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More Flame Bait — (Why Mac)
Charlie's Diary ^ | 01/17/2010 | Charles Stross

Posted on 01/21/2010 1:54:46 PM PST by Swordmaker

This is an oldie but a goodie, and I haven't written about it before — at least, not on my blog.

I'm writing this entry sitting on a sofa and using a Macbook Air. The desktop computer in my office is also a Mac. Why?

There are several good arguments for not using Apple's computers. For one thing, they're expensive; no cheap netbooks here. If money was all there was to it, I'd stick to generic cheap PCs — and indeed, I have run PCs in the past.

I'm on the public record as being a UNIX bigot. Although Mac OS X is BSD UNIX based, these days the various flavours of Linux will turn just about any PC (except for a few portables with exotic hardware) into a decent workstation. If it was just about the UNIX experience, I'd be running Linux on commodity PCs.

The reason I choose to pay through the nose for my computers is very simple: unlike just about every other manufacturer in the business, Apple appreciate the importance of good industrial design.

Most of the major computer vendors were started by salesmen or engineering executives. Over time, marketing took over as the main driving force. Design doesn't get much of a look in edgeways — with the intermittent exception of Sony's high-end kit, most PC vendors wouldn't know good industrial design if you hit them over the head with it. Apple, however, is different.

There is a focus on industrial design at Apple that is ubiquitous in other business sectors but absent from the rest of the personal computing industry. Automobile marketing is almost entirely design- and fashion-driven these days, followed by technology in second place. The PC business isn't; what passes for design is a choice of differently-coloured injection-molded plastic cases stuffed full of badly-integrated cruft. There are wires everywhere, bad ergonomics (did I rant yet about the iniquities of far eastern keyboard designers and their contempt for the right-shift key?), and to cap it all there's Windows — a dog's dinner of an operating system — plus lashings of try-before-you-buy junkware. Sure you can get decently designed PCs, but you'll end up paying as much as you would for a Mac: and you still have to scrape the crud off them to get a halfway acceptable experience.

Worse: for the most part, PC people don't understand the value of good design. The value of good design is simple, literally: stuff that's well designed is easy to use, fit for purpose, and doesn't put obstructions in the way of you using it to get stuff done. Design, in the computing biz, is all too often confused with technology, which is something entirely different. Yes, there is a place for advanced technology: but it shouldn't be getting in your face. All too often, PC vendors market their products by over-emphasizing the technology that goes into them, rather than by making the damn things useful. And then they look down their nose at anyone who complains that this stuff is hard.

I use Macs because I appreciate good industrial design when I see it; I work sitting in an Aeron chair in front of a 1970s vintage Swedish desk, and I don't want to spend sixty hours a week sitting at that desk staring at something that looks like it was thrown together from the spare parts bin. I want an operating system descended from UNIX under the hood, because I have twenty-plus years experience of bossing UNIX systems around (and UNIX, in my opinion, exhibits a degree of basic design consistency in its userland experience that is missing from the Microsoft world). I like the Mac OS X graphical experience because it looks good, (as it should, because before it could be released it had to satisfy a fanatical design perfectionist obsessed with caligraphy). And I am sitting in front of this thing for sixty hours a week. I have better things to do with my time than nurse a balky, badly-designed system that shits itself all over my hard disk on a regular basis, or spends half its time running urgent maintenance tasks that stop me getting stuff done.

I could write while sitting on a cheap IKEA stool in front of a kitchen table, banging away on a netbook loaded with Windows XP. But after a week, my back and my wrists would hurt and I'd be bleeding from the eyeballs every time I looked at the screen. It'd be like spending sixty hours a week driving a cheap Chevrolet Shitweasel instead of a Mercedes: sure, think of the savings — but the pain will get to you in the end.

Let the average price of a laptop PC (when you add in the necessary applications) be £600, and the average price of a Macbook Pro be £1200. Amortized over a year, I'm paying about £2 a day for a decent working environment. That's the price of a cup of coffee in Starbucks. If you drive to and from your day job for an hour a day, you'd seriously consider buying a more comfortable car. A better, more comfortable computing environment costs peanuts in comparison.

One day, I hope, the entire PC industry will cotton on to the value of good industrial design and start taking it as seriously as Apple; or that those companies who don't will go bust. I'll spend less of my time answering questions from confused friends and family. Maybe it'll mean less employment for technical support staff. But for the rest of us, it'll mean more time to do the things we consider to be important.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Computers/Internet
KEYWORDS: ilovebillgates; iwanthim; iwanthimbad; microsoftfanboys
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To: avenir

As a diehard Sony fan, may I observe that Sony’s problem with otherwise winning designs is their insistence in cutting corners _somewhere_. If the product specs don’t say X exactly, don’t assume it does/has X. Prime example: my beloved ultraportable VAIO has a Memory Stick slot - which, along with several other non-standard cool interfaces suddenly stopped working one day for no apparent reason, and I can’t find a solution/driver/explanation/whatever for it anywhere. I mean really: their proprietary product-line-defining specialty, the Memory Stick, was implemented as a tenuously-impemented USB device which just died. Another example: same VAIO came with a 50GB hard drive - of which 10GB is set aside for system restoration, with no apparent way of either doing a system restoration nor trashing the contents and recovering the unusable disk space.

