I was reading the article over at Fagstein’s ever addictive and sometimes infuriating blog (that’s another story) on the opening of Apple’s new Mac Store in Montreal.
And I have to say something here and bear with me please.
You Mac freaks make Star Trek conventioneers look fucking respectable and sane.
Mooooooooo
Yeah that’s right I said it, I went there. Look at yourselves gushing over a fucking computer store likes it’s a fucking religion. You freaks are the end of the consumer line. You are the marketer’s wet fucking dream, the drone that clamours at the opening of a STORE, a STORE… it’s just a goddamn STORE.
Apple products aren’t so great; you’re just so sold on the brand you can’t let go like the preachings of a prophet. As long as it has an “i” in front if it you’ll buy it.
The MacBooks overheat… but it’s not so bad, just take out the battery. That’s insane troll logic but you don’t see a problem with the fact that the macbook is a laptop or notebook whatever the fuck you want to call it and that the battery is supposed to be in there, not removed.
The iPhone. I LOVE MY iPHONE. I really do. I think as a phone it’s 5 years ahead of other phones (with the iPod) but as a PDA, let’s face it it’s a piece of shit – yes I’ve come to my senses. No copy-paste, a shitty 2 Megapixel camera, no video function, it’s locked up so tight, you have to pay twice to get a ringtone. You can’t remove the battery or the memory. And what’s this shit about not downloading my stuff from my iPhone onto another computer? I have an American contract and I think it’s expensive, the Canadian ones are huge rip-offs and the drones will all get one anyway, because it’s iPhone and nothing else matters.
iTunes. What the fuck is that? That is the lame-assiest piece of shit media library manager I have ever had the displeasure of working with. I am willing to pay for a licence for a good software to do just that because I have a huge music collection and I’ve done so in the past with. iTunes is so bad it can’t even find album covers for million-unit selling metal bands like Tool. It can’t properly rescan folders if you’ve played with your files with another file manager; you have to recreate the library completely. Now I’m sorry to say that Microsoft’s Media Player can outrun iTunes on all facets of media management and makes everything easier because of its flexibility. Who knew that a Microsoft product would be more flexible than an Apple one?
Your mindshare has been bought and sold cheap by a big company that makes you believe it’s all nice and cuddly and loves you like bunnies, but it’s just another share-owned corporation trying to get your money into their accounts and they created a media-culture shift to do it and you all fell for it like cows to the slaughter.
You’re an embarrassment to geekdom.
Solipsism does indeed describe your argument, because you’re predicating it on the idea that your experience is the only true experience and therefore all others are invalid.
I don’t doubt that demand from gamers drives the development of high-end equipment, but they are, like Mac users compared to the general pool of “computer users,” a niche minority — like automobile hot rodders and drift racers etc. A lucrative niche at the high end, to be sure, and not an insignificant one, but not the only one. I’d say that more than general performance of the CPU and memory, gaming really pushes the GPU, which is why the critical aspect is the PCI bus and support for SLI, etc — so it’s not just the CPU but the motherboard and the graphics card makers, which in turn drives demand for better power supplies and ventilation, etc.
And again, this is all to get what…more or less the same performance as a $400 game console that runs on dedicated hardware?
Supercomputing clusters these days are largely built with off-the-shelf hardware — Virginia Tech’s Mac cluster is built with Xeon-based Mac Pros (not even Xserves), for instance, and I’d bet that Xeons go into quite a few Linux clusters as well. So the performance of the Xeon matters to engineers and biotech researchers just as much as gamers. When labs and universities talk to Intel about their supercomputing needs, they are large institutional purchasers, and I’d think that their input weighs in just a tad heavier than gamers’ concerns.
I don’t doubt that a well-tended PC, particularly one made of better-quality components, can run for years without rebooting. And I’m all for people using whatever serves their needs — in the end it comes down to file compatibility.
The difference is, you’re an expert PC user who probably knows what every IRQ is doing at every moment, and you enjoy that mastery. If you were to put a dollar value on the hours you put into learning, tending and upgrading your machines, it’d likely run into the thousands.
Nothing wrong with that, but most people don’t care about the under-the-hood stuff — they want to be able to do things with relative ease, install software and just have it work, plug things in and just have them work, and not have it BSOD every time you update a driver or something.
But to knock people’s devotion to their Macs as brainless brand / trend following shows a lack of understanding of both the product and the users.
I think that many of the new users (who maybe got their first taste of a Mac experience via the iPod, iTunes or the iPhone) are pleasantly surprised to find they can do things without “fighting with the machine” as a friend of mine put it.
A PC is kind of an extension of your brain — if you become a Mac-head then it’s hard to imagine using anything else; it feels like a compromise.
