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The Wrath of the Apple Tribe
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Mar 22, 2008 11:38 PM
from the blame-it-on-eve dept.
from the blame-it-on-eve dept.
Narrative Fallacy writes "If you've ever written about Apple products with even a hint of negativity, you'll appreciate Salon's excerpt from Farhad Manjoo's True Enough, about why the Apple tribe is so rabid. 'There are many tribes in the tech world: TiVo lovers, Blackberry addicts, Palm Treo fanatics, and people who exhibit unhealthy affection for their Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners,' writes Manjoo. 'But there is no bigger tribe, and none more zealous, than fans of Apple, who are infamous for their sensitivity to slams, real or imagined, against the beloved company.' Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg has even coined a name for the phenomenon — the 'Doctrine of Insufficient Adulation.' 'If I see the world as all black and you see the world as all white and some person comes along and says it's partially black and partially white, we both are going to be unhappy,' says psychologist Lee Ross at Stanford University. 'You think there are more facts and better facts on your side than on the other side. The very act of giving them equal weight seems like bias. Like inappropriate evenhandedness.'"
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I blame it on Apple... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, market a product as "stylish", "hip" and "different", and you'll raise a troupe of people to whom presenting themselves as different is pretty much their only end. I personally find it one of the most disgusting facets of consumerist capitalism.
Re:I blame it on Apple... (Score:5, Funny)
Ooo, someone forgot to take their "Think Different" pills this morning, didn't they?
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Re:I blame it on Apple... (Score:5, Funny)
'Cuz I'm too drunk to remember their current slogan, whatever the hell it is. I know there's something folksy about the Macbook Air music, and U2 sings Vertigo for old iPods, and there's a funny "Hi, I'm a PC and I'm a Mac" commercial campaign, but no actual slogans that have sloshed their way to my addled forebrain.
If they had a good slogan now, I'm sure I would have made my joke about it instead. But I came up empty, like a manila envelope with nothing inside.
Oh, and I remember Ellen Feiss. She was kind of hot, in that grunge way. But nobody takes Ellen Feiss pills any more, they smoke Ellen Feiss blunts instead. :-)
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Re:I blame it on Apple... (Score:5, Funny)
The macbook air ad tells you exactly what to do with it: pull it out from somewhere like a rabit from a magician's hat, then show it off to your neighbors (then put it away because it can't do shit).
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Re:I blame it on Apple... (Score:5, Interesting)
No, there are plenty of reasons to flame Mac fans. My experience may not be typical, and I'm certainly not directing it at you specifically, but here goes...
I have met or interacted with roughly 40 mac users in my last two years of work. I provide contracted IT services to companies. Each and every single one of those 40 mac users were pretentious twats. Every single one of them acted like the whole problem was my fault--even when they were coming to me because their mac was having issues.
My personal favorite example was a doctor working as a contractor for a company I was contracted to. She had apparently been having no end of issues getting her mac hooked up to the projector.
So after exchanging a bunch of phone calls and finally agreeing that there was no other possible time she could do it save for 7:30 at night on one reoccurring day each month, I finally gave in and said I would help her.
She whipped out her macbook and folded her arms...waiting. So I asked her to show me what she did exactly so I could witness the problem. She indignantly sighed as if I was asking too much and booted the thing up. Once it was fired up, she opened up whatever the hell the mac equivalent of powerpoint was and folded her arms again, and once again glared at me. I waited. She finally sighed again and pulled out the DVI to VGA adapter from her laptop bag and plugged it in. The mac immediately froze. The projector hadn't been plugged in, only the adapter. She threw her hands up in the air and whined "Seeee!!!" at me. "Uh, it crashed. Reboot it."
"It's not supposed to do that!!!". "Nope, probably not. You'll have to call Apple about it--but for now, reboot it and we'll try again."
This time it came up and didn't crash. So we plugged in the projector and everything worked like a charm...
Right up until the point where she was completely baffled by her desktop being EXPANDED onto the projector rather than duplicated onto the projector.
She kept dragging things off the laptop screen onto the projector. This had her totally fucking confused for 5 minutes. Several times I tried to explain what was going on, but she would cut me off and say "See--it's disappearing. Why is it on the projector and not on my laptop. It's broken."
Idiot. So after 10 minutes she finally listened to what I was explaining and figured out that her desktop was extended. (All of this while huffing about how my projector was messed up and not working correctly--because is sure as shit couldn't be her macbook. It was developed by a deity after all, and they make no mistakes.)
