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I don't buy it, Apple products still attract a significant premium just for the brand. You don't see linux users purchasing Apple hardware to install linux on g

I don't buy it, Apple products still attract a significant premium just for the brand. You don't see linux users purchasing Apple hardware to install linux on generally, which would actually be a good measure of if the hardware was worth the cost. They're just trying to tie the software to the hardware and push the benefits of the software to the average user in a way that it can't be separated from the hardware (via their DRM etc in the chips). Nothing Apple has ever made has been compelling to me in any way, shape or form. So from my perspective, they generally make worse products than the alternatives, this includes OS9, OSX, and definitely OSX touch.

bonaldi 16y ago
The Mac still attracts a premium, because that's its market now, for better or worse. When it was conceived, the target price was $999, which it didn't actually hit until the underpowered Mac Classic arrived. The other products -- iPod, iPhone, iPad -- have definitely been priced to sell, even if they don't appeal to you. As for compelling, we're talking 1980s here. If the choice was DOS vs System 6, or later Win 3.1 vs System 7, the only thing in Microsoft's favour was price.
- etherael 16y ago
  My progression was TI-84 -> C64 -> Amiga OS -> Linux. I never had to choose between whatever microsoft or apple were trying to pedal at any given point in time, they both always struck me as bad choices by comparison.
  - houseabsolute 16y ago
    Do you actually have any real experience (on the order of months) using the other systems, or is this an ideological position?
    - etherael 16y ago
      I've spent multiple months, never more than one at a time, on windows due to having to have access to some locked in infrastructure at an employer or somesuch and virtualisation not being practical at the time but I eventually got so frustrated with it I just ended up working around it. OS X forced myself to use for one month, hated it more than windows.
      - houseabsolute 16y ago
        > forced myself to use . . . Sounds like your mind was already made up. Whatever works for you I guess.
        etherael 16y ago
        On the contrary, I forced myself to use it because I am well aware that even now, linux is not perfect. and back when I forced myself to try out OS X it was a fair bit less perfect still, Case in point, it was not a flawless install on this notebook I am currently using it on, I had to fiddle and experiment and google to get the video settings just right because the internal hardware is by no means standard (two video cards, one for high power low battery life, one the other way around). Things like that I frankly don't want to have to deal with and if I could have the power of Linux with someone else handling setup for me so it all "just works" as Apple afficionados are so found of saying; I'd be all over it. I was even prepared to sacrifice some of that power so I wouldn't have to deal with it. But at the end of the day it simply did not cut the mustard. Mouse acceleration curve was infuriatingly bad, the interface was bland and ugly to the point of distraction, I hated the iconoclastic keyboard layout seemingly designed just to show the rest of the world how smart Apple is for putting the control key near the space bar. There was at the time no way to get the functionality offered by the compiz grid plugin, nor GL zoom, nor the multitude of plugins I make use of in various linux programs all the time, and the spaces implementation was clunky by comparison to the compiz based version of the same. And all to boot I was ticked off at having to pay Apple to cripple me in all of the above fashions and accept an inferior CPU/memory/hdd to boot.
dieterrams 16y ago
Yes, people who buy Macs place enormous value on having a flat, nondescript image of a piece of fruit on their computers. We are all massive brand whores, and there has never been anything compelling about the design of Macs. Also, Linux users, and you especially, are extremely representative of the market for computers.
- etherael 16y ago
  touche and a riposte, I'm well aware I'm not representative of the market for computers, but if you're here this probably applies to you also. So whilst you and the audience of mac users here may not be a massive brandwhore, that doesn't invalidate the point that a significant amount of the mac userbase actually are. And when you have a company that is selling fundamentally the same product with a different label on it and marking it up 40%, yes, that does tend to be the difference. Maybe back in the Power PC days you had a point, but what's inside the magnesium case is now pretty much the same as what's inside the black plastic one.
  - dieterrams 16y ago
    Ignoring the fact that the hardware design is widely lauded as outpacing the competition, your argument is sort of like saying that two books are fundamentally the same if they're made of the same materials. Most users could care less if the computer's running on an x86 or PowerPC chip: everything is ultimately subordinate to user experience, cost, availability of desirable software, and interoperability. (At least two of those are highly contingent on the individual user: cost and availability of desirable software. If you're a heavy PC gamer, a Windows PC remains much more desirable than a Mac overall.) Historically, Macs have owned user experience, but lost on everything else. These days, cost is still relatively high (although historically lower, given the drop in component prices), but the other things have gotten better. Growth of the web, cross-platform file formats, ability to run Windows on Mac hardware, shift in gaming from PCs to consoles, etc. have done a lot to mitigate the disadvantages of Macs. This, by the way, is coming from someone who'd been using DOS and Windows up until a few years ago.
    - 16y ago
blasdel 16y ago
> You don't see linux users purchasing Apple hardware to install linux on generally Linus Torvalds does this, and has for a decade (he had several Powerbooks before the Intel transition). A lot of the other kernel developers do too. They have money, want to get shit done, and don't have ideological hangups about these things. If you spend your $2k for a non-shit laptop on a Thinkpad instead, you're just buying into a different high-margin premium brand, and at this point one that's been on the decline for years. There isn't really DRM in the chips, you know. It's just in the software, and it's very easy to get around, because Apple doesn't really care. They don't even normally bother with serial numbers, much less product activation.
- etherael 16y ago
  I know you can hackintosh, but the thing is I actually dislike OS X, I dislike the missing features of linux etc etc, so that means nothing to me. At the moment I use an Asus UL80vt, it took some tooling around to get it perfect, but it is that from my perspective now, and it only cost me 1k AUD. Interesting point about the Linus thing, I was specifically talking about everyone I know that actually uses Linux, they'd look at me like I was crazy if I suggested they buy a mac for the hardware (cause it would necessarily subtract from the grunt margin on the box they could get, instead, and also mac hardware is always significantly behind the performance curve at their cutting edge compared to what's available outside apple's walled garden.)

