< why buy a mac?
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- 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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- GreedoLives0
omg that will totally settle this 23 year old argument right here, right now, forever. good show.
- mikotondria20
Apple is the Christianity...
Ooh - the symbolism is spot on...
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Pixter0
I'll bump this forever
- MrD0
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.
GT_1
(Jul 7 07, 22:12)but isnt computer part of our surroundings? part of our interior? part of what we carry in our pocket?
- Antonelli0
haha gt, i do care about how pretty it is. i don't want a clunky looking PC sitting on my desk and a plastic box sitting next to my leg making a humming noise. Are you even a designer?? i can't imagine you not understanding what i mean if you were one.
- coreyL0
i agree ... mac is snazzerific.
- BonSeff0
didnt boz threaten to sue yayhooray? wtf ever
- slappy0
sounds like someone scatched their iphone. Sour grapes, get over it.
- GT_10
Antonelli, you sound like that designerslashmodel.com video...
"Beautiful people make beautiful design"
Antonelli, if a modest computer makes you a worse designer, I doubt you're a designer at all. You have no business being in this industry if you can't even identify the very bullshit we create and feed to the masses.
Get your ego in check and go chop off your faux-hawk. The tools you use mean shit. It's the ideas and results that matter.
- GT_10
"Oh I'm sooo sensitive! I can't have ANYTHING other than a shiney hunk of plastic with an apple on it! Anyone that isn't this sensitive must not be a designer!" -Antonelli paraphrased
- ribit0
GT_1 please stop making bullshit and feeding it to the masses... its not nice.
- tank020
i used to work on pc...i hated it..been working for 3 years now with the mac. am very pleased with.
macos x is just the best operating system.
- digilee0
totally agree that it's pretty sad how no matter what Apple do/ say/ produce a lot of people totally whoop it up.
i do not own an ipod, don't want an iphone or care about itv but there are some that will rather their kids go hungry than miss out on sleeping on the streets for a week just to buy the latest Apple offering.
i do have a powerbook at work, supplied by my company, and an imac at home as that's what I prefer to use but as far as apple kit is concerned, that's all i have or desire.
- tank020
and what antonelli and mrD says is true.
i like to buy design stuff and my macpro just looks better next to my eames chair than a pc does.
i'm not saying it makes me a better deisgner, it just looks nice.
- Drno0
its only a question of taste,
and should i say going around with a tshirt that says "i visited the mothership" is tastelessly tastelooopaly tasteless.
i've been using pcs for as long as i remember. i use osx at work which is for me definitively a good os,
but the thing it lacks is control. i feel so oppressed to not being able to have total control on my G5 that sometime i just wish it was a pc.ps: so having a pretty computer makes you a better designer? finally i understand what has been going wrong in my life, thanx anto, thanx
- ian0
So Bill Gates doesn'ty do this for Microsoft then? What was that piece of shit video with the cretin from Microsoft whooping like a fucking monkey and shoting out how he loved his job and yelling at people to not sit down cos he hadn't told em to yet. Thunderous applause recieved.
So in other words, Im in a foul mood and this argument is silly so fuck off.