Then again, you know, it’s not for everyone; just people who value their time
it really is amazing how people defend Apple like it is Scientology. I have a few friends that just about killed me when I bought my Zune. Apple geeks always think there is nothing better than a mac, and Steve Jobs may well be the new L.Ron Hubbard.
I wanted an iphone at first, now I have no desire to buy one given all the functions that are missing.
great post and thanks for saying it!
Oh boy. So wrong. My comment is based on experience. Yes it’s true that Mac users with their 7% market share are a niche. But gamers? Oh my friend you are dead wrong.
I have to make death threats to the kids living on my site to stop installing games in the internet café. World of Warcraft has over 9 million registered players (that’s ONE game alone) , some games like Half Life are over 10 years old and still have thousands of servers with thousands of players still playing the game. There are LAN parties with thousands of people in attendance. Pro players like Fatal1ty design their own motherboards and have them marketed and sold. There are dozens of TV shows that are game centric, there’s a TV channel entirely devoted to gamers. Halo2 sold for 125 million dollars on day one. First day sales for Halo 3, 170 million dollars. The American gamming industry alone made more than 10 billion dollars in game sales in 2007. I’d hardly call that NICHE.
So big brands asked gamers why they weren’t buying HP or IBM… they got their answers and changed their game plan. That’s why companies like Dell have a subdivision called Alienware. The gamers are the sysadmins running the server farms of enterprises and industries. If they have a kick-ass Dell gaming war-horse, who do you think they will run to when comes the time to purchase a new server?
Xeon processors were originally server based. Then sysadmins thought, like I did, wait a minute, this kicks PC CPUs to the curb I’ll make a server in a gaming machine. It’s what many of us did. But I’ve also seen an astronomy supercomputer made of playstations. It’s what happens when your budget gets cut. It says nothing to their capacity. Rack up enough computers and you can get all the power you need to render anything. When a science lab goes to Intel, they don’t talk to the same guys that make the PC hardware for public distribution I found that out the hard way when I had to hook up my first spectrometer to a computer in such a lab. There was something you don’t learn in school.
As for MAC, well I can’t speak for it much but I’ll say this about the iPhone, ever since the upgrade, it’s slow and bloated and I’ve been forced to reboot it 5 times. So much for “it just works”.
And surprisingly here at the Cirque du Soleil, everyone owns a Mac as a personal computer and they all come to me for help… so much for “it just works”
@Slinger. Really a Zune? any good?
I’d go… but then again, I have nothing in my possession remotely close to Appel products. So… I’ll stay home!
Surprisingly, it is great! I got it on ebay for cheap and decided to try it out. Yeah it is a little thicker than the iPod, but the screen is bigger and the sound quality is MUCH better than the iPod.
The ability to maneuver through artists, songs, genres, etc. is so much easier on the Zune. You dont have to keep clicking back to the main screen to get where you want.
The software is not excellent, but all I need it to do is load my music onto my device. There is some video quality issues, but other than that, it is great, I love it.
I should calrify, I got a first generation 30GB Zune for cheap right after the 2nd gen came out.
Oh boy ! Dave you really pissed off the Fan Boys. You should link your anatomy of a fanboy post.
PC Gaming is the future of gaming. Consoles are fading to black.
MACs are not a gamers platform. They are a Unix based redistributed OS to sell using propaganda to people who don’t have computer experience. The dumber the user the better for MAC.
Macs are overpriced. Drivers? The variety of manufacturers from motherboard, to proc, to device is the reason why you need drivers. Macs are based off a sole vendor so it’s easy to incorporate all the base APIs in the OS.
People buy iProducts for the lifestyle, not the actual product.
http://mojaveexperiment.com/
Maybe I should have
Yeah the mojave experiement. Great site.
We’ve got several of these buggers in Manchester, exactly the same and years old. I always assumed Canada would be ahead of us in terms of Apple. You are, aren’t you?
This is not the first Mac store. But we only got the iPhone recently due to patent disputes here in Canada.
I’m maybe late on the train but I’ll yank the chain. As far as this article goes, well, to quote another big corporation “I’m Loving It” period.
AJ, as you claim Apple users can play games (and I assume you are), care to meet me on a Team Fortress 2, Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike Source, Crysis or even STALKER (for that matter) ??
My PC is tricked out because I built it with parts that I chose carefully and know what? It’s running Vista 64 bits since Decembre 27th and since that time, no matter what prog I feed or use it has never crashed. No hang ups, no BSOD, nothing. Even when I’m multitasking like hell (and I don’t mean MS Paint and Calculator as the same time).
I don’t use a Mac nor will I ever. Macs to me fells like a cudly little tricycle while a rigged PC feels like a goddam race motorbike.
Sorry, I mistyped my blog’s adress in my previous comment.