7 anti-Apple cliches that need to die

TUAW ^ | 29 May 2010 | Chris Rawson

[TheStickman]

Paid $99 bucks for my Logic Express upgrade from 8 to 9. Got 300 dollars invested in a pro-sound/multi-tracking/mixing & mastering software. Similar software that is as user friendly, feature-rich & of similar sound quality for Windows is much much more expensive.

[TheStickman]

Also the upgrade price from Leopard to Snow Leopard was 29 dollars. :)

[PJammers]

Last October I bought my college student daughter an IMac Pro because she had to have one and her IPod touch recently wouldn’t “feel” her fingers anymore. $1700+ including service plan. Not sure of the speed of the chip set but it is an Intel.

Just bought my first laptop. The young saleman was pushng the IPad like it was some magical device. $699. I was also looking at a Gateway with a 17” monitor for $599. I asked him where does the CD go in that IPad? I bought the Gateway with Window 7 home premium and an Intel Core I3 processor. Oh and because I bought the Gateway I qualified for a 50% coupon for a printer so I bought a brand new HP wireless printer for $70. I also included $275 3 year service and damage plan that will unconditionally replace my computer even if it is my fault.

Total bill $1023

I didn’t say that the Apple software was expensive it’s the devices that it runs on.

[Mr. Blonde]

And Apple’s software isn’t exceedingly protective? As a matter of fact Apple Corp likes it that way so they can charge more for it.

What is the "it" in the second sentence?

[PJammers]

I also didn’t say Apple’s are bad machines. To me there isn’t a noticeable difference. I just can’t see paying more for a name and some gimmicks.

[PJammers]

My grammar was poor. “it” means Apple products.

Listen I don’t care what you use. Both have limitations and are good at what they do. Mine isn’t shiny and it doesn’t have a picture of an Apple that glows on the back of it.

If you want to pay more money for essentially the same machine that’s your business.

[Gator113]

I’ve had my iMac OS X for about 2 years. I haven’t become a lib nor have I turned gay... I think I must have gotten lucky. ;>)

I love this thing and I will never buy anything else.

I already own an iPod and have had it for about 4 years.

The second Apple contracts with Verizon, I will buy an iPhone and maybe one for my wife.

I require product quality/reliability and great service. I get that with Apple, I didn’t with the other stuff.

If anyone is thinking about buying a iMac, this is what you will be required to contend with— turn it on, then-—use it.

I’m not one that want’s to figure out or even understand my computer... I just want to use it.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"Buying Apple is a total rip-off for many computer users and I have a good example. I have a friend who has been wanting to get on the internet for a while and do other basic things such as email, writing a letter then printing it and mailing it So this week we are going to Staples where there is a $300 Compaq desktop. Has 3GB memory and will easily handle whatever he does He wants a big LCD monitor so we are probably going to get him an Acer 23" LCD for $157 Total bill is $457 and no way Apple can compare to this.

I hope your friend has better luck with his entry-level computer than you do with your period key.

But we're not in disagreement: I said Apple doesn't make cheesy entry-level crap, and clearly Compaq does. It might be instructive to consider why the Compaq costs as little as it does. First, your friend will find it absolutely festooned, stuffed to the gills, with "trialware" and "bonusware" and other form of performance-sapping, pop-up flashing, annoying intrusive insecure crap, crap that natters the user to spend money to make the annoyance go away. Compaq gets a subsidy for putting each of those gems on it. So your first job, as the friend who's gotten sucked into supporting this piece of junk, is to cleanse the machine of as much of that stuff as you can find. Oh, but some won't pop its little head up for a few weeks yet. So I hope your friend lives close by, because it'll be a while before you're done with that part of the fun. The best part is how you can show him how easy it is to reboot Windows, which you'll have to do a dozen times. Enjoy.

Your second job will be to download and install a decent anti-virus/anti-malware program (unless you succumb to the siren call and hourly pop-up come-ons from the trialware, which will ask you to pay). Gotta be sure the machine is locked-down. Be sure to teach your friend about malware and email attachments and so forth. Enjoy.

Then comes the day to day support. Maybe you'll get lucky and there won't be much of that. But when something goes wrong, what a pity, there's no Apple Store to make an appointment at and get a swift, knowledgeable answer from a native English speaker face-to-face. Nope, it'll be you, and your script-reading friend Mujibur in Bangalore at the other end of the 800 number and 45 minutes of hold music. Enjoy.

And then when your friend gets a virus or installs some cute animated cursor utility or a nifty "search bar" (hey, it's free!) that turns out to include a keylogger that emails all his financial information to the Ukraine, who'll he call? Enjoy!

[PJammers]

Windows 7 runs perfect. It does every thing I want or need and more. I just can’t see paying hundreds of dollars more for a machine that would do the things I want it to do.

Apple did an outstanding job fooling people into believing they created some magical machine. As a matter of fact the new add for the IPad actually states that it is “Magical”.

Why wouldn’t anyone want to have some magical machine? Brilliant sales strategy IMHO.

