thing I will always love about Apple is the first class hardware engineering.

>> ^dag:

The platform wars are getting bizarre. The level of disdain seems weird to me. Mac evangelism is also strange - and I'll admit to doing some of it.


Let's be realistic here, dag: you're the most prolific only Apple preacher on here.

Also, since Apple produces computers (or what they pass as computers these days </quick jab>) as well as other hardware and software, this is long-past a simple console war: personally, I simply can't stand Apple marketing and the enormous praise they get from fanboys with different standards and values in consumer electronics than me.

P.S. Don't mistake that last bit for critical introspection and self-consciousness. I am still DEAD CERTAIN that MY values are better than YOURS.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

The calls of "fanboyism" are interesting - it seems like a way to marginalise and dismiss - without providing a cogent argument.

I do love Macs.

I hear people ranting a lot about what an asshole Jobs is, the "marketing", etc, etc - but the arguments rarely involve the platform itself.



>> ^EDD:

>> ^dag:
The platform wars are getting bizarre. The level of disdain seems weird to me. Mac evangelism is also strange - and I'll admit to doing some of it.

Let's be realistic here, dag: you're the most prolific only Apple preacher on here.
Also, since Apple produces computers (or what they pass as computers these days </quick jab>) as well as other hardware and software, this is long-past a simple console war: personally, I simply can't stand Apple marketing and the enormous praise they get from fanboys with different standards and values in consumer electronics than me.
P.S. Don't mistake that last bit for critical introspection and self-consciousness. I am still DEAD CERTAIN that MY values are better than YOURS.

I own a G4 TiBook (circa summer 2001). It really was the biggest waste of money I've ever spent on a piece of computer hardware, though it did remain sorta-functional (with abject babying--most of my classmates, who were less careful, had theirs literally falling apart at the seams within a few months) up until 2008 or 2009 or so. I'm a lot more pleased by my T61p from Lenovo, two and a half years into its life, though I have a few issues with it as well.

In fact, I think the TiBook cost me as much as my Lenovo and my last two desktops combined.

Yeah, the smugness of Apple is spot on. I own a number of Mac products myself, but I can attest to their hugely frustrating failures. They do not "just work". PCs are nothing to write home to Jobs about, but their consumer base doesn't consist of smug geeky hipsters who* claim superiority.

In fact, just this past week I bought an Airport Express. It's advertised as "plug and play" yet it took me nearly three hours to get the damn thing to work, and I'm not what you'd call technically ignorant.

*I hope I'm using that right. I cannot determine if it relates to the subject or object in that sentence. Man, I feel dumb.

Adding video to channels (Geek) - requested by blankfist.

My problem isn't with Apple itself, nor their obnoxious marketing; neither is it with people such as yourself who find the product satisfactory for their needs (even though I remain of the opinion that there are other products out there that would probably be better suited for you, even if they might not be of the same level of polish, because, like @gwiz665 said, "Apple sure know their polish").

What bothers me is the staggering number of people that buy the brand, not the product, because of simple conformism, and because they don't even try to evaluate their choices based on their needs/price/etc.; especially elderly people who I can see in stores or who I know (like my colleagues) won't be using and/or don't know how to use the majority of the "advanced" functions a smartphone has, just to try to be "hip" and "with the now". Also, fanboys who are above rational argument as to why a device other than one of their brand is better at a particular task/criteria (such as call audio quality, at which the original iPhone was complete rubbish). These people are, for the most part, stupid, and I despise them for their ignorance. >> ^dag:

The calls of "fanboyism" are interesting - it seems like a way to marginalise and dismiss - without providing a cogent argument.
I do love Macs.
I hear people ranting a lot about what an asshole Jobs is, the "marketing", etc, etc - but the arguments rarely involve the platform itself.

>> ^EDD:
>> ^dag:
The platform wars are getting bizarre. The level of disdain seems weird to me. Mac evangelism is also strange - and I'll admit to doing some of it.

Let's be realistic here, dag: you're the most prolific only Apple preacher on here.
Also, since Apple produces computers (or what they pass as computers these days </quick jab>) as well as other hardware and software, this is long-past a simple console war: personally, I simply can't stand Apple marketing and the enormous praise they get from fanboys with different standards and values in consumer electronics than me.
P.S. Don't mistake that last bit for critical introspection and self-consciousness. I am still DEAD CERTAIN that MY values are better than YOURS.

