< why buy a mac?
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- Pixter0
I'll bump this forever
- GT_10
You're a geek who's never going to get laid if you care about how "pretty" your computer is.
Sorry antonelli, but in the future, I would never admit that again to anyone.
- r_mutt0
the thing is; all corporations are suspect in their strategy/marketing/whatever. most use apple products because they are simply the better designed alternative.
- MrD0
Apple like many companies, researches in to marketing methods taken from psychology of cult.
this is not something new. some are more successful at it.
- Antonelli0
i just love mac because it looks a million times better than any PC out there. pretty important for me - being a designer. they didn't brainwash me, i love good design & interface.
- mikotondria20
Apple is the Christianity...
Ooh - the symbolism is spot on...
- GreedoLives0
omg that will totally settle this 23 year old argument right here, right now, forever. good show.
- Boz
This guy actually blew me away. This is EXACTLY how I feel about Apple. A while back I even posted the resemblence of the 1984 ad and Jobs at Apple gathers (conferences) and the brainwashed audience. It looks exactly the same. Jobs is the guy speaking on TV, the audiences is just sitting (and clapping at anything he says of course) but only this time we have no one to free us.
I have to completely agree with the following the author of this article wrote:
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You will hear applause for the Apple legal department which sues everyone in sight at a moment's notice for alleged infringements of copyright or trade secrets, and seeks to bully journalists, and claims to be able to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate members of the legitimate or illegitimate press. And sues even when the alleged infringements consist of linking to a site displaying the company's own service manuals!If the thinking of the Mac fanatics were applied to the political process in the Western Democracies, we would have one party rule with a Dear Leader who would be in place for life, and the only books allowed would be those not on the Index. They would be the only ones you could read with the special viewers the State publishing company supplied, or buy with the local State currency.
Surely however, all this is just the supporters club? Surely this has nothing to do with the company or its products? Alas, no. I am saying that there is a close connection between Apple and the wilder shores of OSViews. Apple is like an extreme right wing political party, that denies racism, while condoning the expression of extreme racist attitudes in its supporters as understandable. The extremism of Apple's supporters is only its own marketing line taken to absurd and offensive lengths. Apple more or less gently mocks the buyers of other products. Its supporters abuse them as low class redneck idiots and talk about 'Windoze' and 'Micro$oft. Apple says nothing.
I am also saying that the alienating tone of the Apple marketing materials and their use by the fanatics is a deliberate choice on the part of the company. Apple knows it is alienating people who are not members of the cult, and accepts, perhaps even welcomes it. Their aim is to foster a sense of being a persecuted superior minority among their users. They are happy for the faithful to proselytize in a manner calculated to offend, because the point of the proselytizing is not to gain converts, but to retain those you already have, by making them suffer abuse for their beliefs. Cognitive Dissonance will do the rest.
While it may seem to many rather unreasonable to base one's choice of computers on the antics of other buyers, this is why refusing to buy anything made by Apple has come to seem to me almost a moral issue. It is not just that the products have come to put lifestyle marketing ahead of performance. It is not just that they are overpriced. It is that Apple as a company behaves in ways that are morally questionable. It encourages its most frenzied adherents in offensive utterances and behaviour, and in the expression of abusive snobbery. Like all totalitarians, it believes it needs to control us and limit our choice for our own good. If the Apple model were to come to predominate in our industry, it would be an end of consumer choice, and shortly after that, would bring sharp limits on intellectual freedom. Its marketing stance, and the attitudes it seeks to foster in both adherents and opponents, are actually an abuse of its adherents. The fanatics are mad. But who has encouraged and exploited them in their madness?
From being a company that introduced products which freed many of us from the restrictions on usability that the early command line imposed, it has come to be a company which is in spirit and practice opposed to almost all of the freedoms that have since come to define our industry and our society.
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