[PJammers]

I do agree that a cheap machine will end up costing you more in the long run. I always buy a service plan. I even did on my daughter’s IMac Pro,

I also think that Apple’s claim of not needing anti-virus/spam ware are numbered. With Apple’s recent report of market share Google dropping Windows are enemies will discover ways to hack Apple software.

[Mr. Blonde]

The thing is I don’t think I am getting essentially the same machine. For one, no PC laptop has OS X on it, which I prefer to Windows although by all reports Windows 7 is much better. And then, I’m not aware of any PC laptops with multi-touch trackpads, an all aluminum body, and a battery capable of 7 hours (15in screen) among other things all separate my laptop from the PC offerings. Maybe they aren’t worth any price differential to you, but they are to me and I find that to make them not essentially the same.

[dennisw]

But we're not in disagreement: I said Apple doesn't make cheesy entry-level crap, and clearly Compaq does. It might be instructive to consider why the Compaq costs as little as it does. First, your friend will find it absolutely festooned, stuffed to the gills, with "trialware" and "bonusware" and other form of performance-sapping, pop-up flashing, annoying intrusive insecure crap, crap that natters the user to spend money to make the annoyance go away. Compaq gets a subsidy for putting each of those gems on it. So your first job, as the friend who's gotten sucked into supporting this piece of junk, is to cleanse the machine of as much of that stuff as you can find. Oh, but some won't pop its little head up for a few weeks yet. So I hope your friend lives close by, because it'll be a while before you're done with that part of the fun. The best part is how you can show him how easy it is to reboot Windows, which you'll have to do a dozen times. Enjoy.

Your second job will be to download and install a decent anti-virus/anti-malware program (unless you succumb to the siren call and hourly pop-up come-ons from the trialware, which will ask you to pay). Gotta be sure the machine is locked-down. Be sure to teach your friend about malware and email attachments and so forth. Enjoy.

Hope you feel better after all that holier than thou venting
Now back to the real world
I will take off any trial-ware.....20 minutes time
Run msconfig and eliminate unneeded programs that start in the background when booting up
I will install Avira free anti-virus, make sure Windows Defender and Windows Firewall are turned on along with automatic updates
I will see if restore disks are included. If not we will burn the restore DVDs..... takes one hour

It takes me 80 minutes to get the new computer prepped and up and running and my friend saves about $400 by not buying an over hyped Apple product that does more than he needs
That's a good deal where I come from

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"I also think that Apple’s claim of not needing anti-virus/spam ware are numbered. With Apple’s recent report of market share Google dropping Windows are enemies will discover ways to hack Apple software."

Time will tell. I personally expect the worst risks will come, as they do with any OS, from idiot users who click on risky links, open infected email attachments, unthinkingly authorize installation of stuff they find on the Internet, etc. Already the only piece of malware to hit the Mac in recent memory came last year when folks downloaded "free" versions of some desirable commercial program from warez sites, only to find they'd installed a malware-infested version. In the cell phone market, the App Store review process has kept the tens of millions of iPhones malware-free, whereas the comparatively un-policed Android Market already suffered a scary piece of "demonstration" malware when users merrily downloaded what seemed to be a useful weather app but which turned out to be a trojan horse. Result: in a flash, more than eight thousand Android phones had set themselves up in a botnet. And, friends, there are truly scary security implications when you're talking tens of millions of powerful, location-aware, always-connected devices whose users don't think of them as computers.

But I'd doubt that we'll see a day anytime soon when you'll read anything regarding the Mac like "There is a 50 percent chance your unprotected Windows PC will be compromised within 12 minutes of going online". That is the sort of insecurity that just isn't going to happen with a properly-configured _nix-based system. (Although, a warning: many of the inexpensive Linux-based netbooks that were all the rage a couple years ago, such as the Eee, ran their single users as root. Bad, bad idea. And to my great annoyance, most Macs are set up with their users running day-to-day as an administrator. Better to set up a non-privileged user account and live your daily life in it.)

The fundamental rule of computer security is that a machine is only as secure as the wetware sitting at the keyboard. OS X is no different.

This underlies why Steve Jobs is so adamant about the review process for apps for the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch. To get into the App Store, which is the only place an unhacked i-device can get software from, a developer must submit his code for review. Sure, Apple thereupon rejects porn and other nasty stuff. In an email debate with a blogger a couple weeks ago, Jobs sent the blogosphere (and certain worthies here at FR) into orbit by saying "no porn." But what few seem to have noticed was that he also said something of the lines of "...and no insecure apps that will steal your data."

Apple's walled-garden approach, in which installable software can only come from authorized sources, might just be the future of computing. That makes a lot of folks angry. They should reserve their anger for the hackers who made it necessary.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"Hope you feel better after all that holier than thou venting"

Every example I cited was from sore personal experience.

Say hi to Mujibur for me.

