Apple I Hate You or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mac
››Your computers are ridiculously overpriced, anyone beyond your power users are paying for an accessory they saw in Vice that might look cute next to their Vespa.
››People that swear by you cannot give me one good reason why I should use a Mac instead of a PC, and yes I know the reasons, but these groupies don’t.
››I bought my 60g iPod photo in August and you’ve made it a dinosaur already. I may as well bury it beside my Newton.
››Yuppie college kids have sweet PowerBooks they will never use for more than email and wordprocessing, because mommy and daddy bought them one. (Attention Yuppies: You may redeem yourself by donating your PowerBook to me.)
››You release new products too fast. Once everyone has an iPod, what’s their motivation to spend $400 on a new one? Maybe you should think about cooling and noise before cramming your newest iMac into a 2″ deep space. These things sound like they’re about to take off.
››Also it really pisses people (me) off when they buy something you just came out with, and you redesign it a month later and make them look like they have a Yugo to everyone else’s Bentley.
››You’re in cahoots with DRM, why don’t you let me worry about whether or not what I’m doing with my content is legal.
Yeah, I’m jealous. I wish I were rolling in cash so I could pretend Apple’s ridiculous price tags didn’t matter. But isn’t a fundamental of good design accessibility? What good is all Apple’s design if they can’t bring it to the masses? Where is this extra money going? It certainly isn’t to service or support. In fact, I pity anyone who buys one of your machines before you switch to Intel, for the same reason I’m pissed you removed the remote jack from the iPod. What happens a year from now when I need a new iTrip, I have to shell out another $400 so I can get something compatible with the investment I made?
Also, why would I spend $400 on a portable video player that can only play about two hours (for the 30g) of video when a lot of movies are three hours? Your PowerBooks are still running on a G4 processor! Why should I drop three grand on one when I can get a faster computer for half that price? I’d be better off to buy an iMac and duct tape a handle to it! And it really really makes me mad how many people insist on the iPod as being the best possible digital audio player, without being able to give me a single reason why it’s a better player than another besides “It looks pretty.” I bought this thing because nothing else held 60g. Make an 80g, and make it flash based so the battery barely needs charged, and I’ll consider giving you more of my money.
Lastly, why would I want this stupid FrontRow thing when Airport doesn’t support video and you don’t have a tv tuner built in. If I’m expected to use this as my media center I want it to be able to send video anywhere I want, and I want it to have some Tivo equivalent capabilities.
This is similar to my knock on Apple for years: they always outdate their users within a year and they don’t have a migration path to new software (read older OSx versions to OSX). They are all about having their customers constantly buy new stuff from them. They are contributing mightily to the landfills with their strategy. Little wonder then that the vast majority of the world (90%) uses PC’s and Microsoft OS or a UNIX OS. Stability!
No kidding! I really think OSX is a superior OS, and way more user friendly. My grandma could use a mac right out of the box. They’re just too inaccessible, and you said it, unstable.
The mini mac was an absolute joke. Oooooh a $500 computer. Well the IBM I use for development was only $600, it came with a keyboard and mouse, and is better in about a 1,000 ways than than the mini mac. What average user wants to drop $1500 for sub-par hardware? And if it breaks, it’s not like they can take it to the local Best Buy for a tune-up. If they lowered their prices they really could give Microsoft a run for their money.
I’ve got kind of a love-hate relationship with Apple too. PCs were kind of crappy until 1992, when the 486DX2-66 and VL-Bus machines came out and started to seriously spank the Mac. Since then the OS has come up to speed also, mostly, though I really like OS-X. Conceptually…it still feels kind of piggy to me.
These days I really like the design that Apple has…I don’t care if they come out with newer designs, because I generally still like the old ones for what they are. I still have an original bondi-blue iBook (my first Apple purchase since 1987), and it’s cool.
I only seriously started thought about switching to Mac after getting a new HP laptop for my Dad, and being ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTED with the amount of marketing BS installed on it. It was like the desktop was covered by writhing parasites. Ugh. Plus, watching him try to figure out how to install something on his own with the typical windows installer was painful, as were there awful quality of the peripheral drivers. Made me mad, it did.
Dave, it’s funny you should mention that. I just got an HP printer, and it came bundled with so much garbage, it was unbelievable. You know Lexmark used to bundle spyware with their drivers?
One thing I’ll give Apple, pretty much any Apple product I’ve ever used, you can plug it in and it works. No messing with drivers, no nothing. That’s why I say it’d be the perfect computer for my grandma.