Next thing I know, she's firing up iTunes...and for the finale I thought "I'll bet she's *the* air america listener".
Sure enough. Hundreds of air america broadcasts/podcasts/whatever.
Oh yeah, and when I said "It looks like you're all set", there was no "Thanks" or "Awesome" or really any positive acknowledgment other than "It's about time".
And yes, all 39 other mac users displayed the same total lack of technical knowledge and the same "I'm better than you attitude" when really they were just so fucking stupid I'm surprised they didn't die half way through the troubleshooting process because they didn't remember to breathe.
I suppose I should amend this slightly. I actually do know 2 mac users that are intelligent. My friends parents. They bought it because o
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Re:I blame it on Apple... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a physicist in grad school, so maybe my cross section of mac users is entirely from a different demographic. In the past few years I've seen several physicists go from Linux to Mac, just to "get stuff done" easier without having to waste time fiddling with the system (both professors and students, and myself included). A computational/simulational group in my department went from IBM-supplied UNIX boxes (not sure if AIX or Linux) to Mac. I know a few theorists that have gone from Linux to Mac too.
More interestingly, a huge astro research entity nearby (with ties to NASA) with several hundred employees is in the process of switching almost exclusively to OS X. They used to use predominantly Solaris boxes, which are relatively old by now and need upgrading. So OS X fits their needs nearly exactly, especially with regards to visualization toolkits and software. It's pretty cool for me because sometimes they call in Apple engineers to give technical talks about various features/software of interest for scientists.
In all these cases, though, I guess the mac users are fairly intelligent and computer savvy. Seems to be opposite to the Mac users you interface with.
The only potential explanation I can give you, and I hope I'm not accused of being a fanboy, is related to my experience where I've had significantly less problems on my Mac than on Windows (which I had to use in my lab). I'm not saying Macs are problem free, they're not, but IMHO they give much less hassle and I'm more efficient at them.
So anyway, it could be that when the shit hits the fan and you get a support call from a Mac user, they're far more irate than a Windows user that is relatively used to dealing with problems. Just a hand-wavy guess, but given the exposure you have to mac users versus mine in science, it's a possibility.
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I have similar experiences to the grandparent (Score:5, Interesting)
However, we get users that insist on buying Macs. Ok, fine, they can support them by themselves. We don't mandate using department support and many research labs have systems that are all their own. Well that would all be fine, except the Mac users come crying to us when things won't work, and then get mad when we can't fix them.
That's why I get tired of. The attitude of "Macs never break so I'll use one, oh wait my Mac has a problem you have to fix it!" This is not the first job I've encountered it at. If a place wants to use Macs and support them, that's great. If a place wants to train me to do Mac support, that's also great. However when the policy is "Macs are unsupported," I get tired of Mac users justifying buying them by saying they won't need support, then bitching about it.
Also, in many cases recently, it has even been almost completely useless. One of our professors bought a number of Macs for his lab. Since there's a good deal of software we use that isn't for Mac OS, Windows is on there too. His students are always booted in to the Windows side since everything they want to do can be done there. So it wasn't as though he bought the Macs out of a well researched need, he bought them because he's a Mac fan, without consideration as to if that's the right tool for the job.
Hence, I get a little annoyed.
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Re:I blame it on Apple... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a mac-user, and I'm also a mac-user-hater. Your experience is unfortunately all too common.
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Re:I blame it on Apple... (Score:5, Insightful)
The people I know who fit that rabid fanboy stereotype are the ones for whom Mac ownership is the hippest thing about them, dorks who think their choice of tech moves them one step closer to the cool-kids table.
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Re:I blame it on Apple... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I blame it on Apple... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I blame it on Apple... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know many people who just wear whatever the fuck they want. It's sad.
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How to pretend to be a tech journalist (Score:5, Insightful)
Step 2: Write an article about all the hate mail you get
Step 3: Ad revenue
Goto Step 1
Dvorak has done this so many times he should be selling his technique on an infomercial at this point.
Re:How to pretend to be a tech journalist (Score:5, Funny)
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It's a religion (Score:5, Interesting)
Honestly, it's the biggest reason I no longer buy products from Apple. The astonishing thing is how many years this keeps going on. I had a friend who started hiding his Newton for fear of the cultists that would swarm him and go on about how great it was while he was just trying to look up an address or whatever.
