going back to the original topic, apple hardware/software, i've used apple hardware and software (company-issued macbook pro and iphone 7/8).
The software is great as long as you want to stay within apple-defined boudaries. If you want to go outside that, it's an experience similar if not worse than using gnu/linux.
The hardware is great when the machine is brand new but decays very quickly, it's not designed to be serviced by either end-users or specialized users or specialized shops -- you're supposed to return it to an apple store and pay an expensive price to basic maintenance. As an example, cleaning up the fans from dust is very important in those machines but you have to buy special hardware to take off the screws, and in generally you risk breaking something. Keyboards failed spectacularly in last gen, and apple waited like two years before fixing it. Audio is great, until it breaks. My macbook pro (15" top of the line) couldn't sustain full-audio, and distorted audio after ~30 sec of full volume audio (imagine that during a conference call in a meeting with other people). The screen is great, but the glass panel retained ALL of the fingerprints and it was a PITA to clean, i had to buy special glass-cleaning liquids. WTF.
All the above issues appeared all shortly after the first year of life of the laptop. Call me an anti-apple fanatic, I don't care, but I expected more from a 3500+€ machine.
At the new job i've been given a 13" dell latitude 7390. It works flawlessly, it rarely skips a beat and it has none of the problems stated above. Fuck Apple.
You’ve missed my point, which is that you could remove the word “Apple” from your original comment and it would have made no difference. One kind of fanatic does not excuse another, nor have I claimed it does.
There’s no need to list Apple’s faults. I’m aware of them and support a large part of Apple criticism in the Tim Cook era (and not just technical[1]), including most of yours.
Where we disagree is in the insinuation the author is a fanatic simply for defending Apple. They’ve written a technical post and gave their conclusions, which may indeed sound apologetic but are far from rabid fanaticism.
> Fuck Apple.
In sum, it’s fine to decry the company but I disagree that people who like it and accept its tradeoffs should be immediately labeled as extremists.
Well Apple is notoriously abusive of the developers on its platform. Two things are particularly cried about across most of the ecosystem: the 30% cut they take off pretty much everything and the vague terms that you have to comply with, and that they enforce in a mostly random way (app gets pulled out of the app store, won't tell you why, won't tell you what you did wrong).
Now add the exhorbitant prices for their low-specced, low-quality hardware.
Now add the continual rip-off of their users.
Now add the subject of the original linked page.
At this point I think that yes, defending Apple is extremism.
It's fine to accept the tradeoffs, it's not fine to pretend they do not exists:
- "Yeah this stuff is unreasonably expensive but we have to use it"
that is honest
- "the apple ecosystem is the best for creative and developers and what apple does across all the spectrum is fine"
that is dishonest.
That is the crux of our disagreement, which I doubt we’ll resolve over an internet text interaction.
Thank you for the conversation thus far. Maybe we’ll resume it if we happen to ever meet.
I find that you're the kind of person that only find what they're looking for.
> Thank you for the conversation thus far. Maybe we’ll resume it if we happen to ever meet.
thank you too and have a nice day.
I expressed an opinion on a belief you seem to hold, not a value judgement on yourself. I don’t presume to know which “kind of person” you are from a short text-based interaction pertaining to single subject matter. I’ll ask you extend me the same courtesy.
As do anti-Apple fanatics. That’s what being a “fanatic” means. You can say the same about gun fanatics, or meat fanatics, or vegetarian fanatics, or Android fanatics. It’s staggering how often people who are anti something fail to perceive the irony in behaving exactly in the manner they are decrying. Someone having a contrary opinion doesn’t make them a fanatic.