Five Reasons Apple is Evil
- Thread starter Trekker4747
- Start date
I believe this describes me, and would be interested in hearing more.
I'm pretty sure that Apple isn't the only company that uses and enforces NDAs. IBM used to be very big on them and they were were very one sides (Tell anyone what IBM said and they'll see you in court but IBM could tell the world what you said).
The story goes that Gary Kildall of Digital Research never knew IBM came knocking looking for an OS for the new IBM PC because he was out and his wife refused to sign the NDA so IBM didn't tell her what they were after.
Hell I even had to sign an NDA one time just to be told about a new Acer server going back about 18 years and this was a briefing to the local dealers.
Of course when Apple buys out company to kill it's product which competes with them then people might have something to say.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/189705/google_acquires_iphone_search_application_remail.html
http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2010/02/remail-acquired-by-google.html
Well, from what I hear of Windows 7, I would probably agree with you here. But until Windows 7 came about, I never heard anything but complaints. Most people I know generally despise Vista.
I personally have no opinion about the operating system. I can navigate a Windows computer just as well as Mac, and for my purposes either works fine (I don't game, I don't edit videos or do crazy graphics). The main difference I've noticed is simply that Macs last longer and don't get bogged down after prolonged use.
My MacBook is about a year old now, and it works just as well as it did when I got it. My two previous computers were Windows, and after a year of use they both got really slow and unreliable.
Not always by choice. Trust me, the vendor lock-in with Microsoft is crazy stupid.
Not always by choice. Trust me, the vendor lock-in with Microsoft is crazy stupid.
and depending on the work you do it's not always the best approach. Do you refuse to take on a client simply because they have Macs? Sounds like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
And yes I've had a client who runs both Macs and PCs and the fact I was willing to learn and support the Macs was a plus for me.
Would love to play with an Xserve or just OS X server on min (like Apple's bundle at the last product update) but don't have the money
Well, I thought Microsoft was getting too powerful years back, maybe Apple is now...
Not always by choice. Trust me, the vendor lock-in with Microsoft is crazy stupid.
It's a series of choices by people in an organization, of course. And we're not just talking operating systems and Microsoft when discussing the range of software and hardware configurations on networks that make PC-type computers preferable to professionals in most situations.
If they came through the office next week and announced that they were switching our network and all our computers over to Macs (ha!) I'd shrug and work with what I was given - as long as customers are happy with our service, I'm no more attached to my work equipment than I am to the color they paint the office walls. But I wouldn't waste the extra money on that stuff if it were coming out of my own pocket.
I'm still using Vista and will be until I replace my current home machine in a few months - every couple of years I go out and spend a little less money than I did last time for a lot more storage and memory than I got the last time. Never have had a moment's trouble with Vista, including regarding device drivers, and the machine runs as well as it did when I bought it...but then, I would never browse the Internet using IE.
Me and my family are complete Apple users. I own a Mac Pro and Mac Book Pro, I'm a video editor. My wife has a Mac Book and we both have iPhones. While the conversion to Mac has been a recent one, happen in the last 4 years. I know for most people Apple products are over priced and I agree but I'm willing to pay it. I like that my hardware and software is made by one company. I love the design aspect of their products and that they stand behind their products, you can get an appointment with a Mac Genius to help you if you have any problems.
I do, as do the vast majority of users and computer professionals.
Not always by choice. Trust me, the vendor lock-in with Microsoft is crazy stupid.
It's a series of choices by people in an organization, of course. And we're not just talking operating systems and Microsoft when discussing the range of software and hardware configurations on networks that make PC-type computers preferable to professionals in most situations.
If they came through the office next week and announced that they were switching our network and all our computers over to Macs (ha!) I'd shrug and work with what I was given - as long as customers are happy with our service, I'm no more attached to my work equipment than I am to the color they paint the office walls. But I wouldn't waste the extra money on that stuff if it were coming out of my own pocket.
