Rotten apples

[greatbear]

Many of you might believe that Apple is an elegant, well-run company behind their flashy gadgets. I think it might be more like what's pictured below, given their latest PR foofaraw.




It seems the lost iPhone saga has finally begun to spotlight Apple as being far more Big Brother-ish and anti-consumer than most tech companies, and far more worthy of such a label than Microsoft, the company that so many like to paint as a bully (but not entirely unjustified). I had traditionally balked at buying Macs over the years primarily because I didn't like paying essentially double or more for some rather average hardware, despite having a nearly flawless operating system and UI. Besides, I like rolling my own boxen, creating crazyassed machines that suit me and the way I use them. The latest crop of Macs are still nice, but fall once again under the same entirely-average-hardware-wrapped-in-shiny-for-twice-the-price non-value. Add to that the increased bullying by the company, and my respect for the whole shmegeggeh is kaput.

It'll be interesting to see how this latest episode plays out.

Comments

[bigredpaul.livejournal.com]

Most people aren't like you, don't know anything about computers, and just want things to be easy and work. This is the genius of Apple - they make stuff that works, it beautiful to look at, and they have top-notch customer support.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

This assumes that every Windows PC is not as usable, reliable or doesn't come with decent support. Granted, some PC setups are absolute nightmares. But being that I work with all sorts of computers, I know my fair share of Apple machines that are just as horrid. I have no problems recommending Macs to people looking for something that just works. I also have no problems recommending PCs for the same reason, to people looking for a better value and a more versatile machine.

Apple's "genius" is more marketing these days than before. Not everything is "magical" or "revolutionary". It's something that's been done before by others, just refined, made shiny, and sold at a premium.

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

I read about this through tellemann earlier today and it does not surprise me at all, while Bill Gates was uber competitive, Steve Jobs makes him seem tame in comparison IMO.

[cpj.livejournal.com]

I dunno. It seems to me like Jason Chen committed a felony, and his actions can potentially cost Apple hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue. I think any other company in the same situation would have done the same thing.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I will agree with you. Only issue with this latest episode is the number of times the unit was attempted to be returned to Apple (pre and post Chen), with no one actually owning up to the snafu until it became clear that it was made public, then Apple wanted it back in no uncertain terms.

My reason for this post is not to skewer or defend Apple in this situation, but use it to highlight just how intensely corporate this company has become, all the while selling itself as the think different/rebel/free spirit/perpetually green/etc company. While this has been unfolding, Apple had used its purchase of streaming media company Lala solely to kill off the service to eliminate competition for a possible streaming iTunes service. It's only going to get worse, especially if the fanboys keep agreeing the company does no wrong.

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you realise this ... you have a whole massive amount of knowledge and skills and time and money invested that allow you to build and fix your own computers, you enjoy doing that and I don't know but expect you are probably good at it. I don't have all that, and don't want to spend a couple of years learning what I would need to even begin to have that kind of knowledge. To me it is *absolutely worth it* to have a machine that doesn't crash every 3 hours like my last windows machine did right out of the box (the mac I bought to replace it paid for itself in billable hours gained in TWO MONTHS); and by and large the macs just do what I want them to. I am perfectly happy with my toaster and don't see the worth of me becoming an electrical engineer so that I can turn a general purpose machine into a toaster. Does that make any sense?

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Makes perfect sense, to a point. I've had to play unwitting IT tech for lots of folks I know with PC issues. A lot of these problems stem from far too much 'crapware' loaded into typical Windows machines out of the box. The big brands like Dell, HP, IBM are the worse for this, with consumer boxes being far worse than business PCs. All these silly control panels, free offers, and other bloat is usually the first thing that goes when I get hold of someone's new PC. Apple has a head start out of the box without all this junk installed.

In the case of anecdotal evidence, the last fully-assembled PC I got was an ASUS lappy. A rather impressive 17" multimedia computer, all the bells and whistles, and Windows Vista. The latter I was a bit apprehensive about, but at least it was the SP1 version. Upon turning on the PC everything worked. It has yet to crash. Any application software I run on it has yet to crash. I can leave it running for a month at a time without a reboot and it keeps on going. It was the functional equivalent of a 17" MacBook Pro at the time. It's a lovely machine that I had recommended to others. The best part is it cost only 1050 bux. Less than half the price of entry of the MBP. Would I like to have a MacBook Pro? Hell yeah. I just can't justify the purchase. I would not be gaining anything, and the majority of the apps I run are for Windows. My only real 'need' for a Mac would be to keep my skills on the machine honed at home.

The point of all this is that one does not need to become some sort of IT guru to run Windows successfully. I still recommend a Mac to anyone who says to me that they want a PC that they dont have to worry about. I do tell them that any potential hardware repairs are going to be more costly than a commodity PC if the need does arise, and if they are used to having typical Windows apps, they need to make some changes.

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

when I used to write software, I would never have even considered buying a toaster, but now that I'm a toast-based lifeform ...