The only sane Apple-nut I ever met was Douglas Adams, but then he was at least reasonable enough to acknowledge other OSes, although you wouldn't believe it from the Apple fans who quote him endlessly.
Why are so many of their consumers complete nutcases?
Re:It's a religion (Score:5, Informative)
I personally have purchased only one Apple product -- I recently bought my wife an iPod touch. While I absolutely love the cool user interface experience, the consumer lock down is much worse than I imagined it would be (and I was expecting bad.) Overall I can only rate the thing "half-way above shit." I'll never buy anything else from them and I'm not going to recommend them to other people unless that changes drastically.
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Re:It's a religion (Score:5, Informative)
Was she clicking on the music icon under library? because obviously they're not in the library they're on the ipod. I'm not sure why you, your wife or your "Apple buddy" couldn't get this simple, obvious thing to work for her.
Piss and moan all you want about not being able to copy them off the ipod, that's entirely true and annoying, but figuring out that you have to double click on a song under the ipod and not in the library really doesn't take geek smarts.
And just so we can keep track of the fan scores, I own 1 iPod, 1 ancient g4 emac, 1 amd xp/linux box and 1 dell vostro core 2 duo running xp, so could someone explain to me whether i'm palestinian or israeli?
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At Least I'll be Vaccinated (Score:5, Funny)
You mean it's not rabies? Oh...I guess I didn't need those shots after the last time I called the MacBook "useless" and one of them bit me...
Re:At Least I'll be Vaccinated (Score:5, Funny)
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Can we mod this story... (Score:5, Insightful)
I must not be a fan then (Score:5, Insightful)
But I will point out the negatives in their products where I see them. There is no point in pretending that they don't exist as all that does is give them time to fester. I am a realist. I'll also point out issues with the company when they deserve it. Yeah, praise is better but only if they are going to work for it.
I am more judgmental because I've been in the IT field for years and have used, and I mean really used, many different OSes out there. I also wouldn't have considered calling myself a Mac user before OS X. Sorry fans, but OS 9 was pretty terrible.
I suppose Apple needs the rabid fanbase as they are advertisers that pay the company for the privilege. Maybe Apple should even thank them every now and then for keeping the company afloat for so many years. They also need the realists that speak their mind and truthfully say what is good, what is bad, and what is downright idiotic. Yes, this means that these groups will clash but it is needed.
How else are they going to move forward?
Re:I must not be a fan then (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though I'm not a big fan of Apple, I will admit they have some advantages here and there.
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Re:I must not be a fan then (Score:5, Interesting)
So I don't know why the mac-hating crowd has to paint all of us Mac users with one big fanatic brush. But I can tell you flat out that OS X is what pulled me to the mac, it's UNIX with an awesome GUI, and no more fiddling to get stuff to work that I had to with Linux. If claiming that makes me a rabid fanboy, then so be it.
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You can't even say anything bad about Jobs (Score:5, Interesting)
I was amazed at the number of fanboi's that modded it off-topic, only to have it modded it back up, then back down again. Some apparently thought I had committed blasphemy.
The article in short (Score:5, Insightful)
That's basically all the article says. And we knew that, of course. But why are Apple fans so extremely sensitive to criticism? I've said many 'bad' things about Apple on this forum, and it inevitably got me modded down. Apple zealots are even worse than the Linux zealots of ten years back.
You and Farhad need to stop pimping each other (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW Farhad is the biggest Apple Fanboy in the world. Before this week 80% of his columns were about iPhones, iPods, Macs and Apple.
Puh-lease. Apple zealots are tame.. (Score:5, Interesting)
So *bah* I say.. Give these Apple people a break. The alternatives were quite a bit worse!
Re:ratio (Score:5, Funny)
Are you sure you've read the summary correctly AND you know what board you're posting on? You seem to be confusing Microsoft and Apple. One is bad, the other is God.
Hope this helps. Oh, and you might want to cut back on the schnapps.
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Re:ratio (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:ratio (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:ratio (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:ratio (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:ratio (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:You just don't get it... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:inappropriate even handedness (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Experience it first hand (Score:5, Insightful)
I've heard of some crazy stretches for comparison, but come on, a journalist actually comparing a group of people that have an affinity for a company's products to a deeply-complicated bloody 60+ year old conflict? Talk about going off the deep end.
