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Five Reasons Why People Hate Apple

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superboyac:
OO...another epic by Oshyan!  Well, all good points.  It's funny, the strength of the PC is it's weakness: the modular-ness of it with distinct lines between OS/software/hardware.  There are infinite ways for people like us to use it.  Apple's strength is it's weakness also: tight-control, little flexibility, but pretty great overall product.

Currently...as in, right now...I think Apple has the advantage.  We're at a point where simplicity and elegance is very welcome.  This wasn't the case in the early 90's and 2000's.  Back then, we were discovering computers and everything we can do with them.  Then there was a huge boom, and an equivalently huge bust.  Now, it's Apple's turn.  They've come out of the ashes and have boosted up to the top.  Google and Microsoft are not the pristine companies they once were a few years ago.  Google's search is largely a chaotic mess. Microsoft has made a couple of significant blunders.  Apple is riding a streak of impressive successes.

But Apple will not last forever, of course.   I believe it's a cycle.  I think they are going to do really well in the near future, maybe for another decade or so.  But, their fundamental strength/flaw--the isolated, closed system that their products are in--will eventually have to change.  If they don't change, they will run out of innovations.  If they do change, it means they have to start opening up (like the Intel chip thing in their computers).  So as the years go by and they become more open, they will be less like the Apple of today, and more like the PC of last decade.  Then, other opportunities will open for other companies.  It's a cycle.

As manufacturing advances are made, smaller companies will be able to build competing products that will rival the big boys like Apple in build quality, and offer a more open structure.  That's what I see happening.  It's the one weakness Apple has.  It's the one that will be exploited.  Just like Apple exploited the complexity of the PC universe with their elegance...someone is going to exploit Apple's restrictive system.

But I don't think it will happen soon.  This decade belongs to Apple.

johnk:
Apple makes good hardware. Whether it's worth the price is an individual decision.

I hate Apple for other reasons.

Best example: A while back I bought a Nano (mainly because it could be Rockboxed) and I stupidly allowed iTunes to import my music collection.

Without asking permission or informing me, iTunes wrote gibberish into my MP3 tags (to get slightly more technical, iTunes wrote code into my comment tags to enable gapless playback, a good iTunes feature).

Now if you looked at the MP3s in iTunes, everything looked perfectly normal. You could read the tags. It was only when I used different software to play my MP3s that I saw the gibberish in my tags. Completely unreadable.

That's the problem. The underlying assumption that, if you're an Apple user, you don't use anything else. Ever.

And that's why I don't generally use Apple stuff. Apart from.....

A couple of weeks ago my brother decided that having three iPhones (!) was too much, so he gave me his 3G. It is a lovely bit of hardware. Very stylish. But I was surprised at how slow it can be. Dreadful lag sometimes. And rubbish battery life. Wifi reception is poor. The built-in email app can't even hide folders. And for an Apple product, it seems to crash a lot...I could go on. But I will keep it. Why? The apps. It's all about the apps. It's never about the hardware, it's always the software. I preferred my Nokia E63 in many ways, but Symbian software is no match for the Apple apps. Already I couldn't live without iPeng...

Darwin:
Speaking of iTunes and music, not only does it mess up the tags, moving songs onto an iPod and then off again onto a different computer also creates an epic mess - the filenames themselves are overwritten! I backed up the music off an iPod Nano for the son of a friend who wanted to switch to a non-Apple mp3 player. All the fileneames were like: fE45.mp3 and the tags couldn't be read without iTunes either, so his 4GB music collection had to gone through song by song to figure out what was what and re-tagged before being transferred onto his new device.

I know we could have used iTunes to sort the mess out, but at the time I was in an absolute no iTunes is getting anywhere near my Win7 machine... (I also could have told the kid to get on his bike and sort the mess out at home, but he didn't have his own computer at the time)!

f0dder:
Speaking of iTunes, be very, very, VERY careful if you ever connect a device to another person's iTunes account - you risk ending up getting your content wiped because of the synchronization shizzle.

Darwin:
Good point, f0dder. The transfer I made was via Windows Explorers - as stated, I had/have a loathing for iTunes that borders on irrational and am very hesitant to install it on my compter. I'm glad you brought this point up, actually, because it means that I'll be extra vigilant as another friend's son has asked me to help him update his iPod Touch to iOS 4.2. My plan was to install iTunes, update him, and uninstall iTunes. I might try doing it in XP Mode, which will hopefully minimzie the risk to both his music collection and my computer! Doubt it, though... I'll just have to be VERY careful to set iTunes up properly before doing this for him.

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