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Posted on 07/10/2009 12:53:32 AM PDT by Swordmaker
You must be blind to the irony you are spouting. You are the only one on here attacing the persons, us. If you noticed, I already mentioned that the author appears not to be an English as a native language writer and cut him some slack. We were commenting on his lack of a grammar editor who, doing an editor's job, could have helped.
No irony at all. I saw more comments on things from you on how it was said rather than what was said.Of course your comment on mobile OS’s which you called FUD was material related.
Where is the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt in my rhetorical question about Android? Please tell me how that spreads FUD about any product?
You expressed doubt of his numbers by claiming that Linux is not equal in numbers to the iPhone(which you called FUD) which in turn spreads uncertainty about the veracity of his claims which is all about the fear his column created in your defensive mechanism.
I think you struck a nerve - what I don’t understand is this. I love my BMW (used to be BMWs - now it’s just BMW). But if people don’t like BMW’s or don’t like the fact that I like BMWs or just don’t give a sh*t one way or another, I could care less. Go figure.
No, yes, donut know. lol
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Or ... put another way: you don't have to be ex-gay to hate macs, but it helps.
Yup, you're right:
The irony is that YOU are using ad hominem attacks on people discussing the article. We are not. We've been discussing the article and its presentation. Re-read my comment you are referencing on mobile OS's... you will find I did NOT call it FUD. I said:
"Did you catch the claim that Linux cell phones were 8.1% of the market? Did Android suddenly gain more phones?"
Do you see the word FUD there? I had not seen that percentage of Linux OSes reported for Cell phone before... and the latest one being hyped is Android.
Do you really think those on here making comments alluding to the sexual perversities of Mac users are really discussing the content of the article? Strange, I don't recall sex being in the article at all. No, I think those comments are intended to marginalize Mac users and are exactly what ad hominem argument is about.
SO the entire article EXCEPT that part is FUD then to you? I mean you simply can’t start off with a post on your pinglist calling the thing FUD and then claim a small part of it isn’t FUD in another post. Or can you? Meh I don’t know.
As for that poster calling Apple users gay. Call him out on it, take him down, do what you do best. I don’t care.
You impute some kind of a "fear" to me and imply I am responding because of a "defense mechanism." These are loaded words which ARE ad hominem attacks against me, intended to marginalize me to other readers by implying a pathological condition. If we are going to psychoanalyze me, perhaps we should also consider your knee jerk reactions when you enter Mac threads and start spreading your ad hominem attacks. Perhaps the "fear" and "defense mechanism" references toward me are projection because you fear Apple's incursions into the Market and its phenomenal growth?
Getting back to legitimate debate, questioning the veracity of the author's data is NOT ad hominem attack... it is discussing the weight one should give the data that is being presented.
I can, for example, challenge the author on his implied accusation of dishonesty on Apple's part when he says:
"Apple itself said that it sold 13.675 million of iPhones in 2008. According to Gartner market research firm, Apple’s sold-through figures for the iPhone series were considerably lower: 11.4175 million units.
Total mobile phone sales reached 1.22224 billion units in 2008, claims Gartner. Therefore, depending on whose sales numbers to consider real, Apple’s cell phone market share is either 0.934% or 1.118%."
In this section the author implies that the actual, audited numbers of iPhones sold by Apple and reported in their annual report (where if you present false information, stockholders can sue the management, and the Feds can bring criminal charges of fraud) are somehow not accurate and further implies that Gartner's ESTIMATED numbers—provided by an organization that has limited information, mostly garnered by counting people in lines at stores in statistical samples... and which don't include sales on the Internet nor from Apple's own retail stores—are more accurate. Bah! That is FUD. It is perfectly proper to question his other "statistics."
Let's assume Gartner's estimate of 11.4 million sold through the channels they CAN sample, AT&T stores, Best Buy, and WalMart, etc., is accurate. To meet Apple's reported number of 13.7 million iPhones sold you'd have to account for 2.3 million phones not accounted for in Gartner's estimates. Apple sells iPhones on the Internet and through it's 250 Apple Retail Stores, neither of which provide figures to Gartner. Just ignoring the Internet sales and concentrating on the retail stores, doing simple math we find that Apple could sell ~2.3 million iPhones just through the Apple Retail stores if each store sold only 25 per day. Last November I took a friend with her iMac to an appointment at the Sacramento CA Apple Store's Genius Bar. We got there late because of an accident on the freeway so wound up having to wait for about 45 minutes for the next available opening... during that time I saw at least 12 iPhones sold. I think it is perfectly do-able and that Apple's audited count of iPhones sold is accurate and SHOULD have been used in this article instead of bringing up the FUD question of their veracity. So yeah, I will challenge the author's facts. Challenging his facts is not ad hominem.
