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Why do people get so angry about Apple products? I wouldn't buy one, but apparently someone does, and I'm guessing they make enough money using them that they c

• soperj 7y ago
  People who use trucks regularly do the same thing. I know when I worked in the oil industry everyone was hoping they wouldn't get stuck with the ford truck. Just because Apple's got the most expensive tools, doesn't make them the best.
  • ghaff 7y ago
    Yeah, when I was in the oil business, I think literally everyone in our sub sea shop had the same model of pickup. Don't remember what it was; it was a long time ago.
  • copperx 7y ago
    What's was the truck that people preferred?
    • tunesmith 7y ago
      I've always heard it was the Tacoma.
    • soperj 7y ago
      Yep always the Toyotas. We had one in the yard that wasn't street legal any more, the thing was basically a shell of a truck with 700,000 km on it, no hood, whole exterior was just trashed, but it ran beautifully so they kept using it.
  • crooked-v 7y ago
    If the XDR monitor's specs hold out, it will actually be an order of magnitude cheaper than its existing competitors... which makes the other nickel-and-diming around stuff like the monitor stand and the Mac Pro base storage even weirder.
• dman 7y ago
  Goes the other way too. Why do Mac fans descend on Linux threads and comment on the lack of fit and finish and that time they tried Linux in 2003 where it did not work for them?
  • liamcardenas 7y ago
    When has this happened? I have not seen this at all in recent years. Happy to stand corrected.
    • kick 7y ago
      It only takes a handful of seconds to find multiple occurrences sorting by recency on HN search: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=desktop%20linux%20mac&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
    • dman 7y ago
      Plenty of examples in this thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874148
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • woah 7y ago
    Seems like a pretty normal thing to share experiences using something when it is being discussed. If the people in these threads complaining about Apple workstations had actually bought one and been disappointed, that would be equivalent.
  • criddell 7y ago
    The thing that always confuses me about those threads are the number of people that can work on any operating system. I use Windows at work because I need Visual Studio. It doesn't matter how good Linux or a macOS is, I need VS, SolidWorks, and a handful of other Windows-only pieces of software. My machine at home is also Windows because I play games on it that aren't available on macOS or Linux. So I assume that people who buy Macs are running XCode, Omnifocus, and other Mac-only bits of software and likewise people choose Linux because it's the best choice for the software they want to run. So what's the point of OS arguments in threads like this? Frankly, all the modern operating systems are good enough. What matters are the applications that can run on top of the OS, no?
• alextheparrot 7y ago
  Interestingly, in the rural area I grew up in strong opinions about automobile brand choice were common. Maybe there’s something more universal and fundamental about product choice and brand loyalty at work.
• grecy 7y ago
  I agree 100%. Consumerism has reached such a strange state that people get genuinely offended when a company releases a product that doesn't perfectly fit their needs and price point, even if said company has a different product that does! It's utterly absurd. I think it's because people are realizing they have sold their entire lives to their jobs and they get emotionally overwrought when they realize a company they have some products from also sells products they will never be able to afford. I think it's the pain involved in realizing they didn't get enough money for the life they sold.
  • kick 7y ago
    Arguably Apple brought this on themselves; every one of their marketing initiatives over the past two decades and every one of their bids toward user-exclusivity has led to this by design. I don't really have any opinion on this, but cult-like outrage over a company that markets themselves as a cult isn't something that users can be blamed for, generally.
  • sysbin 7y ago
    More like the life they're born into. I agree, I think people find products they daily use from a company, usually interpreted to all of the products should be affordable to them.
  • _ph_ 7y ago
    The point is, Apple doesn't. They already had a big gap in the area of a "desktop mac". There was a large unoccupied space between the Mini and the Pro - and while they finally refreshed the Mac Pro, they moved it to a new price range, creating an even larger gap.
    • Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      What about the iMac Pro? Doesn't it fill that space?
      • chipotle_coyote 7y ago
        I'd actually argue the "non-Pro" iMac fills that space for a lot of people. An 8-core i9 with a 1TB SSD and 32GB of RAM is $3600 (or ~$3200 if you buy it with the stock 8GB of RAM and upgrade it yourself, as that's one of the few Macs you can still easily do that with!), and that's a pretty serious computer. For a web developer and writer like me, it's arguably already overkill. I think there's still a desire for a "midrange" headless Mac between the Mac mini and the Mac Pro, but that's been something people have wanted for many years -- it's pretty clear Apple doesn't think there's enough of an addressable market there to make it worthwhile. (I also think people underestimate how much power you can actually stuff into the current Mac mini as long as your work doesn't require a serious GPU.)
• tw04 7y ago
  > and I'm guessing they make enough money using them that they can afford to have the best tools. Or they just have lots of money and like Apple products. As long as Apple isn't bleeding cash to the point of going bankrupt making it... who cares? It's no different than Honda making the NSX or Ford making the GT. It's definitely not moving the needle for their revenue but it sets a statement for the company as a whole.
• Analemma_ 7y ago
  It's all performative. No one is actually angry, but people think that being mad at Apple online makes you look "smarter than the iSheep" or whatever.
