Rotten apples

[greatbearmd]

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.

Comments

[bigredpaul]

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]

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]

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.

[greatbearmd]

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]

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]

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

[bitterlawngnome]

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