bonaldi 16y ago

The Mac still attracts a premium, because that's its market now, for better or worse. When it was conceived, the target price was $999, which it didn't actually hit until the underpowered Mac Classic arrived. The other products -- iPod, iPhone, iPad -- have definitely been priced to sell, even if they don't appeal to you. As for compelling, we're talking 1980s here. If the choice was DOS vs System 6, or later Win 3.1 vs System 7, the only thing in Microsoft's favour was price.

etherael 16y ago
My progression was TI-84 -> C64 -> Amiga OS -> Linux. I never had to choose between whatever microsoft or apple were trying to pedal at any given point in time, they both always struck me as bad choices by comparison.
- houseabsolute 16y ago
  Do you actually have any real experience (on the order of months) using the other systems, or is this an ideological position?
  - etherael 16y ago
    I've spent multiple months, never more than one at a time, on windows due to having to have access to some locked in infrastructure at an employer or somesuch and virtualisation not being practical at the time but I eventually got so frustrated with it I just ended up working around it. OS X forced myself to use for one month, hated it more than windows.
    - houseabsolute 16y ago
      > forced myself to use . . . Sounds like your mind was already made up. Whatever works for you I guess.
      - etherael 16y ago
        On the contrary, I forced myself to use it because I am well aware that even now, linux is not perfect. and back when I forced myself to try out OS X it was a fair bit less perfect still, Case in point, it was not a flawless install on this notebook I am currently using it on, I had to fiddle and experiment and google to get the video settings just right because the internal hardware is by no means standard (two video cards, one for high power low battery life, one the other way around). Things like that I frankly don't want to have to deal with and if I could have the power of Linux with someone else handling setup for me so it all "just works" as Apple afficionados are so found of saying; I'd be all over it. I was even prepared to sacrifice some of that power so I wouldn't have to deal with it. But at the end of the day it simply did not cut the mustard. Mouse acceleration curve was infuriatingly bad, the interface was bland and ugly to the point of distraction, I hated the iconoclastic keyboard layout seemingly designed just to show the rest of the world how smart Apple is for putting the control key near the space bar. There was at the time no way to get the functionality offered by the compiz grid plugin, nor GL zoom, nor the multitude of plugins I make use of in various linux programs all the time, and the spaces implementation was clunky by comparison to the compiz based version of the same. And all to boot I was ticked off at having to pay Apple to cripple me in all of the above fashions and accept an inferior CPU/memory/hdd to boot.

dieterrams 16y ago

Yes, people who buy Macs place enormous value on having a flat, nondescript image of a piece of fruit on their computers. We are all massive brand whores, and there has never been anything compelling about the design of Macs. Also, Linux users, and you especially, are extremely representative of the market for computers.

etherael 16y ago
touche and a riposte, I'm well aware I'm not representative of the market for computers, but if you're here this probably applies to you also. So whilst you and the audience of mac users here may not be a massive brandwhore, that doesn't invalidate the point that a significant amount of the mac userbase actually are. And when you have a company that is selling fundamentally the same product with a different label on it and marking it up 40%, yes, that does tend to be the difference. Maybe back in the Power PC days you had a point, but what's inside the magnesium case is now pretty much the same as what's inside the black plastic one.
- dieterrams 16y ago
  Ignoring the fact that the hardware design is widely lauded as outpacing the competition, your argument is sort of like saying that two books are fundamentally the same if they're made of the same materials. Most users could care less if the computer's running on an x86 or PowerPC chip: everything is ultimately subordinate to user experience, cost, availability of desirable software, and interoperability. (At least two of those are highly contingent on the individual user: cost and availability of desirable software. If you're a heavy PC gamer, a Windows PC remains much more desirable than a Mac overall.) Historically, Macs have owned user experience, but lost on everything else. These days, cost is still relatively high (although historically lower, given the drop in component prices), but the other things have gotten better. Growth of the web, cross-platform file formats, ability to run Windows on Mac hardware, shift in gaming from PCs to consoles, etc. have done a lot to mitigate the disadvantages of Macs. This, by the way, is coming from someone who'd been using DOS and Windows up until a few years ago.
  - 16y ago

blasdel 16y ago

> You don't see linux users purchasing Apple hardware to install linux on generally Linus Torvalds does this, and has for a decade (he had several Powerbooks before the Intel transition). A lot of the other kernel developers do too. They have money, want to get shit done, and don't have ideological hangups about these things. If you spend your $2k for a non-shit laptop on a Thinkpad instead, you're just buying into a different high-margin premium brand, and at this point one that's been on the decline for years. There isn't really DRM in the chips, you know. It's just in the software, and it's very easy to get around, because Apple doesn't really care. They don't even normally bother with serial numbers, much less product activation.

etherael 16y ago
I know you can hackintosh, but the thing is I actually dislike OS X, I dislike the missing features of linux etc etc, so that means nothing to me. At the moment I use an Asus UL80vt, it took some tooling around to get it perfect, but it is that from my perspective now, and it only cost me 1k AUD. Interesting point about the Linus thing, I was specifically talking about everyone I know that actually uses Linux, they'd look at me like I was crazy if I suggested they buy a mac for the hardware (cause it would necessarily subtract from the grunt margin on the box they could get, instead, and also mac hardware is always significantly behind the performance curve at their cutting edge compared to what's available outside apple's walled garden.)