The Wrath of the Apple Tribe

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.'"

Sorry, still trying

[Anonymous Coward]

to catchup with the Amiga.

But But But

[ColdWetDog]

Nobody else has a real live Reality Distortion Field [slashdot.org]. We're special.

Re:ratio

[bennomatic]

Don't forget the whining fanboi apple adulations. "Mac OS X is perfect, but I'm going to switch to Windows because of the translucent menu bar!!"

At Least I'll be Vaccinated

[snl2587]

about why the Apple tribe is so rabid

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:ratio

[ColdWetDog]

There is at least ten mac hater[s] (sic) for every fanboy, each posting ten whining comment[s] for every adulation of apple.

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.

You just don't get it...

[uvajed_ekil]

I am always right.

Next thread please.

I dunno..

[DurendalMac]

I think the Linux/FOSS fanboys are trying to wrestle that crown from the Apple fanboys.

Re:ratio

[BountyX]

I was assualted by a fanboi when I told him my Tapwave was cooler than his iPhone. Luckliy, I had a stylus as a weapon, while all he had was his finger. He didn't want to drop his iPhone either becuase it didn't have applecare.

Re:You just don't get it...

[calebt3]

Are you one of these 'females' I keep reading about?

Re:I blame it on Apple...

[plover]

I personally find it one of the most disgusting facets of consumerist capitalism.

Ooo, someone forgot to take their "Think Different" pills this morning, didn't they?

Re:I blame it on Apple...

[Maestro485]

It pisses me off that using Apple products makes you "different". I'm way more different than those preppy jerks. I have a tattoo of a Chinese symbol on my wrist that means 'peace' in English. I have the tips of my semi-dirty long hair dyed green. I even have a nose ring *and* a lip ring (earrings are a given in my non-conformist world). Seriously those Apple fans need to start coming up with commercials with lame yet catchy songs that accompany a minimalist but stylish product line.

Re:I blame it on Apple...

[Joe Tie.]

Pfft. I wear a long sleeve shirt under a short sleeve shirt under a long sleeve shirt.

Re:Sorry, still trying

[LoadWB]

Tribe of Apple, meet the Church of the Amiga.

BOOYAH! :)

Re:It's a religion

[tsa]

You sir, can kiss your Karma goodbye ;) And be careful: those Apple fans know where your house lives.

Re:Experience it first hand

[Artuir]

I dunno. The levels of insanity reached in both Apple fanboyism and the Israeli/Palastenian conflict seems equivalent sometimes. Hey, you hear that? That's the sound of my karma level going through the floor!

Re:Sorry, still trying

[Lord Apathy]

Apple don't have nothing on them rabid amiga hippies. I still get hate mail from them crazy mother fuckers.

Re:ratio

[tsa]

Oh yes. And don't get me started on the reflections in the new 3D Dock. They're all wrong.

Re:Hmm

[xstonedogx]

You've never met a Lexus owner, I see.

Wow, I was marked Troll!

[wass]

Apparently it's not just Apple Fanboys that can't handle criticism!

Re:At Least I'll be Vaccinated

[93 Escort Wagon]

I guess I didn't need those shots after the last time I called the MacBook "useless" and one of them bit me...

Oh come on - a MacBook bit you? Sounds to me like Apple fanboys aren't the only ones experiencing a reality distortion field...

Re:Hmm

[TapeCutter]

Have you never been shopping with a woman....oh wait, forgot where I was for a moment.

Re:ratio

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost perfectly wrong.

Re:I blame it on Apple...

[plover]

I don't know why the Mac hating crowd needs to resort to 6+ year old marketing slogans

'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. :-)

Re:How to pretend to be a tech journalist

[mmeister]

I'm actually surprised Dvorak hasn't tried to patent this technique.

The Windows Tribe?

[FoolsGold]

Goddamnit where's OUR tribe!

Apple have got theirs, Linux sure as hell got theirs, but we have to fend for ourselves, and believe me it get's lonely sometimes. ... ...

*whimper* Don't leave me!

Re:I blame it on Apple...

[xenocide2]

They don't even bother with taglines anymore. They know what it is they sell, and sell it without even using words. What they sell is image.

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).

MIxing your brand loyalties improves the quality

[vorlich]

of your life. It is a well known fact that people who wear Burberry are much more succesful when it comes to fights in pubs. Individuals who are totally Macced-Out tend (from the observations I made during my years in the Licensed Trade) to fair less well during pub fights. They are usually not amongst the "Early Exiters", that group of society who can exit a pub in the blink of an eye during a fight. This is because their need to carefully pack or stow their branded products uses up valuable time.

Nor are they amongs the "Early Retaliators", that group of society who are able to optimise their probability calculating skills and go for an early, but strategic smack down. They are usually checking that they did indeed transfer the Bjork/featuring Skunk Anansi remix of Army of Me and it is on their playlist.