Heh....David and Goliath effect?

With Apple now being richer than Microsoft, I'm not sure that's as relevant anymore.

I think the thing that bothers me about apple is that flaws aren't recognised amongst their fans.

A friend of mine owns a macbook and an iphone. If he goes on any webpage with flash on it his fans spin right up. He was using a shockwave flash application recently and said his CPU was at 160%. This laptop is maybe 2 or 3 years old. The only learnt recently that unless you void your warranty by jail-breaking it - the iphone doesn't let you change the background, which seems ridiculous when on my much less sophisticated sony ericsson, I have a custom made metal gear solid theme I made myself where I can customise everything from background to tab and font colour.

That moves me on nicely to my other quibble of how locked down apple products are. 'you can view videos in AMAZING quality on your ipad'. Perhaps....but you have to convert it into some proprietary format first. The shuffle needing licensed patented headphone parts for them to actually work with the device. What's that Seric? You'd like to use your new Sennheiser PX200-II's with this product? Too bad.

I mean...yes, Windows is with it's flaws too. But I can do what I want with it. (In before linux users, I have and use cygwin, that's good enough for me ) Well...I say I can do what I want, but last time I checked - I wasn't allowed to write programs for iphone/ipad on a Windows machine T____T.

Oh snap. @EDD called @dag a conformist.

Damn, that shoe fits with painful truthfulness.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Flash does kind of blow on a Mac. I certainly recognise that Macs aren't without shortcomings. Many things are done better on a Windows computer. But for the particular types of things that I do - I feel that Macs suit me best.

I could do everything I needed on a Windows machine - after a fashion, but I don't think I could do them as well. That's my opinion and I'm sticking with it.

I do use a Windows computer everyday - BTW - at my day job.

I care very little about the argument directly. Most people who care about this argument are just marketing victims and/or pretentious twats.

I'm CONSTANTLY meeting people - often clients unfortunately - who know very little about computers or using computers, but feel very strongly that I should be using a Mac if I'm genuinely creative. And these people are actually ascribing less creativity to me in their internal assessment. I harbour contempt for anyone who expreses this opinion to me. Some people even package it in the form of advice. Beware people of the world: If you have this opinion, you're most likely a fucking pretentious twat. Honestly. It's like caring deeply about what colour lightbulb your accountant uses.

>> ^budzos:

I care very little about the argument directly. Most people who care about this argument are just marketing victims and/or pretentious twats.
I'm CONSTANTLY meeting people - often clients unfortunately - who know very little about computers or using computers, but feel very strongly that I should be using a Mac if I'm genuinely creative. And these people are actually ascribing less creativity to me in their internal assessment. It's hard to express the contempt I feel for anyone who expreses this opinion to me. Some people even package it in the form of advice. Beware people of the world: If you have this opinion, you're most likely a fucking pretentious twat. Honestly. It's like caring deeply about what colour lightbulb your accountant uses.


This is where things got really lopsided for me in regards to Macs. When I was in college in an early digital media related class they were using G4s with OS 9.1 (?) which at the time was standard (OS X had *just* come out a few months earlier). I had a portable firewire drive I would use to take projects back and forth on my PCs at home and would always get garish looks from the instructors and other students as if I was poisoning their inner sanctum.

What really got to me is that OS 9 was hardly a model of stability and there were often problems with hangs or snags yet nobody really cared about it... I would just be present for class and just do all my damn work at home when I could on the PC version of say After Effects which was comparatively much more reliable. I talked to one of the lab veterans who had been there a while and what they had was light years from the previous base of PowerMacs which were apparently guaranteed to not run for more than an hour without eating shit in some fashion.

Understandably things are much better today for Macs hardware and software wise but that year of experience forever tarnished my view of the community itself. I don't mind the equipment thats being put out even as a hardcore PC user I can't knock the unibody MacBook Pro for being a well built machine.

Some of the most vocal users just need to dial down the anti-Microsoft or anti-anything-thats-not-Apple bile, thats all. Oh by the way Endgadget users, posting with "Micro$oft" or "M$" is so 1997.