[moodyskeptic]

Well written. I make my living on a mc, and have for 20 years. I refuse to get into arguments between platforms and I refuse to talk tech, it’s such a futile exercise. In the old days I defended Apple and came up against that PC Cult who, like Palin haters, are just plain crazy. Then I met crazy PC haters and wanted no part of them EITHER.

After years of just keeping my mouth shut I’ve noticed this quiet truth: real computer experts don’t engage in this silly Mac/PC war. That angry cross-platform vitriol is for the hobbyists and newbees. The folks who REALLY know their machines act like war vets who saw combat... they don’t brag about it.

[Swordmaker]

Apple, realizing that they would need four years starting from then to produce anything similar, hauled Atari's reps into their offices in Cupertino and demanded both money and a list of crippling changes to the GEM environment, threatening to tie the thing up in courtrooms for ten years otherwise, and Atari and DRI caved, i.e. the consumer never got to see anything like the full capability of the ST.

That's a bunch of revisionist BS. The Atari ST 260/520 was a late comer in the game and was Jack Tramiel's essentially off the shelf, down-and-dirty quick GUI, get it out the door, copy of the Commodore Amiga. Neither the Amiga nor the Atari ST were positioned to compete with the Macintosh. They were designed to compete for the home consumer market.

Jack Tramiel, the ousted ex-CEO of Commodore, bought the gutted shell of Atari from Warner Communications under the mistaken belief that Atari had acquired the Amiga. Unknown to him as he negotiated the purchase with Warner, Atari defaulted on the Amiga acquisition by missing the payment deadline, and his former company, Commodore, stepped in and snatched it up. Tramiel raided Commodore's engineering department to staff his new Atari Design Team and told them to come up with something quick. They did. The Atari 260/520 ST was the result. They used CP/M 68k (renamed Tramiel OS) and GEM. It was a non- multitasking OS that looked slick but was really not a competitor to the pre-emptive multitasking, multi-processor Amiga in functionality. It beat the Amiga to market by one week.

Ironically, High Toro, the company that created the Amiga, was founded by ex-Atari engineers... And the Atari was created by ex-Commodore engineers. So, the Commodore Amiga, at heart has more of an Atari design philosophy, while the Atari ST, has more of a Commodore design philosophy.

DRI's GEM, in its original form for CP/M and MS-DOS, was an exact copy of the look and feel, the registered and copyrighted trade dress, of the Macintosh. DRI had lifted from Apple all of the custom icons, the nested drop-down menus, and the exact look and design of the windows down to the drag bars, close buttons, etc. Apple rightfully sued DRI. Atari was not party to the suit. Apple required changes that were NOT functional to GEM but did affect the look and feel of the product. DRI settled rather than lose in court. They made the cosmetic changes. Your assertion that this somehow "crippled" the Atari ST is ludicrous as the lawsuit predated the creation of the Atari ST and involved look and feel issues, not function.

[antiRepublicrat]

Macs are expensive, but then so are other high-end PCs. That’s kind of the definition of only playing in the high-end market.

The question is whether they are overpriced, but that is a value judgment to be made personally by every consumer based on what features that consumers sees as worth paying more for. I’ve noticed some here don’t care about things like precision designed and machined aluminum notebook bodies. They think the prevalent standard plastic bodies are just fine. That would make a MacBook pro less valuable to these people.

On the whole though I’d have to say the continued high consumer demand would say they are not overpriced.

[TheBattman]

Apple’s software exceedingly protective? I just don’t grasp what you are trying to say.

Apple’s OS is less expensive than MS Windows.
Apple’s productivity suite is FAR less expensive than MS Office
Apple’s web browser is free
Apple’s music software (iTunes) is free
Apple’s iLife suite of creative tools is free with new computer purchases (not a time or feature-limited demos like what comes on most Windows-based PC’s).
That same-said iLife is still very reasonably priced. If you wish to use a 3rd party’s software to accomplish what you could with iLife (some may have a need for more advanced stuff) - there are zero blocks to doing that.
Apple has high-end software that, again, can be done with 3rd party software as well - no blocks to that.

How many times have I felt “gouged” by Apple? Never. I buy what I need, and don’t buy what I don’t need.

There are very few things one can’t do if they buy a new Mac - all without buying a single piece of additional software. In fact, other than those who are tethered to Microsoft Office (and even then - there are solutions to that too - for free), I cannot think of a single thing you would be beholden to Apple to be able to accomplish.

Where is the predatory, over-priced software you mention? Please back up your statements.

[antiRepublicrat]

What you malign as cheesy is good enuff for most people

That's the kicker. Apple simply doesn't sell in the "good enough" market.

[antiRepublicrat]

It takes me 80 minutes to get the new computer prepped and up and running and my friend saves about $400

Now imagine your friend didn't have you, was paying Best Buy or some other outfit to do it, at $$$ per hour, go slow to earn more $$$.

An iMac, once out of the box, takes probably less than 10 minutes to get running and on the Internet (I'll even add that it be wireles with WPA2 encryption, but using DHCP and broadcasting SSID) for the average person, with no expert help.