Apple is a luxury fashion company and Apple hardware is a way for people to express social status, which means convincing as many other people as possible that Apple is desirable in order to elevate the effectiveness of their social status signaling. It's the same as any other luxury fashion brand, e.g. Louis Vuitton. The value is not in the function of the product itself, but in the perception of status that it engenders.
I felt the way you do for the entire decade of the '00s.
Then I started a job that issued me a MacBook Pro. And got to see, use, and develop for, a shitload of Android and iOS devices, both phones and tablets.
Turns out I'd just never given them a chance.
But yes, I'm sure Apple users are just dumber than you, and that's all it is.
> But yes, I'm sure Apple users are just dumber than you, and that's all it is.
I too fell for the Apple marketing cult. I was excited when I got my first MacBook. To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement. The keyboard felt terrible and broke frequently, the insistence of dongles to make up for the anemic port selection was a constant annoyance, the touchbar was a myopic UX catastrophe, the touchpad was worse than on PC laptops that I've used, the software was outdated, configurability and lack of control was appalling, and it was abundant with boneheaded design decisions that favored form over function. At least the screen was nice. Today it sits gathering dust in the corner.
But yes, I'm sure non-Apple users are just too dumb to appreciate Jobbesian bliss, and that's all it is.
Heh, I was kinda bummed out when I got mine. I'd been developing on Linux for years. That turned around hard in a month or two.
This was well before the super-shitty run they had where they went all-USB-C, Touch Bar (ugh), and ruined their keyboards, though. I'd probably have been a lot less impressed if that was my introduction to their stuff.
The thread is in the context of Apple users insisting that the OP should use a Mac, when the OP has explicitly stated that it does not fit their needs.
Well, sure, because Apple makes it impossible to develop for iOS devices without using a Mac. So you HAVE to fully buy into their ecosystem if you want to develop anything for their mobile phones.
Could we get tech companies to step up and beat the fashion company then? Because on many, many, many comparisons the fashion company makes them look completely inept at making tech products. I know, they've only had 20 years, it seems like a ridiculous ask.
Besides raw specs of CPUs and GPUs, which the fashion company is encroaching on too, my non-fashion product's trackpads, screen color quality, sound quality, screen hinges, heat dissipation locations, power efficiency, keyboards, case flex, case materials, weight, size, storage speeds, and upgradability are just some of the things that all suck on my Lenovo, Microsoft and Asus laptops my household owns and that my fashion laptops consistently do better.
My non-fashion products manage to put better refresh rate screens in, and I can get gaming capable discrete GPUs, and one of them lets me upgrade the RAM aftermarket, but for the most part they're all worse products that have lower utility than the fashion products. The perception they engender with me is that they're the only company that builds a product they don't secretly loathe.
There are many ways to signal social status, and we'd all be better off if people favored ones with positive externalities (e.g. volunteering and donating to charity) rather than ones with negative externalities (e.g. lining the pockets of executives of the world's richest company while they endeavor to reduce computers to unrepairable appliances and destroy general-purpose computing).
I love and develop for Linux, but I use a Mac. I understand people’s complaints about macs, but in no way have I bought it for any kind of signaling. Most people don’t know I use a Mac, except my family.
I used to be a windows person, and had the same opinion about macs as you, but now I exclusively buy macs for myself and my family bc I am the family’s IT support team. And guess what? The amount of time and headaches it saved me over the years can’t be understated. It would not have been possible with Linux.
My mother can drag and drop an app into applications folder but even that is a stretch. She however can easily open the App Store and click buy, using the same UX as on her phone. Guess how many things are intuitive to her across her ipad, iPhone and Mac, that she almost never has to call me for anything.
I have my family on a family sharing plan with my card on it (I have terrible things to tell Apple about the fact that I have no granular control abt who or how much people can spend there) , but the fact that they are able to get what they need to be productive without having to research the many different ways an application is installed, or how it’s impossible to uninstall or to handle all those MSIs or whatever the windows installers do now, or virus scanning everything under the sun (and let me not forget about the mcaffee and avg and avast licenses and adware from companies that are supposed to be legitimate and give you peace of mind)…is priceless (I know, sounds like an Apple ad, but it’s true).
More, the integration with the outside world, how people can record voice, take notes, photos and have these things readily available everywhere. The finder app, and how I don’t need 100 different apps to view things I download from the web or get from an external source. Again, priceless.
You can geolocate, disable, brick your stolen hardware, no extra software, apps or cost. Super useful, I forgot my laptop in a cab once at an airport, my mother had hers stolen. Both are confirmed bricked. Maybe other brands/OSes have this now, but I have no time to find out.
Back to my family, how they can subscribe to things like scribd, audio books, udemy, and a bunch of other things without having to go through all the marketing pages and double speak of these services online and be able to cancel immediately if they need, gives them a lot of power and I’m glad they can get what they need when they need and move on with their lives. My mother is a lawyer, she should not spend her time fighting an OS.
Linux would be better than windows, but it has failure modes that require admin level terminal skills to solve. I use Linux server, but I have no need for the desktop atm.
Finally, maybe today is different or I never looked hard enough, but it used to be that to get a Linux laptop, I’d need to get a windows laptop and dual boot or wipe it and install Linux.
I may have time for this with servers (that’s my work), and I may have had time for this when I was in college, but I most certainly do not have time for this now.
Maybe if it were as easy to just walk into a store or get online and buy a Linux laptop back then, I might have gone Linux desktop rather than Mac.
In my mind, windows is hell, Linux is expert level, Mac is for everyone.
This is not an answer for this post, I would also like to get the answer and maybe I’ll try that.
Linux user base is far more cultish. For one, they collaborate for free over high minded concepts and lol at outsiders who don’t know their incantations.
Cults were never paying their people, and like to demean outsiders. So there’s that.