It's not that easy. Say for example that you are working in a predominately Microsoft shop. Your IT department runs Exchange, some variation of Windows server (probably 2003) and maybe even Sharepoint. Microsoft does it damndest with each revision of the client OS to futher tie critical maintenance functionality to the corresponding server component. Windows 7, for example, has several compelling features that are only complete when coupled with Server 2008. In house apps that were most likely developed in a .NET environment would require a complete re-write to either Java for cross-compatibility, be it web-based or pure client. The list goes on and on and on.
I won't deny that Mac's enterprise strategy is virtually non-existant. It's a market that they aren't really interested in entering for a myriad of reasons. Top of that list is that support for legacy apps becomes a must and Apple is terrible at supporting legacy. Each major transition has been marked by a huge swath of their older equipment becoming unsupported. Their most recent OS, for example, will not run on a PPC-based Mac and software written for the PPC is quickly on the road to obsolescence.
So it may seem like it's as easy as just switching one day, but years of built-up Microsoft infrastructure lead to a situation where transitioning would be hugely costly, making even the most tangible of benefits pale in comparison to the pain caused by the switch.
I'm still using Vista and will be until I replace my current home machine in a few months - every couple of years I go out and spend a little less money than I did last time for a lot more storage and memory than I got the last time. Never have had a moment's trouble with Vista, including regarding device drivers, and the machine runs as well as it did when I bought it...but then, I would never browse the Internet using IE.
Vista's reputation as a stinker was 98% hype and 2% truth. Windows 7 has arrived with the same architecture, a slightly better video driver model and a much more favourable narrative, mostly because it takes advantage of the Vista ecosystem that has finally coalesced into a coherent collection of hardware and software support.
You are satisfied with Windows. Good for you, but Apple and OS X offer more that just expensive hardware. The integrated experience that Apple achieves by controlling the 'entire widget' is compelling and the thriving third-party ecosystem of software has produced some of the highest-quality apps and utilities that I have ever seen. The proliferation of crapware that pollutes the Windows ecosystem never took hold on OS X.
What is particularly telling for me is that the two laptops in my house that came pre-loaded with Vista run faster, smoother and longer using OS X than they did under Windows. That's pretty impressive, considering that Apple never intended for its OS to run anything other than the hardware they provided.
For my own part, in the office I use a Windows box, with frequent ssh'ing into Linux environments. So I'm reasonably familiar with both of them. At home, I stick to my Mac, only booting it into XP when necessary to do something specific.
There are ways in which Windows is more suited to a business environment. And there are ways in which Linux is more powerful for development. But at the end of the day, I find OSX to simply be a more comfortable environment to use. Besides which, the full power of Unix is available via Terminal whenever I want to do something unusual, so I don't feel I'm being limited in any way in regards to the "last 20%".
It also doesn't help that my Dell at work has absolutely the slowest hard drive access time I've ever seen. That's not Microsoft's fault----probably----but it's still degrading to the experience.
You throw the phrase "computer professionals" into that statement as if it adds weight to your position. But it doesn't; Apple is a minority market-share, of course, and the proportion of computer professionals who use them is going to reflect that, same as "users" in general. I'm not convinced that "computer professionals" who use Macs represent a significantly different fraction than any other particular group of users.
There are ways in which Windows is more suited to a business environment. And there are ways in which Linux is more powerful for development. But at the end of the day, I find OSX to simply be a more comfortable environment to use. Besides which, the full power of Unix is available via Terminal whenever I want to do something unusual, so I don't feel I'm being limited in any way in regards to the "last 20%".
It also doesn't help that my Dell at work has absolutely the slowest hard drive access time I've ever seen. That's not Microsoft's fault----probably----but it's still degrading to the experience.
I do, as do the vast majority of users and computer professionals.
You throw the phrase "computer professionals" into that statement as if it adds weight to your position. But it doesn't; Apple is a minority market-share, of course, and the proportion of computer professionals who use them is going to reflect that, same as "users" in general. I'm not convinced that "computer professionals" who use Macs represent a significantly different fraction than any other particular group of users.
