i have to admit to not being a fan of apple.
i know that mac osx is getting great reviews from programmers, and i think the basic idea of a pro quality user interface on top of an open source clean *nix based operating system with a robot commandline support is a great idea.
but i have always disliked apple as a company. they seem to be much more concerned about marketing than about anything else. and while they often seem to create interfaces that people love (ipod), some of their stuff like their mouse stuff is just insanely bad, and yet they market it like jesus himself invented the round one button mouse and using it is better than sex and chocolate. any company that can try to sell such a piece of crap, at higher prices than anything else, and pretend its the best thing ever, gets a bit of scorn from me.
to me, apple just feels to me like its more about building and selling an irrational cult image - and less about the product. you can't replace that battery in your ipod? wtf !?!!
they are very clever marketing people, there is no doubt about it, and some of their products are genuinely impressive. i used to go with my father to look at the apple lisa in a mcgraw hill bookstore often as a kid and just stare at it.. and obviously the company has done some real innovation. but my first experiences programming an apple macintosh made me hate it
when i found turbo pascal and turboc on the pc i was in heaven
also the whole closed spirit of the mac world has always rubbed me the wrong way, and reinforced my view of apple as a greedy company. the ibm pc came out and changed everything in terms of being an open architecture. apple hardware and software still seems to be in the mindset of money money money, how can we make the most.
one last comment about how "usable" and just works is apple softwware.
i hope vrgirl will post more about the experience we had trying to get her computer to connect to her intenet/lan. but here is a summary:
the first day she got her mac, she wrote me: the mac just works! it connected to the internet perfectly without any effort, this is how all computers should be!!!"
then a week later she bought a router, and needed help getting it connected. it was insanely hard. it seems when it can be smart and guess what to do, its great. but god help you if it can't solve it on its own, because its just went through these silly wizards, and eventually after searching on the web for an hour or so we found you hate to type in some secret character at the begining of the ip address or something to tell it about some option to use. maybe she remembers more. but to me this captures the apple spirit - they probably wanted to cut down on the options to display on the screen because it looked to messy, so they wrote code to try to guess the values, and that probably works for most people. and if you are one of those who needs to be able to change that option, then you enter the land of crazyness.
Recent Posts
)