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Should we admire or slap Apple zealots?

August 28, 2009 | By David Moore

I don’t know whether to admire the Apple zealots or slap them.

I admire their faith and their love of the undeniably beautiful and pleasing design of the Apple suite of products. They are things you want to own, caress, be seen with and hold.

The desire to slap them, on the other hand, comes from the denial of any flaws in the Apple technology. Clearly, there are flaws. Many flaws.

Let me give you an example from real life – my real life this morning. Today a couple of speakers at one of my business groups were setting up their computers for the purposes of presenting some material through a data projector.

The PC guy had a little trouble with sending the video to the data projector and we had to restart it. We got it working in short order though. The Mac guy said, “I know how to fix that. Get a Mac. Ha, ha, ha!”

The Mac guy went on to point out that 95 percent of professional speakers use Macs. This is my favourite bit, though. Right at that point in time a very large error message came up on the screen of the Mac. It had a yellow warning triangle and lots and lots of words on it.

Without acknowledging the error to us, the Mac guy fidgeted about, trying to get his Mac working again. He failed. Still he said nothing and eventually he held down the power button until such time as the thing did a forced hard shutdown.

I said nothing. There was no need to be cruel about it. Besides, I have no allegiance to a brand or a particular technology. I have a grounded view of all technology and its capability for less than flawless operation. Beware of anyone who thinks any piece of “high tech” is “perfect”.

I actually experience this sort of thing a lot with the Mac folk. The name of my business, “I Hate My PC“, is tongue-in-cheek and almost never fails to get a rise out of the Mac crowd. I let them go. There’s no point engaging them in discussion. Besides, more often than not, letting them talk usually finds them getting to a point where they start confessing all the sins of their Apple.

I find this hysterical. It usually manifests as a long monologue that starts with: “Get a Mac – they are perfect” then trails off, without punctuation or breathing, into an extensive list of Mac failures and bugbears. When they catch themselves, they add, “But they are still brilliant. You should get one!”

In this regard, they sound like parents. “I haven’t slept in weeks. You should have a baby.” Their agendas are quite similar, I guess. They want to recruit people to their cult, irrespective of logic or consideration for your circumstances. Another common thread is their desire for the experience to be perfect as viewed by all outsiders.

So why is this? I really want to know.

It could be argued that the PC folk aren’t so effusive because they are used to unreliable software and hardware. It could also be said that they are simply more level-headed about what their tools do for them and not the image the box they came in portrays.

Apple has had a rollercoaster existence and maybe that is what it is all about. Maybe it is about the ride and not the destination. The PC crowd have had a pretty calm ride in the 90 to 95 percent market share zone, while Apple have come and gone more times than John Farnham.

The people on-board with Apple love them, and long after your iPhone has burnt your ear, you’ll still be able to run your fingers along its beautiful curves and dream of what Jobsy has in store for you next.

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  • http://www.brascoebooks.com.au Leticia

    I laughed out loud at this article, I enjoyed it so much. I have to admit that when I bought my mac, the blokes in the shop said to me “you know, when you go mac you never go back”.

    Being pretty well hard-wired into my Windows machine, I was incredibly skeptical. Unbelievably though, it’s true. And while I agree that no computer is ever without its flaws, I have had nearly no downtime in over a year with my mac: while all the Windows-based machines I’ve ever owned (laptop, PC or otherwise) had major system errors that required the Repair Men within the first ten months.

    Touch wood it continues.

    But honestly there are a few basic things that bind me to MacOS now: the first is the beautiful clean interface with a single menu bar, meaning that all my apps have a broader working space; the second is the Apple software repository, all of which is free; the third is the fact that many linux-based open source programs are written to run on either MacOS or linux; the fourth is that an operating system upgrade is $39 Australian – I’ve yet to see a Microsoft product that doesn’t sting you repeatedly for even more $.

    So, while I would never claim that my mac is perfect, my experience with my mac has been so good that I would consider myself loyal to the brand now, which is pretty tight loyalty too I must admit. My experience with my Windows-based PC was like fighting an enemy constantly just to keep it happy – which did absolutely nothing for my loyalty to their brand.

    There’s probably a lesson in that!

    [Reply]

  • http://www.futurefocusgroup.com.au Simon Franklin

    I left the PC World 13 months ago. I know it was 13 months as the transformer died on that very day. No problem I thought, I bought the best Apple Care plan money could buy. Unfortunately, it didn’t cover transformers!

    That aside I have had a mixed experience. Only one or two error messages, a couple of force quits and the odd unexplainable hard reset so it passed my basic reliability test. The greatest irritation though has come from the rest of the online world. I have found to my dismay that despite heavy sales, the beautiful looks and promises many developers still don’t write things to work with Macs. From having to find widgets and fixes such as quicktime, flip4mac et al through to annoyances like the back end of website tools I have been frustrated to the point of screaming.

    I have found myself longing for windows compatibility. I can’t get simple features on my 2 year old printer to work as it’s not supported, the bootcamp program doesn’t allow programs older than 5 minutes to work so all my old windows software is in the bin and worst of all I have found myself sliding the office chair along and using an old windows laptop.

    This is certainly not the utopia described by the spotty-faced kid in the showroom who congratulated me on joining the Mac community that I would never regret. Mostly, I curse myself for falling for the hype. I should know better.

    I think I love it, just not as much as I’d hoped for. A cruel mistress.

    [Reply]

  • Doogey

    I started out in Macs from the early 1990′s as my personal computer of choice. I eventually made switch to PC’s as I was entering the market as a software developer. I made the switch for professional reasons, as the programmer market was (and is) heavily PC, so I bought a PC for a personal conputer as well.

    I lived with this PC and it’s upgrades for many years. I suffered through many bad windows OS’s, and payed out alot of money for apps, repairs, OS upgrades. I found that even though the processor speeds kept imporving, the Windows OS kept growing as well, and thus nullified and real performance gains. The thing just got to be a big drain on my time and resources.

    I got tired of being told by tech support guys at (wherever: best buy, compUSA before that) to just re-install windows every year. I also got tired of having my employer having to re-install the windows OS, or just get me a new computer ever year or two. I also got tired of the threading model of the OS, whereby prioritizing of foreground apps vs background app just plain sucked.

    The thing is just bloody unreliable…

    So, I still need to use a PC at work, but I finally got around buying a new PC, and this time I got a new Powerbook Pro. What a wonderfull experience this has been for me. And while no OS is perfect, I have had hardley any real problems with it. Mac enthusiasts are right: while they me be a little zealous, they know a good computing experiencce as well. Heed their advice!

    And yes…you are just too used to all the bad hardware and software of Windows, and don’t see the handwriting on the walls…

    [Reply]

  • Ian

    The worst type of Mac zealot is the Mac owner who runs Windows via bootcamp. Whenever there are any issues… “Bloody Windows!”

    [Reply]

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