Sony is so close to perfect cool, and yet so far for the stupidest reasons. Apple, however, does get it right. I’m still agonizing over whether to get the latest 2-lb carbon-fiber supercool VAIO, or the equivalent MacBook Air. Both are awesome. Would that Sony were just a little more so.


41 posted on 01/21/2010 8:12:17 PM PST by ctdonath2 (Virtue is to be apologized for. Depravity commands respect. - Galt)
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To: Auntie Dem
Ha! A FICTION writer! I knew this whole post was made up.

Grin! Don't forget the modifier to that verb... SCIENCE

That gives him a little more credibility on tech subjects like computers... after all Science Fiction authors predicted that people in the future would have personal computers in every house... oh, wait... they didn't... somehow they all missed that development... ;^)>

42 posted on 01/21/2010 8:14:15 PM PST by Swordmaker (Remember, the proper pronunciation of IE isAAAAIIIIIEEEEEEE!)
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To: MikeWUSAF

There’s about 10% of the MAC users that make me want to avoid having anything to do with it.


43 posted on 01/21/2010 8:15:30 PM PST by tacticalogic ("Oh bother!" said Pooh, as he chambered his last round.)
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To: discostu
If you like your iMac great. I think they’re kind of ugly, I’ve found every generation of them ugly. Even if I didn’t find them ugly though i dno’t want to spend the extra for aesthetics on the box (or box/ monitor in the case of iMacs). I don’t really care how my fridge, microwave or car looks either, I want them to get the job done.

Esthetics is only ONE of the aspects of industrial design... and its one of the lesser important aspects of industrial design. That is what most PC apologists and PC designers miss... and why they fail miserably when they try to design something to compete with Apple's designs.

Apple's Industrial design has to do with how the hardware, software, the esthetics, the network, the extended network, the user interface, the service, and even the content, work together with the user.

44 posted on 01/21/2010 8:22:43 PM PST by Swordmaker (Remember, the proper pronunciation of IE isAAAAIIIIIEEEEEEE!)
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To: Hardastarboard

“Ever try to make a Mac work with a home network?”

This is a problem only if the ‘infidel’ machines on your network are running Vista, which makes it difficult to do anything. Macs use the same standard network protocols as everything else these days.


45 posted on 01/21/2010 8:33:29 PM PST by BlazingArizona
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Bookmark


46 posted on 01/21/2010 8:41:11 PM PST by The Cajun (Mind numbed robot , ditto-head, Hannitized, Levinite)
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To: Hardastarboard

Let me know if you ever have another problem getting a Mac to work on your home network.

I’ll send my 12 year old nephew over to get you squared away.

Even my computer illiterate parents were able to unbox a shiny new MBP and get it connected to their existing (Linksys) wireless network.


47 posted on 01/21/2010 8:53:20 PM PST by gruffwolf
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To: gruffwolf

Amusing, but I’ve hooked at least four Windows machines to my network with no issues. Took me a matter of minutes for each of them.


48 posted on 01/22/2010 3:45:22 AM PST by Hardastarboard (I am a light-skinned American with no Negro dialect, unless I want to have one.)
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To: Hardastarboard
"Ever try to make a Mac work with a home network?"

Easiest thing in the world. Besides my own experience, I'd spotlight my mother-in-law's. She's 85, hardly a techie, had wrestled with a Windows PC for years, and thought the Apple Store people were blowing her off when they told her the Mac would pretty much configure itself. She plugged it in, and sure enough.

Which isn't to say there might be some circumstances where an ancient router or something might cause an issue. But if so, it's hardly the typical situation as you allege.

I'm curious why you'd post such a falsehood.
49 posted on 01/22/2010 4:36:03 AM PST by RightOnTheLeftCoast (Obama: running for re-election in '12 or running for Mahdi now? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahdi])
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To: ctdonath2
"As a diehard Sony fan, may I observe that Sony’s problem with otherwise winning designs is their insistence in cutting corners _somewhere_."

We have five Vaios here. (People think I'm a Mac fanboi, and I guess I'm becoming one based on good experiences, but Windows still outnumbers Macs and Linux machines here. That's changing fast.)

I'd say the problem with Sony is abysmal customer support and their habit of trying to ram non-industry-standard interfaces up our collective arse. And crapware, lots and lots of crapware. And their prices tend to be higher than most competitors, though I'd agree they (like Macs) are often worth it.
50 posted on 01/22/2010 4:44:49 AM PST by RightOnTheLeftCoast (Obama: running for re-election in '12 or running for Mahdi now? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahdi])
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To: iowamark

My first home computer!!


