Reason #1845 Not To Own A Macintosh
I’ve never been a huge Macintosh fan. It’s not that the computers themselves suck, though I must admit I’ve used the Mac a lot over the years and in my experience it crashes more often than the Windows boxes I’ve owned. My dislike of the Macintosh has more to do with the irritating attitude displayed by so many Apple fanatics. You know the type. They wear black all the time, attend poetry readings in burned out buildings in the bad part of town, and make it perfectly clear to anyone within earshot that you are nothing unless you own a translucent computer that says “Hello” when you turn it on.
Add to this the fact that Apple Computer continually runs ads with the same holier-than-thou attitude, and it really becomes a turn off. It wouldn’t matter if they had the fastest, cheapest, most crash-proof computers ever created. I still wouldn’t buy one.
The last straw was this idiotic “Switch” campaign. Who came up with the idea of a marketing campaign based on telling 90% of computer users that they were idiots to buy their current computer? If Apple put half as much effort into their products as they do to trashing Wintel technology, the Macintosh would have cured cancer years ago.
Apple should really be careful about making such lofty claims of stability (“It Doesn’t Crash”). The hype has been out of control in Cupertino for a long time.
That’s part of the reason I read articles like this one with a certain warped glee. I hate to see users lose their data, but shouldn’t they have had it backed up, especially if they were performing a major upgrade to the operating system? I love the guy who bemoaned the loss of his kid’s baby pictures. If they were that important, why weren’t they backed up? Are blank CD-Rs too expensive?
I especially liked the part where they had to tell Macintosh owners that if the Firewire drive was not connected to the computer, your data wouldn’t be affected. Nice.
If the day ever comes when Apple markets the Macintosh line based on its own merits instead of trashing Windows from dawn to dusk, I might give it a second look. But I’m not holding my breath.
I am so with you on this whole thing. It’s a freakin’ cult. It really is. Complete with brainwashing sessions, I believe.
I don’t know if it’s Apple that’s caused this phenomenon, or if the Mac is just filling a huge void for those who don’t want to be part of a crowd. I think a lot of the die hard Macintosh folks use one simply to be reactionary.
As I pointed out in a previous entry (five years ago, no less!), I remember all to well the old days when the IBM PC, Apple II, Macintosh, Amiga, Atari ST, and other platforms each had a substantial piece of the market.
It sucked.
Invariably, the software you wanted to run was written for the Atari and you had an Apple IIGS. Or that friend you wanted to share a file with used an Amiga while you had a Mac.