Why Apple Sucks pt 2

An interesting pattern in the responses I received in my last post was a consistent accusation of iconoclasm. The anti hipster sentiment really was not the point, though it's interesting to see that it's being taken that way by people. This would indicate I need to be clearer in my explanations, in pursuit of that goal I'd like to go into a little more detail about why I think it's important to actually explore *why* Apple does what it does, rather than just looking at it's actions in a vacuum without recourse to motivation or philosophy.

Apple tends to behave in ways that are driven by their positioning their products as fashion centerpieces. It's not the sentiment that makes me dismissive of them, it's the actual follow up actions that they take because of that underlying philosophy, such as forcing a pricing tier specifically to squeeze the maximum margins out of the marketplace (more money for a black MacBook? Really?) whilst still being able to claim price parity in the narrow band of sections which they do compete. And of course all the issues I raised in the previous post on this subject.

Graphical session based remote access to Macs is a nightmare compared to Linux, I know it has a VNC clone / work-alike, but that compared NoMachine NX or Windows RDP is a pale imitation of proper remote access at best. In all the research I'd done into Macs before when I was considering actually buying one, this didn't even come up. Why not? Because most people that use Macs don't even care about it and for those that do simple VNC is "good enough", even when they're charged extra for it like they were when it was first released. At this point NX and RDP on Linux and Windows respectively were ancient news in the industry, but this was somehow acceptable "because it's Apple".

This attitude permeates the entire environment, instead of the reverse in a Linux environment;

Linux Environment;

A pixel or two is out of place? Who cares, it crunches numbers, pretty pictures are for designers. If you really care fix it yourself

Apple Environment;

It's not technically better than the competition, lacks feature parity, is dramatically overpriced? Who cares, it's so pretty. If you really care you're out of luck until we take the 2-3 years it typically takes us to catch up with the competition in the areas where we don't focus the vast majority of our energy.

This is why the philosophy is important, you can see where the underlying philosophies come out in the real world. When I attack the underlying philosophy, I do so not for the sake of iconoclasm but because I think the results are unacceptably bad. Just like the people complaining about font / colour / UI inconsistency / insert related issues here within Linux think those results are unacceptably bad.

Apple constructs it's game plan based on the underlying philosophy that it is a luxury products company that is designed to inspire a cult-like following amongst people who share this underlying philosophy. This is it's primary driving force in just about all of it's decisions, and this is the reason that I went over that philosophy when laying out my problems with Apple.