Last edited:
Apple's enterprise strategy was NeXT's enterprise strategy. In fact, when Apple bought NeXT, what was NeXT became Apple Enterprise. The only products that NeXT was successful selling was it's enterprise software (OPENSTEP Enterprise for Windows, Enterprise Objects and WebObjects). And though people believe that Apple paid over $400 million for NeXT to get what would become Mac OS X some 5 years later, in actuality they were buying the parts of NeXT's business that were earning money at the time of the sale (December of 1996). Apple later merged Enterprise Objects into WebObjects (in version 4) which runs on both Macs and Windows based systems.
But Apple has faced the same problem that most developers face on Windows... a hostile development environment if you make a product that in any way competes with something that Microsoft also makes. Part of the case against Microsoft that the DoJ made was that developing applications on Windows is not an even playing field... which was why the original solution put forward by Judge Jackson was to break-up Microsoft into two companies (a software company and an OS company).
Microsoft works hard to lock people in and break cross platform standards. A perfect example was Java, which Microsoft saw as a threat. Java's reason for existing was a write once, run anywhere development environment. Microsoft came up with Java development software call Visual J++, but Microsoft polluted the code it made to make sure that anything written in it would only run in Windows. Sun sued Microsoft to stop polluting Java. Another example was Microsoft's attempt to add export to PDF to Office. PDF is an open standard that Adobe licenses for free as long as you stick to the standard, but Microsoft had to add code into their implementation that made PDFs made by Office only readable in Windows. Adobe sued Microsoft to stop polluting PDF. Apple gave a ton of it's Quicktime technology to MPEG4 as long as it was a free and open standard, shortly after the standard was released Microsoft came out with it's own versions of "MPEG4" which could only be viewed on Windows systems. Microsoft came up with their own versions of XML that is Windows only. And they attempted to put forward their own version of HTML (called MS-HTML) which only displayed correctly in IE. The media player that came with Windows XP when first released would purposely make bad quality MP3s so that people would convert their music to WMA files instead.
Lock-in is the way Microsoft operates. And locking out competition is a major part of that.
People complain about Apple products on Windows, but they seem to not realize that Microsoft has worked very hard to make sure that products from Apple don't run as well as they could. Apple wants it's products, like Quicktime, to run perfectly on Windows... and Microsoft has adjusted their APIs to hamper that. And it isn't just Apple and Quicktime, Real Player faced the same issues, so did Netscape, so did WordPerfect. Windows is a hostile environment if you compete with Microsoft in anything.
Infoworld has an article up (it appeared on slashdot a week back) that Apple isn't interesting the the business market even though it's got the products (Ranging from the Xserver, to the Exchange Support in Mail through to exchange support on the iPhone).
http://infoworld.com/d/mac/why-apple-wont-let-mac-and-iphone-succeed-in-business-907
Which is a pity given they've got a product that is marketed right could give Microsoft a hard time. You'd think with an OS bundle that pretty much does everything SBS does for $500 reguardless of the number of users could go well. You're just limited in the hardware choices. Short of a Mac Pro you've got the Xserver (very nice machine but $3000+ for a Single Quad Core Processor, 3GB ram in a 1RU chassis or the Mac Mini Server. Knock a couple of hundred dollars off and get the product out there (or maybe an in between server config based on the MacPro) and see what you can do.
Yep hard luck if you want to use Project Server or the remote apps capability of Server 2008 both of which require Internet Explorer which only runs on Windows (I know there was a version for Mac but iirc that's been dead a few years).
Another example is Entourage. Written by Microsoft, basically the Apple version for Outlook but won't handle PST files.
And the reall kicker is the Microsoft benefits from Office for Mac to ways - a) it's paid by Apple to write it and b) gets the money from selling it.
Really? I thought it was those guys at Google who kept saying 'don't be evil' or something? Just the other day Jobs was ridiculing them.
It's all about the bottomline. Or is it?
However that doesn't change that IMHO the last few iMacs models were the best thing that ever happened to the desktop market. As soon as they made the switch to Intel they started cranking out an incredible line of iMacs, crowned by the gorgeous 27" models.
I would also like to subscribe to this newsletter.
I can do that with my win mobile phone just by changing a setting. I can also load in any software I wish without it being ok'd by the mothership. I can do all of this without breaking my phone in anyway.
Similar threads