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Re:Experience it first hand (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wow, I was marked Troll! (Score:5, Funny)
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Apple fans can make death threats (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Experience it first hand (Score:5, Funny)
I've heard of some crazy stretches for comparison, but come on, a journalist actually comparing a group of people that have an affinity for a company's products to a deeply-complicated bloody 60+ year old conflict? Talk about going off the deep end.
It's a bit like the word "feminazi", which draws a completely unfair analogy, as it is deeply insulting to any proud member of the National Socialist party.
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Re:Experience it first hand (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't compare Apple fanboyism to the Israeli/Palastenian conflict, but I can certainly understand why somebody would. I mean, how extreme is that? I don't even know how you get that many people with mod points to come in for the attack. Very extreme. The worst part? I wasn't trolling. I might have been more respectful of it if I had said something snide or shitty, but I didn't. I sat down and explained where I was coming from on it. (Hence the positive mods.) But
Oh well. That's the internet for you.
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Re:Experience it first hand (Score:5, Interesting)
"All of my recent posts had been negatively modded so many times that I was actually banned from Slashdot for WEEKS. Weeks. The last I had bothered to count, I had been modded down over thirty times."
You can't mod down one comment 30 times. Nor can one comment be modded down so many times you get banned. If you have a better explanation behind it, I'm all ears, but at least read what I said before passing judgement.
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Re:Experience it first hand (Score:5, Informative)
Your profile page - I only see one thing modded down and that was: this one. Yep, douchebaggery.
Even if I were the biggest douchebag in the world (yet somehow still posting at +2...) and I made the douchiest comment in the universe, could you really deny that that sort of Apple fanboism is (or at least was) extreme?
That said, I will be up front about one thing: You won't catch me at my best behaviour if you find that. After my posts started getting modded down I got annoyed and rather defensive. You might look at that and think I was being a douche. That's one thing about looking at this stuff from the past, you can't see what order the events (like moderations) took place in. That's why I don't expect you guys to be kind to me. That's fine, I'll deal with it. Have a good night.
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Re:Experience it first hand (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Experience it first hand (Score:5, Insightful)
Been there, done that. Points drops almost as fast as when you suggest Linux may not represent perfection.
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Re:I dunno.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:I dunno.. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a difference in philosophy. Linux is about freedom and choice. If you say "Linux lacks X", most of the time if you get a negative reply it'll be something like "well, go fix it, the source's there". You generally won't be flamed to a crisp for daring to suggest that say, the state of audio in Linux isn't ideal. Constructive criticism could get a positive reply. Take the guy who did Linux boot benchmarking -- it quickly resulted in optimizations of the process.
Now try to do the same with Apple. Apple is about the "experience". Either you get it, or you can go look somewhere else. If you try to suggest the iPod, iPhone or something else isn't ideal you'll often get a reply from somebody who thinks nothing Apple makes might be a bit imperfect, and that if you don't like it, something is wrong with you. Mac OS was perfect before OS X came out. I've never seen a fan reply to the complaint of the iPod's lack of ability to play Ogg Vorbis as "You know, they should really include that". If it was a Linux device somebody would have added that within a month of the iPod's release.
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Re:Sorry, still trying (Score:5, Funny)
BOOYAH!
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Re:Sorry, still trying (Score:5, Funny)
Apple don't have nothing on them rabid amiga hippies. I still get hate mail from them crazy mother fuckers.
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Re:Mac Pride (Score:5, Informative)
The second mistake I see is that the Free and/or Open Source (internal feuds do exist; let them sort themselves out) Software fanboys are even more plentiful than Apple ones. Being one of those myself, I think the reason is that we believe in an ideal, fulfilled by the hard work of those seeking recognition among their peers, or money, or plain and simple sense of self-fulfillment. Yes, there are very vocal FOSS fanboys out there, but they are either novices to the belief or prophets of the cult; most of us fall in-between, prowd of our sense of judgement, knowing what is good and what isn't for our families and for our our stranded relative's PHD about-to-be-lost-to-a-virus thesis.
* That PC crap hits my nerves; I'm black, but I was born in Brazil; I'm not a fucking African-American, I'm BLACK, thank you very much! And I wasn't born in a "developing country", I was born and live in an UNDERDEVELOPED country; the notion that we are in a "developing country" has deluded our leaders to think we are "getting there". No country "gets there" when 32 million of its population STARVES.
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