51 posted on 01/22/2010 5:05:36 AM PST by KosmicKitty (WARNING: Hormonally crazed woman ahead!!)
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To: iowamark
You were saying ...

I'm sticking with the Shack:
Well, you keep yours and I'll keep mine... LOL...

IMSAI 8080 Microcomputer System


52 posted on 01/22/2010 7:10:09 AM PST by Star Traveler (Remember to keep the Messiah of Israel in the One-World Government that we look forward to coming)
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To: Hardastarboard
You were saying ...

Ever try to make a Mac work with a home network? The Apple technicians will swear up and down that it's a problem with your ISP, or that you need a new router, or whatever. It can never be the Mac's fault. Oh, no.

I've never once had a problem, either with my desktop or my laptop, in many different environments.

One of the desktops has been around (loaned around at times), and it's never had a problem connecting on any home network, and the laptop has never had a problem connecting on networks, all over the place -- even with war-driving and connecting in five states in many different neighborhoods, by the side of the curb... LOL... I've even done warbiking and warwalking...

I'm not sure what kinds of problems you've had, but whatever it is, I've never run into one... :-)

53 posted on 01/22/2010 7:15:08 AM PST by Star Traveler (Remember to keep the Messiah of Israel in the One-World Government that we look forward to coming)
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To: AndyJackson; moehoward
You were saying ...

Turned on my new MAC. It said “Join network? Y/N. I clicked yes and was on the network. It was a lucky guess.

You can go to thousands of WiFi Hotspots around the country and that's the way it will work... :-) I know because I've done it and do it...

54 posted on 01/22/2010 7:17:33 AM PST by Star Traveler (Remember to keep the Messiah of Israel in the One-World Government that we look forward to coming)
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To: Swordmaker

Aesthetics is the aspect this guy is talking about. His big complaint is he doesn’t want things to look like they came from the spare parts bin. That’s aesthetics, and that’s not something I, or apparently most of the PC buyers, want to spend one extra penny on. Don’t care how the machine looks, don’t even care how the software looks, just want to use the stuff.


55 posted on 01/22/2010 7:27:54 AM PST by discostu (wanted: brick, must be thick and well kept)
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To: willgolfforfood; AndyJackson
You were saying ...

C’mon, you had a 50/50 shot at getting it right, even if your cat had walked across the keyboard.

Ummm... sorry, the kinds of things that "could" go wrong, are more numerous than you think and so the fail-rate "could" (theoretically) be more and different things going wrong, than just the one "success" of connecting.

So, the possible fail-rate is higher than 50-50....

It's just the connect rate for Macintosh, over a long period of time and with many WiFi Hotspots is about 100% in my own experience, and from what I've heard from others in connecting with their Macintoshes, over a period of time and in the public.

56 posted on 01/22/2010 7:47:50 AM PST by Star Traveler (Remember to keep the Messiah of Israel in the One-World Government that we look forward to coming)
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To: SJSAMPLE
You were saying ...

MAC technicians swore up and down it wasn’t the computer.

Okay, y'all (and this is to everyone who says this...) -- don't use "MAC" for "Macintosh"... please... LOL...

MAC is Media Access Control -- a data communication protocol sub-layer -- and all devices have that and a number related to that, a "MAC number".... (it's with any computer, any network device and any manufacturer.

"Mac" on the other hand, is a "Macintosh computer"... :-)

57 posted on 01/22/2010 7:55:05 AM PST by Star Traveler (Remember to keep the Messiah of Israel in the One-World Government that we look forward to coming)
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To: PA Engineer; Hardastarboard
You were saying ...

Never had a problem. Been running a home network for ten years, since the first airport was released. What Macs are you running?
Those "Airports" are great devices... but just for the general reading audience here, the Macintosh computers connect regularly with all sorts of WiFi Hotspots everywhere that I go -- and including when I'm driving down neighborhood streets and doing some "war-driving" and connecting to people's local networks, too... LOL... (don't bother going into the "where-with-alls" of connecting to home networks, either, I've heard it all... LOL...).
58 posted on 01/22/2010 7:59:41 AM PST by Star Traveler (Remember to keep the Messiah of Israel in the One-World Government that we look forward to coming)
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To: MikeWUSAF

You should see the “Windows-crazies”.... a worse bunch you’ll never come across in your life... LOL...


59 posted on 01/22/2010 8:00:41 AM PST by Star Traveler (Remember to keep the Messiah of Israel in the One-World Government that we look forward to coming)
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To: Star Traveler
Okay, y'all (and this is to everyone who says this...) -- don't use "MAC" for "Macintosh"... please... LOL...

And don't say "a**hole" when you mean "pedant".

60 posted on 01/22/2010 8:01:36 AM PST by tacticalogic ("Oh bother!" said Pooh, as he chambered his last round.)
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