• _ph_ 7y ago
  I am certainly not angry about Apple products - I am a large user of them. However I am angry when Apple does not update the previous Mac Pro for 6 years, a machine which already was inferior to its predecessor, the original "cheese grater". And when the update finally arrives, closer to its forefarthers, they double the price of an already expensive machine.
  • saagarjha 7y ago
    Double the price of what machine? Its price is comparable to the old Mac Pro, isn’t it?
    • _ph_ 7y ago
      No, that started at 3000, the new machine at 6000. In old G5 times, the entry level Mac Pro even was ever so slightly cheaper than the iMac with the same processor. You traded no included screen for extensibility.
• ProAm 7y ago
  Because they've gone from being a company where "It just works" to pretty blatantly just disrespecting their customers. They used to be able to defend their profit margin because it did just work. Now they trying to be trusted and relevant again but still charge you $1000 for a monitor stand.
  • rusk 7y ago
    In fairness, they always charges $1,000 for a monitor stand, the difference is now that the monitor stand breaks when it’s out of warranty.
• 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
  The axiom on programming languages is useful here: > there are two kinds of things: things people complain about and things they don’t use”[1] The short answer is that people complain about macs because they use them. 1. https://dev.to/jonasbn/comment/4fmc https://dev.to/jonasbn/comment/4fmc
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• lisper 7y ago
  I am disappointed that Apple decided to emphasize form over function. Once upon a time, Apple products Just Worked. They were easy to use. You didn't need to read the manual. Updating to the latest version of the OS consistently made things better. Nowadays the keyboards break. The UI is full of arcane non-discoverable features. Upgrading is a total crap shoot. It might make things better, or it might make things that have been running reliably for years suddenly stop working. And if that happens, it's really hard to go back. (On an iOS device it is usually impossible.) The competition is even worse. No one makes a computer that Just Works any more. And that makes me sad.
  • criddell 7y ago
    They still just work. Those arcane non-discoverable features aren't usually needed to do typical things. At least not the things you did back in the day when things just worked. If you liked your iPad from 5 years ago and buy the new one, you can mostly just keep using it the way you always have. The keyboard fiasco was pretty bad though. Hopefully that's coming to an end.
  • dmitryminkovsky 7y ago
    In my experience, their stuff still “just works” and better than ever before (though I am a major version behind on macOS and iOS).
    • umvi 7y ago
      In my experience, the latest Windows 10 build "just works" way better than Catalina.
      • dmitryminkovsky 7y ago
        People said that about whatever the one before Catalina is called but it’s been great for me. Only problem I experienced was drag/drop from Chrome anymore for some reason. Works from other browsers.
    • blackearl 7y ago
• shantly 7y ago
  I think it's mostly frustration when Apple leverages the fact that you can't (legally and without a bunch of extra & ongoing work) run macOS on non-Apple hardware to push changes people don't like to the hardware, or to charge plainly absurd prices for same. [EDIT] actually I think it's similar to the reason some people get pissed off over over perceived mismanagement of fiction franchises—if anyone could tell a story in a given "universe" they probably wouldn't care much if some of those stories were (from their perspective) terrible or misguided or misunderstood and misrepresented the characters or world or whatever, but when only one entity is allowed to tell those stories and define the direction of the "universe" it bothers certain fans a lot if they get it "wrong", and in fact almost any given piece of related media is likely to make someone unhappy in a way and to a degree they wouldn't be if that were just one of many options, rather than the only option. [EDIT EDIT] and in both cases the problem is monopoly control over a very particular product. Yes you could watch other movies or use another OS, but you'd much rather that one simply be better (in your opinion) so you could stick with it or so, in sticking with it, you'd be more pleased with the product, because it's your favorite.
• kilo_bravo_3 7y ago
  In 1991 we would sit around the lunch table at school with our EGMs and GamePros and argue about the SNES vs. Genesis. Angry online comments about Apple have led me to believe that the people making them are either: a. tweens sitting around the 2019 equivalent of a cafeteria table, or b. adults who never grew out of the SNES vs. Genesis phase One of those is embarrassing, the other is pathetic. It could also be that they're broke-asses who are jealous of people who can afford Apple products but that doesn't make sense because there are very few similar comments about other luxury products-- though they do exist. ps. Genesis does what Nintendon't!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  • hombre_fatal 7y ago
    I'm in my 30s and spent a good part of my teens arguing about Xbox/360 vs PS2/PS3 on online forums. I just have to hope others grow of the consumerism faction wars as well. And I like to wonder how many people realize they're arguing online with children.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• cookiecaper 7y ago
  With Apple products specifically, it can be seen as paying a large premium to preserve ignorance ("I don't want to use Windows because it's too confusing"). There's nothing wrong with that per se, but it can irritate people who see users artificially constraining themselves to the much more limited, much more expensive Mac ecosystem because they don't want to commit to the one-time cost of learning another system.
• arvinsim 7y ago
  I think it is because it doesn't meet the sweet spot of price to performance ratio for people's use case. This is easily mitigated in PC land since you can customize your computer. Not so with Apple's computers. It doesn't matter much for cross platform people. But for people trapped in the wall garden, I could see how it can be infuriating.