Posted on 03/21/2015 1:33:07 AM PDT by Swordmaker
Apple zealots are one thing, but Apple doomsayers might be worse. This week, on The Network: John Moltz wonders why we ever mixed church and tech.
Stop me if you've heard this one: Apple is just like a relig—
STOP.
Yeah, you've heard it. Apple is just like a religion. And its customers are acolytes, steeped in the heady lore of the Church of Jobs blah blah blah. For certain pundits and commentators, this explains away everything they don't understand about Apple. Why it does so fabulously well, why its customers are so loyal, why the company is able to charge more for its devices... it explains everything!
A little too neatly.
See, if I could add an addendum to Occam's Razor it would go like this: The simplest explanation is usually the right one... unless it involves magic. Frankly, I think that it's much more valid to apply this argument to Apple's critics than its supporters.
Take, for example, those who continuously proclaim that Apple's doom is nigh. You don't have to look far for them: They literally use the word "doom" in their headlines.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying belief in imminent Apple doom is a religion. I don't think it is. You know what is religion? Religion. Words have meaning, that's what they're for. Most of these people who proclaim Apple doom don't even believe it themselves — they're just selling something.
No, I'm just saying one could make a better case that the Apple Doomsday Cult is a religion than making the argument that Apple itself is. Consider it a thought experiment.
The church of Apple
For starters, let's look at the argument that Apple is a religion. We know this is true because researchers in Britain hooked one Apple fan up to a machine and found his reaction to the brand was stimulating the same centers of the brain that religion stimulates.
Oh, you can argue that one is not a statistically large sample or that even if Apple does stimulate the same brain centers as religion that doesn't mean much because lots of things — our loved ones, playing sports, or the rich, creamy taste of Litehouse Ranch Dressing — could do the same thing, that doesn't make them religions. But now you're just hating on science, hater.
Still there is the generic argument about the canonical "Apple zealot". Do these people who think Apple is perfect in every way all the time and will buy whatever product Apple ships actually exist? Probably. When I invented "Artie MacStrawman" nine years ago, it was not without its basis in fact. But here's the difference: The only place the Arties of the world write is in comments or forums or on the restroom wall of the Applebee's they walked into confusedly thinking it had something to do with Apple. They don't write for supposedly serious publications like Forbes, Fortune, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. They don't have positions as big-time Wall Street analysts. They certainly don't get invited on television to make their case and they definitely do not get book deals.
The altar of facts
Are there Apple fans who will take any opportunity to point and laugh and make snarky remarks about Apple's competitors? Haha, oh, yeah. Oh, my god, so many. Most of these people also criticize Apple, too. While we prefer Apple's products and their business model, we're not idiots. But pointing out that Apple makes good stuff and makes a ton of money for doing so — in other words, pointing out facts — does not mean you're a religious nut.
Maybe Apple doom is a thing because our culture loves stories that run counter to what everyone thinks. If you can come up with some kind of evidence that donuts are actually good for you, it'd be a big traffic day on Huffington Post. But this dogged adherence to the idea that Apple will fail runs back to the mid-1990s when it was actually failing. In other words, when Apple was failing, no one was getting cushy gigs telling people how it was actually succeeding. Which is good because it wasn't, but you can't explain the Church of Apple Doom away as simply the novelty of being contrarian.
The sweet smell of success
Now, Apple is so much more of a success story than a failure story that it seems almost impossible on a quantum mechanical level. That's really the only thing you need to know to make my case: Apple's not just successful, it's incredibly, dramatically, wildly, record-breakingly successful. So demonstrably successful that saying it's doomed has gone light years past "not even funny anymore" and wrapped all the way around the universe to "thigh-slappingly hysterical" again.
And yet people still believe it's on the edge of going out of business. Well, as I said, they either believe that or they're just selling that idea to get attention. Which, of course, also goes on in religion. QED.
Is Apple always a success? No. Will it always be a success? Given what we presume is the infinite nature of time, probably not. Some time before the sun burns out, Apple will probably again get the kind of managers it had in the mid-1990s, an assortment of clotted meat products in suits who believe that market share is incredibly important and that chasing the lowest common denominator is a sure-fire way to win.
But we're nowhere close to that point yet. So to buy into the idea that it's happening right now, you have to take a lot on faith. Certainly a lot more than believing Apple is a success.
This really depends.
BetaMax vs. VHS, SCSI vs. IDE, and FireWire vs. USB for examples.
Everyone thought iEntolgy was going down after the death of L Ron Jobs but it’s just like The Eveready Bunny. Still going!
He’s lying about his “facts.” See post #16.
Meh. Windows for production, and i-whatever for mobile devices. That’s my professional opinion.
Yes. It was amazing that Apple got the build quality out of the same offshore manufacturing host countries that produced so much crap.
Can't stand being outed, can you. You resemble these remarks . . . in fact, they were written about you and match you to a "T"!
There's no technical content in the article, and this isn't a technical discussion. It's meant keep the "haters" meme going. It's good publicity for Apple, and promulgating it here co-opts this site as a propaganda tool for them.
And don't forget MS invented vaporware.
Samsung has been following Apple for many years, Swordmaker has posted all the evidence about Samsung trying to copy everything about the iPhone. Apple sued and won.
Commericails are used industry wide to promote your product. Nothing Apple did was anticompetitive.
Look at the overall product. Apple has discontinued use of Firewire now.
The claim was that "Apple isn't trying to compete with anyone".
"Promoting your product" is competitive.
Thanks for that information, bolobaby, I had missed seeing that. Of course Lenovo I see on a one year follow-up article that Lenovo has also opened a moved a customer service center to the NC location since opening their assembly plant there.
There is trying to sell something to the public, and then there is trying to compete against something. Selling TO someone is not the same as competing AGAINST a competitor. Apple doesn't really do the latter. Apple tries to please the customer. . . not counter what the competition is doing. That is what the competition is always doing; worrying about price, features, and trying to counter what the competition is doing with their next product.
You fail to understand that difference.
The original complaint was:
And what most people fail to understand is Apple isn't trying to compete with anyone.
So, it's not just me. It appears you've created a definition of "competition" unlike anything most people understand it to mean to make yourselves appear victimized.
Of course there is competition in the marketplace. Apple’s primary focus is in making it’s own products better rather than one-upping another manufacturer’s specs, though. Feature-creep is has not been their game, unlike other manufacturers and marketers. That’s the distinction that the article intended to make.
I asked an honest question, received a non-answer, and was attacked for not having seen the non-answer previously.
I applaud Apple for having at least some manufacturing in the US. I hope that is a genuine, long-term commitment, and that they will move more of their production back to this country.
Not lying. I just did not know about Lenovo opening a small assembly plant (116 employees) in North Carolina. My mistake, but not a lie. YOU declare a mistake to be a lie because of your Apple hatred. You, of course, never make mistakes. . . you are perfect. Oops, I just made another mistake.
Most people who switch to Macs report an noticeable increase in their productivity.
Did Microsoft sell computers? No. Again, Apple was selling to CUSTOMERS. . . not against competitors. Not one of those ads was targeted against any specific maker of another computer. . . but instead targeted toward the users' experience. . . and telling them the computing experience did not have to be what they were used to. Those ads were very effective because every PC user experienced what they saw the personification of their PC doing.
No, not really; yes, there's a protocol component to USB, FireWire, SCSI, and IDE — but there's also real technical superiority/inferiority because they're more than just protocol, they're also HW-architectures for data-transmission.
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