Apple, Macs and fanboys
Sunday, 3 May 2009
I bet that you would have surely been taken by the “Oh shiny!” mentality. Correct! Am talking about Apple products. The company well known for its new innovation and user-friendliness is now hitting new markets with its products.
Have you ever used a Mac? Or iPhone? Or iPod? The first thing you would notice is the sleek looking design. Yeah, Apple has great gadget designers. Adding to their wealth, they not only have money, but also a huge base of users inclusive of fanboys.
Let us get straight to the point. I know a lot of people using Macs. Many use it just as an OS, some use it and admire its capabilities and some turn fanatic praising Apple as if there is nothing left in this world except Steve Jobs. Basically I would like to differentiate apple people in two broad categories - the open minded people and the fanatics. Yeah, there are open minded people using Macs… to name a few Ankur Sethi, Apoorv Khatreja etc etc. Well, I don’t need to give example of the latter, you would meet them quite often and easily get pissed off.
I am an admirer of Steve Jobs. The guy has lots of achievement under his hat. Same goes with Bill Gates even though am no big fan of MS. Steve Jobs has made a loyal fan base of Apple who would always be with him no matter how many times he shoots at them straight in the face. It doesn’t matter how many times you rescue a scorpion, it will still bite you if it gets a chance.
MS gets bashed for its horrible policies and monopolistic behaviour. Isn’t apple in the same lines? I did a comparison long back about iPhone and its competitors. Secondly, it pushes Safari through iTunes update, much like a spyware and to my utter surprise, it got lots of praises from the fanatics that Apple is saving the MS users from IE. Oh come-on, you need to educate them that IE is crap, not push another piece of unknown software on their PCs.
Lets move down to iPhone. Initially they had a NDA in place which prohibits speaking about iPhone development in public. Seriously, developing an app filled with communism kinda environment - “Shut up.. Or we will fire you”. The NDA has been repealed after much criticism, but one more evil policy still remains. You can’t make apps which replicate the build-in functionalities of the Phone. To be precise, if Apple gave you Safari on the iPhone, you are done with it, bring no other browser in your dreams.
I came to meet one Mac fanatic on the internet once who was saying how Apple changed the world with its Time Machine which is a new innovative way with which you would never lose any data. Wait a minute, is it innovative? I still believe that Apple did a great job of making it available through a proper GUI and with loads of usability. The core thing is perhaps still decades old. What is the technology? Incremental backups, you moron!! This technology has been used by server admins for quite a long time.
The list of rants is quite huge. Maybe this is just the end of beginning.
No. 1 — May 3rd, 2009 at 6:08 pm
very straight and thought provoking post….liked it…..completely agree
No. 2 — May 3rd, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Completely agree with you. Gawd, Mac fanboys make me SICK. Everything is hailed as ‘revolutionary’, even when it’s something mundane.
No. 3 — May 3rd, 2009 at 6:44 pm
To make it clear, am not against Apple. I am just against two thing:
* The unethical marketing practices and policies which should clearly come under the scanner of Anti-Trust dept.
* The sick community of fanboys.
Let us now split these community of fanboys further:
1. Those fanboys which know what they are talking about and know how to program using Mac SDK(or whatever you call it).They know the internals of a Mac
2. The self-declared uber-cool Mac fanatics who feel horny just at the slightest mention of the word “Apple” or “Mac”.
No. 4 — May 9th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
So, Apple tries to gain market share. Which company hasn’t tried?
Canonical is trying to do the same thing by blatantly copying Mac OS X(as Shuttleworth said on a blog post). Call me a fanboy or use whichever other term but that’s not going to stop me from talking about the things I love.
As far as the so-called “Oh, shiny” mentality is concerned, I don’t think there’s anything wrong in appreciating quality. As I can make out, you don’t think implementing incremental backups with an excellent GUI is innovation. I guess you wont think other things like the Walkman or LCD panels are innovative because they do the things other products have done in the past.
When I use a Mac, or any other product for that matter, judging them while being critical is the least I could do.
No. 5 — May 14th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Unethical means Abhishek! Snooping Safari via iTunes update is ethical? Isn’t it much like a spyware? It was hailed as a great act!
Nothing new. Mac’s core/kernel itself is copied. –> Mach+BSD.
Being a fanboy isn’t that bad, but still when someone blindly bashes anything not Apple and praises everything Apple, its looks stupid.
Oh Shiny mentality should not be the *only* reason for hailing it as “it rocks’. Sadly it is what happens usually.
*
This blog post wasn’t meant to be hurt anyone’s feelings. But still, hailing everything as revolutionary is a something which sucks. Many of the mac-fanboys do this just because they want to show themselves as cool. I am giving my point as a person outside the Mac-community. How do general people perceive this fanboyish-ism.
Those who praise Mac after weighing all the + and - factors are one who don’t deserve to be worried. Still, the irony is that quite a less Mac fanboys weight the +/- points.