Unfortunately they are not amongst the "Early Avoiders" either, that group of society who demonstrate advanced cognitive process and geo-spatial awareness by hiding in the corner (or the toilet) and easily avoid flying fists, Doc martens, chairs, bottles or even the MacBook Air. This is because the Macced-Out tend to congregate around the pub juke box in order to complain about the appalling lack of interoperability and/or Portishead's third album. Sadly the Juke Box shares its high fight-loci rating with the one-armed-bandit (although the Macced-Out sensibly never go near that)

This strategic imbalance in pubs is further aggravated by the absence of "target acquisition" and "engage RPG" items on the iPhone Menu. However all of this will change when Apple once again catch Microsoft unprepared with the release of their iChair.

Heav clanking sound of lid closing tightly on my iBunker...

Re:Experience it first hand

[yanyan]

I sense a comparison between Apple tribe members and Nazis coming soon.

Re:ratio

[EsbenMoseHansen]

I'm reminded of this episode [burbia.com] in which some poor schmuck visited an Apple Store for the first time and wrote about it in his blog.

Yeah, but in the haters' defense his gray font does indeed suck ;)

Re:Experience it first hand

[XnavxeMiyyep]

Well, Godwin IS a Mac user.

Re:Experience it first hand

[Eli Gottlieb]

They're totally dissimilar! I mean, when Apple "thinks different" it's a good thing!

Re:Experience it first hand

[TeknoHog]

The author of the article (yes I actually read it) went as far as comparing the pro/anti Apple crowd to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Yes, he seriously did. And not by briefly alluding to it, but over the course of several paragraphs.

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.

Re:Mac Pride

[dangitman]

not that Mac marginalization has anywhere near the same significance as the often violent discrimination that gays and blacks have experienced in their lifetimes

You've clearly never used Microsoft Word 6.0 for Macintosh.

Re:Wow, I was marked Troll!

[Daimanta]

Well, it should be tagged loltroll just to piss off apple fanbois.

Re:ratio

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you can turn both of those "features" off. The translucent menubar can be reverted to a plain menubar in the Desktop and Screensaver settings, since 10.5.2 I believe. Ever noticed how the Dock gets two dimensional when you move it to different borders than the bottom one? Well you can have that look even when it's on the bottom of the screen by doing this:

"defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -bool YES; killall Dock"

Re:Sorry, still trying

[Anonymous Coward]

Brothers, Can't we all rejoice in our hate towards Microsoft?

Re:ratio

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you can have that look even when it's on the bottom of the screen by doing this:

"defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -bool YES; killall Dock"

Clearly OS X is not ready for the desktop. How is Joe User supposed to use a computer that can only be configured by typing cryptic commands into a terminal window? Come back when you can change settings like that with a simple graphical interface, like in Linux.

Re:Experience it first hand

[cloakable]

I'm personally highly indifferent to OS*. I just felt compelled to respond to this:

Users of other OSs need to hate them to take their mind off the endless fail they experience on a daily basis.

I don't really want to know where you pulled that one from, but I've never experienced any failure on my boxes, let alone endless fail.

And personally, I disagree with the Troll moderation. That is Flamebait.

Re:Experience it first hand

[Ubergrendle]

I think you're being unfair to the Israeli/Palestinians to be honest...

Re:Experience it first hand

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, you hear that? That's the sound of my karma level going through the floor!

Sounds like its going through the roof to me. But then again, I am living in the apartment below you...

Re:Experience it first hand

[macslas'hole]

The reason for this rabidity is simple. We spent so many years, in the pre-OSX days, having to listen to stupid shit from lame PC users. Even without protected memory and preemptive multitasking, our computing experience was still better for us on a Mac than it was on a PC. As with any large enough group of people who are feeling picked upon, there will be some number who will just go virtual-columbine on your ass. There are only so many unsolicited comments about toy computers that one can take.
As to why it continues? I don't know. Why do PC (now Windows) user still feel the need to give us shit? It happens less and less often, but it still happens.

Re:Experience it first hand

[interstellar_donkey]

I always wondered "Who goes on Slashdot and spends all of their mod points modding stuff down?" I've never modded anything down; it seems pointless. I'd rather build up a good (or funny) comment than destroy something I disagree with, and could never understand the psychology of people who do as such.

It's all starting to make sense now. It's Apple users. Perhaps its the inferiority of their computer of choice that compels them to live so negatively. Perhaps its the knowledge, buried deep in their subconscious, that they support a platform that nobody in the IT world takes seriously that causes them to act out in such counter-productive ways.

"Ha ha!" The Mac user says. "I have mod points. I will protect the Slashdot community by searching out 'first post' comments and modding them as trolls! The world is safe for another day!".

Re:I can second that.

[dedazo]

twitter, the whole point of using sockpuppets is to make people think that someone else is posting the same things. So when you say

For some reason, they keep pointing at and saying nasty things about you. That makes you my friend.

People will think that you are:

a) Slightly retarded
b) Slightly gay
c) The same person

Either way, you fail it.

By the way, I have to chuckle at the fact that the only way you can get your sockpuppets to be modded up is to dispense the usual "M$ Windoze LOLOL" tripe. I can almost see you hyperventilating when you have to spell them correctly.

Re:I can second that.

[Anonymous Coward]

d) All of the above

If you picked d), YOU ARE A WINNER!!!!!

You win an all-expenses paid 3 day, 2 night vacation to GNU/Land!! The land of the free as in... the free... the land of the... um... BEER!!! Yes!