The Wrath of the Apple Tribe 870
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.'"
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.
Re:ratio (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:I must not be a fan then (Score:3, Informative)
Disclaimer: I'm a PowerPC fanboy. Still am. (NOT PowerMac. PowerPC.)
When the comparison last made sense, it was between the G5 and the Pentium 4 "Prescott". The G5's pipelines are 10 stages long, the Pentium 4's are 31 stages long. Since then, Intel has changed their focus away from insanely deep pipelines, with the Core series being the first to really shine (especially on TDP). Any questions?
-:sigma.SB
P.S. I want a PPC750 on a PCI card.
Re:It's a religion (Score:2, Informative)
My wife couldn't copy her music from her iPod to her work PC, so she ended up buying a $100 docking iHome thing from Target just so she could listen at work. It's sitting right next to her new PC with its shiny new unused stereo speakers.
After searching the web, I discovered that older iPod Touches (version 1.1.1 and earlier) used to present a USB mass storage device to a PC that didn't already have iTunes installed. That would have allowed her to simply drag and drop her music from the iPod to her PC and let her play it. But her new iPod doesn't permit that -- Apple deliberately crippled the machine she owns.
Now, I'm sure there are a bunch of Apple geeks out there that have some information or geekish knowledge that allows them to easily copy music from their iPods to other computers. Fine, you do that. But that shouldn't be an ordinary consumer's job to learn how to circumvent some company's crappy restriction. That's the whole Apple selling point, that things are easy to use. But as far as I'm concerned, the device should never have been crippled, and up until a few releases ago (according to the web), it wasn't.
And before anyone comments on AAC or the Apple DRM scheme, I know that every single song in this iPod is MP3 encoded because I personally ripped it directly from Compact Discs that she owns using Exact Audio Copy. She has bought nothing from the iTunes music store, and there is not a single byte of DRMd music in this iPod. This is purely a restriction added by Apple to prevent legally owned files from being transferred from her iPod to a computer that should be able to access it. That completely blows chunks, so to hell with Apple.
Re:Experience it first hand (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps you were just being a douchebag? Just checking...
Your profile page [slashdot.org] - I only see one thing modded down and that was: this one [slashdot.org]. Yep, douchebaggery.
Care to post the other username (assuming there really is one) with all the downmodded comments so we can pass judgement on you?
Apple fans can make death threats (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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?
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.
Re:It's a religion (Score:4, Informative)
Seems pretty locked down to me.
Re:Many Apple users are unable to see real problem (Score:4, Informative)
Too bad my powerbook only has one mouse button built-in... When I boot to Linux, ctrl+click doesn't really work.
Re:Experience it first hand (Score:4, Informative)
Macs are Over-rated (Score:5, Informative)
Two and half years into owning a G4 Powerbook [community-media.com] I've concluded that Macs are no more or less irritating*, crash prone**, or prone to dumb design ideas*** than are PCs. They just incorporate different irritations, ways of crashing, and dumb design choices.
I've given the Mac a good run, and arguably am more knowledgeable than most users. I have taken the time to understand the ways that things work on the Mac. I doubt that I would buy another.
* No Delete key, but a key marked "delete" which actually backspaces. Yes, I know there is some multiple key combination that will delete stuff, but I still believe that pressing a key marked "delete" should cause things to be deleted.
** "Kernel Panic" is exactly the same as the "Blue Screen of Death". In my experience the Mac crashes more often than my XP machine. And then there have been programs that just stop working for no apparent reason.
*** The Dock irritates me no end on this small 12" screen. I'll take the Windows task bar any day. Simpler is better. It also drives me crazy that the Mac defaults to leaving all apps running forever instead of shutting them down when you click the "close" button.
Re:I've criticized Linux and lived to tell the tal (Score:4, Informative)
Yeesh. Well, if you decide not to draw conclusions from a data set of one, I'd encourage you to look at one of the replies to my original post. I talked about what happened in more detail. If you still think it's BS, that's cool, don't care. It's not like I require you to believe it to prove that it happened.
Re:Experience it first hand (Score:3, Informative)
I live in fucking Europe and public transport sucks.
It would take me 4 hours of travelling to get to work from home using public transport, and I'd have to leave the night before to get there before 9am. Plus of course sitting on a bus or a train causes me significant knee issues that lead to constant pain and limping.
Meanwhile when I was forced to take a train to work for three weeks, for the first two weeks a third of the trains were late and all of them were overcrowded with insufficient seating available. Things changed in the last week - two thirds of them were late.
For people making short journeys with predictable times and a reliable public transport service, sure, it can work out. But I'm not such a person, and it sucks, and the ever increasing cost of running a car sucks, and the government's anti-car crusade sucks because frankly I'm going to reach the point where I'm financially better off sitting at home claiming benefits than trying to drive to work.
I bet you like Apple products too..
Re:Experience it first hand (Score:3, Informative)
Hell, I'd have to walk two miles to even get to the first likely location for a bus stop and there is no way I'd do it back and forth every day and then walk to my destination on the other end. My wife has fibromyalgia and would be hard pressed to make it to the end of the street let alone two miles.
Public transportation is fine, I even used the rails once or twice while living in Miami but its not a practical solution in the states.
Re:Experience it first hand (Score:3, Informative)
OK - fair enough. That's not a troll - it's a well thought out response, and there are others. I accept your story now.
(but I liked the greater internet douchebag theory, oh well)
Welcome to the internet, the shitheads are here too, and you managed to tweak a bunch of them. Sucks to be you. I guess the new userid is probably a sane idea.
Re:Experience it first hand (Score:4, Informative)
One [slashdot.org]
Two [slashdot.org]
My response to the whole Apple thing? I tend to react extremely favorable when there're negative comments about Apple; it doesn't balance the amount of negative modding, but its the little I can do.
Re:Experience it first hand (Score:3, Informative)
As for the nordic countries others are mentioning, they are tiny compared to the United States. Outfitting the U.S. With a transportation system comparable to those would be an expense that simply could not be shouldered. Especially without paying the ungodly taxes you guys pay over there.