What I dont get is their pride in crowing about how utterly clueless they are in using a PC.
I’m sitting here using a Windows 8.1 machine, and for the the life of me I’ve never struggled with it. But you hear people that buy a Mac almost to a person give stories about how they they cant operate Windows because it is “too hard”, but then go and buy an entirely different OS, that isnt any easier to use, but because people say “it’s effortless”, they then will swear that they learned how to use it on the first day!
Which of course is nonsense or else all of those help forums would be empty, and their “Genius Bars” at the Apple stores would be shuttered.
I suppose when the reality gets in the way of the marketing, you dont want to be the one crowing about how hard a time you are having using a Mac after making such a show about switching to it.
Some folks only drive Fords. Some only use Mobil gas, smoke Marlboros, drink Budweiser. Brand loyalty is not a new concept and all companies promote it.
It only works when people like the product.
I agree with everything that you said.
I received my first Allied (Radio Shack) “solid state” electronics kit in 1970. My first computer was a TI99-4A. In college I got to play with terminals connected to a “main frame”. I also had a Timex Sinclair 1000, a Spectravideo, an Atari, several Tandys, a couple of Commodores and helped friends with their Apple IIs all before I put together my first XT compatible computer which used MSDOS. By that time I had given up on the family lumber mill business and gone back to school and got a job working as a computer lab assistant. So I am lucky because over the years I have gotten to work with a lot of digital equipment as it evolved from the first rudimentary digital IC kits up to the incredible equipment we have these days.
However, I must admit that discussions on forums like this where people debate various operating systems tend to baffle me most of the time. Are people really Operating System Connoisseurs or is it just meaningless chatter? I have worked with dozens of Operating Systems over the years. I never have had any serious difficulties with any of them. In my opinion the importance of various operating systems is generally greatly exaggerated.
I must admit that I do enjoy trying out different Operating Systems. For years I always had at least two or three Operating Systems on every computer that I owned. This is largely because a lot of times a new OS is not compatible with programs that I own. I could reboot into which ever one fit my needs at the time. Now even our tablets and phones have various emulators installed that mimic some of the various “nostalgic” computer systems that I used to use. We also now have various virtual machines installed on our PCs.
I actually enjoy fooling around with different Operating Systems but I am the first to admit that from a practical standpoint most of the time they just don’t make that much difference from a practical standpoint. Some of the new changes introduced actually are useful, but a lot of the time the changes are more for advertising hype than productivity.
For the record I never had any difficulties with Windows ME, or Vista. I have had difficulties with some of the irritating changes Microsoft has made to Office Applications over the years. It is fairly easy to get Windows 8.1 to behave like Windows 7. Just like it was fairly easy to get Windows 7 to work like Windows XP. And graduating from Windows 98 to Windows XP was no big deal either. I have to admit that I just don’t like most of the Linux productivity programs as much as I like the ones you can get for Windows. The way that Android Apps are constantly being updated can be irritating and all the Microsoft updates can also be annoying. However, most of the time it is possible to turn off auto-updating on everything.
The most irritating thing to me is when Microsoft changes their Office Applications... it sometimes irritates the heck out of me. Maybe it is because when I am actually trying to do something productive I don’t feel like fighting with the program. For instance why in the world did Microsoft make it difficult to change the line spacing options in Word and Publisher a few years ago? While graduating from the first versions of Photoshop over the past 20 years I don’t remember finding irritating changes that were time consuming to figure out. The same is true of audio and video editing programs.
So while it is fun to debate the merits of various Operating Systems... to me their differences seem trivial most of the time. As long as they can support the programs that I am using without trouble I usually don’t care that much about the OS.
Sorry for the long rambling post.
Apple sold 5.56 million Macs in just one quarter. There are almost 100,000,000 Macs in the installed base plus over 1 BILLION iOS devices. There are 265 Apple stores in the US, and they are open 364 days (closed Christmas) and each of them have about 6 Genius bar positions with 1/2 hour appointments from 10 to 9 daily. If all of those appointments at every store are filled, that's 12,732,720 service appointments a year, to cover 1.1 billion users. That's approximately 1.15% of users.
The number of people complaining in the forums is even smaller.
December ChangeWave survey: 97% iPhone satisfaction rate
December ChangeWave survey: 98% iPad Air satisfaction rate
Tim Cook: "iPad customer satisfaction is off the charts. 100% in some surveys. Unheard of."
Those both go along with that analysis.