Why Apple actually does *not* suck.

This puzzled me for the longest time before I finally figured it out. My position basically ignores windows and puts it in the "you use it because the company who bought you a computer and subsidises your environment bought it for you" but maybe I could imagine some permutation of the same kind of argument for windows users, also.

I call it the Segway argument. ;)

Marathon runners, the type that train obsessively for days at a time, fly to exotic high altitude locales to starve their bodies of oxygen, etc, and are at the absolute peak of human conditioning, are quite capable of running very long distances without much effort, in fact a case could reasonably made to say that they actually enjoy doing so.

Try sell one of those people a Segway.

It will have no tangible benefit aside from getting in the way of that person, and in fact just the idea of trying to sell one to that market shows the entire thing for the charade it is. It is not designed to service people like that.

The thing is that you can fairly make an argument that Marathon Runners like that are probably wasting their lives / time developing that degree of ability simply to do something like get from A to B with a reasonable level of rapidity. Thus something like a Segway can actually make sense because it isn't targeted at marathon runners, but a completely different type of person.

Now I don't want to be overly bragging, but I am only comfortable speaking for myself in this debate so that is what I am going to do. Once you've been using Linux since 1994, keeping well abreast of all the changes and benefits that have been added to the platform between then and now. Once you've mastered that environment so thoroughly that the regex flows from your fingertips as easily as a normal user's expectation of a tooltip hover on a pretty OS X widget. Once you've become accustomed to the almost limitless flexibility and control of the platform, and all the niggling problems and voodoo that one must occasionally confront when dealing with such a fluid platform slips so silently into the unconscious competence basket that you cannot personally even define the fact that it actually requires any competence at all without thinking about it really really hard.

Once you've got all that, the idea of someone making a cut down variant based on the BSD code base and making everything "just work" instantly, providing a contiguous user experience, doing a ton of things that basically all group up under the heading of "eliminating the need to acquire any indepth computer literacy at all", the idea of switching to a mac is as puzzling to you as the idea of the marathon runner picking up a Segway.

The critical thing to take away though, is that this is all value neutral, the marathon runner is not a hero, he probably wasted a ton of his life and time that could be spent better elsewhere acquiring the conditioning and abilities allowing him to accomplish the feats that he can. The same could be said of people in my situation with regards to computers, I am prepared to accept that if something like OS X had existed back when I wanted a "real computer" in 1994, it would indeed have been a waste of my time to develop all these skills. Further fair arguments could be made that I've wasted a ton of time developing all those skills now when you can get it "almost" as good just by paying a little premium on top of your average computer's cost. I get all that, I want to be as absolutely non-elitist about this as I can be. Taking all the above information into account I can totally see how it makes sense for normal people, and even up to a threshold some pretty extraordinary people even in this particular sphere to choose OS X as a platform.

That is definitely something that was in my blind spot not long ago, just as surely as Segways were an utterly bewildering concept to a marathon runner, but I'm aware of it now. The fact is of course that your average person is generally a lot more interested in stuff like walking around and fitness than advanced computer science, thus the relative success rates of Segway and Apple Computer.

But just because that market exists, is real, and has genuine value propositions for a large swathe of humankind, should not be taken as a reflection of it's value for everyone regardless of experience or situation. People like me will probably always prefer what we've developed this intensely powerful unconscious competence in, and everyone else will look at us and say it was a waste to do that, and although I don't agree with that position, I can at least see how the conclusion would be reached and accept it.

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.

Why Apple sucks

I recently finished setting up my workspace just the way I want it, a task I've been putting off for far too long. I posted a photo of my workspace to facebook / twitter and eventually it came up that I had no Apple machines in my workspace, and it got me to doing a full concrete analysis of why I have chosen not to use any Apple stuff.

In a nutshell, why Apple annoys me is the way that they treat their users, they tend to pander to the "in-crowd" and try to make the business of getting stuff done with computers into something not massively removed from a big fashionista love-in. Yes, I'm sure if you're a designer / graphical creative type it's a lovely platform to use, but for a coder / sysadmin like myself it's almost a hundred percent superfluous stuff that has been done before and better elsewhere, and to boot they charge you out the nose for the privellege of playing in their walled garden.

I know the standard rebuttal; "It's really not all that much more expensive, here's a configuration apple offers of product X, here's a configuration matching that configuration from vendor Y, see? it's pretty much the same". That's not the way I buy computers, I figure out what I want to do with the computer, and then I figure out what I will need from that computer in terms of hardware.

Example; about two years ago I wanted to get a new laptop that was good for coding / gaming, a MacBook was definitely in the running at the time, but you could not get the specs I wanted without upgrading to a drastically more expensive buildout. I wanted a non-integrated graphics card with a DVD writer, that was about the only thing that stopped me from just getting a flat MacBook, the price of those was indeed quite reasonable at around 1300$ if memory serves vs the 1200$ I ended up spending on an Acer Aspire 5630 with a fast graphics card and a built in dvd burner with more memory / storage than I could've got on the comparable macbook model that I would've had to settle for no burner and an integrated graphics card for. If I wanted to get a Pro model I'd be looking at something in the realm of 2k more.

This is not an acceptable margin between the two systems by any stretch of the imagination, yet it has nothing to do with Apple not being directly competitive with identical configurations in the marketplace, it has more to do with the fact that you may well end up (and I have always ended up) in a situation where Apple doesn't have anything that will meet your criteria without being drastically overinflated with a bunch of stuff you don't need, thus pushing out the basic price mismatch to the level where it's just a ridiculous choice.

Putting aside the price and mindless drone trying to be fashionable with his glossy plastic computer BS, Apple's architectural choices are questionable and seem to follow a fairly well established pattern, who remembers these?

Apple (Pimping OS9): Our architecture is totally awesome, everyone wants to use our excellent operating system without proper protected memory, it forces our coders to be better.

Apple (Years Later): You know what, strike that, we'll just rip out the BSD core and charge people a ridiculously high margin for a pimped out enlightenment clone.

Apple (Pimping PowerPC): Our processors are world beaters, we can spin a benchmark anyway you like in order to prove our CPU's are better than intel.

Apple (Years Later): You know what? strike that, we'll just start using intel because everyone knows it's been faster for ages and we're tired of pushing this lie.

Apple (Pimping the JesusPhone): Our phone is a groundbreaking world beating device that is many years ahead of the competition, if you want something that it can't do, then you're just an idiot.

Years Later: You know what? strike that, you bought our bullshit a couple of years and now we've had time to mostly catch up to the rest of the market, we'll pimp this as a massive leap forward rather than just getting our shit together a few years late and charge people 120$ for early access to the upgrade, if they work for us.

Apple has it's place, there's no doubt about that, those old advertisements I remember reading about it being the computer of choice for the mentally handicapped due to it's ease of use, and because of the semi-sweetheart relationship with Adobe resulting in all of their products being available for the platform, some people that rely on that platform have a good reason for using what they use. And a lot of those people are at the moment capable of switching to Linux, as you have the liberty to do as a more technical type.

But for the small fraction of us who have been using Linux happily since 1.2.13 over ten years ago the growing surprise from people around us when they hear we have no intention of making the switch to Apple's high priced gated community is becoming kind of annoying. I do not and never will care about your platform as a fashion statement and I'm not going to drink the reality distortion field Flavor-Aid, thanks but no thanks.