SO the entire article EXCEPT that part is FUD then to you? I mean you simply can’t start off with a post on your pinglist calling the thing FUD and then claim a small part of it isn’t FUD in another post. Or can you? Meh I don’t know.
No, the article in its entirety IS FUD... small portions of it may not be FUD but are used to create FUD.
Fear, Undertainty, and Doubt do not need to be untruthful to be FUD. In fact, it is much more useful if you use facts to spread the FUD. It's the way the facts are presented... what is said... and what is not said.... that makes FUD. The choice of what to present, what is not presented, and how its couched are what makes it FUD.
Much of what this author claims is irrelevant to the quality, the design, the usability, the computing experience, or even the popularity, of the integrated computer and peripheral systems that Apple has put together to offer to the public in the markets it has chosen to compete in. His entire thrust is that Apple and its products must be unpopular because they occupy a minority position in their overall markets... ignoring other salient facts such as the market share growth Apple has been demonstrating in ALL of those markets and that Apple often does not compete in all sectors of those markets. For example, iPhones are sold in only 70 of the World's 195 countries. He doesn't qualify his data that iPhones were not even available in two of the World's largest cellular phone markets, India and Japan, until this year and that iPhones are still not available in the World's largest cellular market, China. Mac computers are actively marketed in even fewer countries. It also does not present the fact that 60% of Apple's market is in just ONE of those 195 countries. yet he chooses to compare Apple's (single company) products' numbers to the entire multi-thousand company competitions' products that are sold in all 195. That distorts the market share data to no purpose except FUD.
The basic argument here is akin to the classial logic fallacy's claim "Fifty Million Frenchmen can't be wrong." Reframe that: "One billion computer/cell phone/mp3/etc., users who selected Windows PCs/other Cell Phones/mp3 players/etc., (everything that was not made by Apple) can't be wrong." It then inverts that to conclude they must be right, and, ergo, anyone who chooses Apple has to be wrong... or a cult member... or deluded.
The fallacy in that claim is the assumption that those Frenchmen or non-Apple consumers, just because of their sheer numbers, have somehow imbued the things they believe or selected with truth or greater value. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that they certainly can be wrong about the truth of what they believe or the value of what they have selected.
Consensus proves nothing factual except that large numbers of people could be either wrong or right or neither... the only fact is their large number. There are probably 200 million Americans who believe that Anthropogenic Global Warming is real... but their numbers do not make that a fact or a not fact. To me it means large numbers of people can be deluded by people writing FUD. . . like Al Gore's seminal work. Their large numbers, just like the numbers of people who have never looked at or used a Mac and chose a Windows computer, do not validate their beliefs in the superiority of their choice, or their error of their choice or their ignorance about something they have not been exposed to. 54% (another large number) of the American Electorate thought that Barack Obama was the right person to be President of the United States... if the logic of this article is correct, then we have to accept that they "can't be wrong" so therefore they must be right!
The author of FUD just needs to spin the data presented in a way to establish FEAR in the potential customer of the company or product that there's something wrong about the company or product he wishes to disparage; He has to instill a certain amount of UNCERTAINTY in the potential customer that perhaps his thinking about the topic is somehow wrong. He also needs to establish DOUBT in the potential customer about what he thinks he knows about the company or product. Doubt that his choice to choose the company or item
That IS EXACTLY WHAT THIS ARTICLE IS ABOUT... it is spreading FUD. This article is a compendium of FUD about Apple and its products. I stand by that judgement call.
Oops, sorry TC. Didn’t mean to offend. Just returning fire. Won’t happen again.
Is English this guys second language?
But that is the point of his article Sword, a case that has completely escaped your gaze or purposely ignored. He is not attacking the quality of Apple products but the disproportionate amount of media coverage and the disproportionate zealotry of it’s fanbase. He is simply stating that Apples worldwide share for all but one of it’s products is miniscule yet the reception by the Media is akin to an Obama visit in Ghana.
I think so. That's why he would benefit from an editor.
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