Their products are hard to use and break easily, their advertisements are painfully arrogant and pretentious, everyone I know that likes Apple stuff is really stuck up about it, and the whole white aesthetic hurts my eyes. I dunno. Maybe it's just me. (I will concede, though, that the iPod + iTunes campaign with the outlines is brilliant, but that's IT! )
Some are their products are awesome. Some of them are crap and incredibly overpriced. They, as well as their users, are incredibly pretentious and arrogant. Apple has the best marketing campaigns seen for decades. They have made low quality mp3 players, that are incredibly over priced, very easy to break, with very few features. And turned them into the public standard. They are the band-aid and kleenex of mp3 players. And all due to marketing!
I was never a big fan of Apple's Mac computers, but my iPod (I wouldn't call it low quality by any means) is a lot more useful than I ever expected it to be.
Dude the cat in your avatar looks eerily similar to my own cat. WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH BECKER?
Yes but I think what Todd was getting at is that they are not very innovative. They play music AND...nothing else. There are better mp3 players out there for much less money, but Apple controls the market because of their brand name.
I think the Apple systems are great for some applications, especially artwork general graphics and editing audio and video. Something about the assumptions behind their software seems to click with the mindset of the creative folks who work in those fields, and the result is a nice marriage of user and machine. For me personally (a business user) I find Apple's terminology and wording vague and confusing, their systems illogical, and I can't use them at all. (Example: What the #$%#$!! is a "Chooser"??????? Nothing precise or logical about that term.) I realize that I'm MS-centric, but Apple machines completely defeat me - NOTHING about the OS makes sense to me and I cannot use them. I find the language and structure of PC machines much more logical and easy to navigate. I've also noticed that because PC users tend to be inside their machines a lot, they have a much higher degree of ability to open up their computers and solve hardware problems. Apples break less often, but when they do, most of the Apple users I know don't have a clue how to get inside their machine and troubleshoot - they haven't had to do it and as a result, they're pretty helpless. And Apples are badly overpriced relative to their computing power. Biggest mistake they ever made was to stop making clones which were affordable. I don't hate Apple, I just find their machines completely superfluous and irrelevant to anything I will ever need to do. I'll keep my PC, thanks.
+1 My office Mac is no more than an expensive iPod to me. The mouse accelleration curve is asinine and not modifyable. That's just number one on my list of things I hate about my Mac. (obligatory) http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/12 - Dave
Apple makes some good products, some highly overpriced products, and some... less good products. I enjoy using their quality stuff, as they are fun to use. However, I find that if I really want to dive into the computer, Linux is the way to go. When I just need to boot something up and write a paper, though, I have no qualms with using a Mac. The rabid fanboys, however, almost make me want to stop using Apple products all together.
That's the myth, I think. The reality, IMO, is that Macs were the first consumer-level computers to have decent graphics, audio and video editing software in the early days so that's what those types of users started using. As the Mac Cult grew, even the fact that you could do all these things just as well or better on a PC couldn't stifle the self-important arrogance of the artsy Mac cult members. How the hell is a one-button mouse better for anything, especially artistic applications? (rhetorical) - Dave
Mine plays video, too. And when I don't want to watch on the small screen I can also output the video into a monitor in NTSC or PAL format. I also have a few games loaded onto mine.
I'm an Apple user. I had (almost) no problem replacing the hard-drive in my PowerBook, and I'm by no means a tech person. You just need to find the correct instruction sheet (which I didn't have...) Also, you can use just about any mouse with OSX...I have a 2-button mouse (+scrollwheel) Let me know if I'm coming off as pretentious
Well, since you're a bass player, you're obviously more intelligent and capable than the average MAC user!
I noticed that for a long time the Mac users I'd worked with always referred to PCs disdainfully as "IBMs". Even during those years when IBM was not really in the PC market. "Oh, you use an IBM those are for, like, banking and insurance, aren't they?"
I would like to add that I think it's rather pretentious and arrogant to presume, like I mentioned, that you can ONLY use the one-button mouse. YOU DON'T HAVE TO USE THE ONE BUTTON MOUSE!!!
No, I LOVE apple and I am one of the fanboys. Why? Because I have never had anything go wrong with anything apple that I own, they have awesome customer support (my mom's ipod wouldn't format for PC) and my ipod plays music, that is what it is supposed to do AND I have no idea where you get the idea that they are over priced. I have never seen a more user friendly mp3 player with more space for less money. Almost every person that I know owns an ipod and no one has ever had one break, so I also don't know where you get that idea from. My macbook? Super easy to use, everything is plug in and run it, it literally takes 2 seconds to install something, no having to run through an install wizard that freezes up when ever you use it. Sorry, macs are easy to use and reliable. They might not be as cheap as a dell, but then again, they aren't as cheap as a dell. lowsound
I like Apple's machines; I think they are too expensive, but they are fine. I HATE iTunes. (Although I make money fixing it....) I HATE Apple snobbery, but I also hate PC Snobbery and Linux Snobbery.