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.
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.