You sign off on a Teddy Kennedy extravaganza to increase the Education budget by 30 billion, later reduced to 24 billion.
Of course, it's a 6 billion dollar cut.
/sarcasm
Posted on 02/04/2004 10:04:38 AM PST by avg_freeper
In politics and other enterprises, the Mac is the superior weapon. It is The Ultimate FReeping Machine.
You sign off on a Teddy Kennedy extravaganza to increase the Education budget by 30 billion, later reduced to 24 billion.
Of course, it's a 6 billion dollar cut.
/sarcasm
Apple has always insisted on having a hardware monopoly, except for a brief period in the mid-1990s when they allowed clone-makers to compete with them, before subsequently putting them out of business. Macintosh hardware was, consequently, expensive. You didn't open it up and fool around with it because doing so would void the warranty. In fact the first Mac was specifically designed to be difficult to open--you needed a kit of exotic tools, which you could buy through little ads that began to appear in the back pages of magazines a few months after the Mac came out on the market. These ads always had a certain disreputable air about them, like pitches for lock-picking tools in the backs of lurid detective magazines.This monopolistic policy can be explained in at least three different ways.
THE CHARITABLE EXPLANATION is that the hardware monopoly policy reflected a drive on Apple's part to provide a seamless, unified blending of hardware, operating system, and software. There is something to this. It is hard enough to make an OS that works well on one specific piece of hardware, designed and tested by engineers who work down the hallway from you, in the same company. Making an OS to work on arbitrary pieces of hardware, cranked out by rabidly entrepeneurial clonemakers on the other side of the International Date Line, is very difficult, and accounts for much of the troubles people have using Windows.
THE FINANCIAL EXPLANATION is that Apple, unlike Microsoft, is and always has been a hardware company. It simply depends on revenue from selling hardware, and cannot exist without it.
THE NOT-SO-CHARITABLE EXPLANATION has to do with Apple's corporate culture, which is rooted in Bay Area Baby Boomdom.
Now, since I'm going to talk for a moment about culture, full disclosure is probably in order, to protect myself against allegations of conflict of interest and ethical turpitude: (1) Geographically I am a Seattleite, of a Saturnine temperament, and inclined to take a sour view of the Dionysian Bay Area, just as they tend to be annoyed and appalled by us. (2) Chronologically I am a post-Baby Boomer. I feel that way, at least, because I never experienced the fun and exciting parts of the whole Boomer scene--just spent a lot of time dutifully chuckling at Boomers' maddeningly pointless anecdotes about just how stoned they got on various occasions, and politely fielding their assertions about how great their music was. But even from this remove it was possible to glean certain patterns, and one that recurred as regularly as an urban legend was the one about how someone would move into a commune populated by sandal-wearing, peace-sign flashing flower children, and eventually discover that, underneath this facade, the guys who ran it were actually control freaks; and that, as living in a commune, where much lip service was paid to ideals of peace, love and harmony, had deprived them of normal, socially approved outlets for their control-freakdom, it tended to come out in other, invariably more sinister, ways.
Applying this to the case of Apple Computer will be left as an exercise for the reader, and not a very difficult exercise.
It is a bit unsettling, at first, to think of Apple as a control freak, because it is completely at odds with their corporate image. Weren't these the guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing suited, blindfolded executives marching like lemmings off a cliff? Isn't this the company that even now runs ads picturing the Dalai Lama (except in Hong Kong) and Einstein and other offbeat rebels?
It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been able to plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious free-thinkers in the minds of so many intelligent and media-hardened skeptics really gives one pause. It is testimony to the insidious power of expensive slick ad campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people who fall for them.
It also raises the question of why Microsoft is so bad at PR, when the history of Apple demonstrates that, by writing large checks to good ad agencies, you can plant a corporate image in the minds of intelligent people that is completely at odds with reality. (The answer, for people who don't like Damoclean questions, is that since Microsoft has won the hearts and minds of the silent majority--the bourgeoisie--they don't give a damn about having a slick image, any more then Dick Nixon did.
"I want to believe,"--the mantra that Fox Mulder has pinned to his office wall in The X-Files--applies in different ways to these two companies; Mac partisans want to believe in the image of Apple purveyed in those ads, and in the notion that Macs are somehow fundamentally different from other computers, while Windows people want to believe that they are getting something for their money, engaging in a respectable business transaction).
...
But the price that we Mac owners had to pay for superior aesthetics and engineering was not merely a financial one. There was a cultural price too, stemming from the fact that we couldn't open up the hood and mess around with it. Doug Barnes was right. Apple, in spite of its reputation as the machine of choice of scruffy, creative hacker types, had actually created a machine that discouraged hacking, while Microsoft, viewed as a technological laggard and copycat, had created a vast, disorderly parts bazaar--a primordial soup that eventually self-assembled into Linux.
Nah, just a crappy, mass-market oriented evil.
hahahaha HaHaHaHa HAHAHAHAHA BWWWWWAHAHAHA
I didn't know that the consumer's sun rises and sets from Rusty's ass. Give me a break.
"My Mac allowed me to focus on the message," said Mr. Surr. "I just find it to be really, really dependable. There's not a lot of surprises on a Mac. It doesn't crash on me and it's just a solid work station."
That says it ALL!!!
And, Apple doesn't oustource ANYTHING!!!
Really? Say that to all those who suffer viruses on a daily basis. Oh yeah, how much did you have to pay extra for all that Video editing software on the wintel? You see, it's free, along with many other things, on the Mac. But live in the past, with your head in the sand and let the world pass you bye.
Exactly! In fact, worth repeating:
It's a freaking computer. It doesn't have a political stance. It has no idea it's being used by some to produce something you dislike. Get a grip.
Anybody ever check the political affiliation of the makers of sign boards used for political signs, or the hammers used to beat them into the ground? How about your ISP? Perhaps the president of the company that makes the tires your car rolls on to the polling place doesn't agree with your politics.
Frightening what people bring into politics.
It's a freaking computer. It doesn't have a political stance. It has no idea it's being used by some to produce something you dislike. Get a grip.
Mind if I use that on a shirt? Perhaps with the Apple logo behind it.
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