A fox's rant: Apple

[Nester Delgado]

Where do I begin. Okay, I'll start with what's making me so angry. Apple people have tunnel vision on that stupid logo. They think that owning a Mac, makes them more intelligent and interesting somehow and will defend it to the death. To have the slightest doubt about Apple products would be the doubt their own existence it seems.

Firstly, Steve Jobs invented a grand total of NOTHING! He was a genius, I will admit that. He knew what had huge potential and was able to repackage such things into a way that made them far more appealing. On top of that, he created marketing that made his products seem very much like the epiphany of modern electronics.

Sony invented the iPod (it was ugly and had a poor interface, but it was the first mp3 player with a hard drive and such) and I'm pretty damn sure there were touch screen phones before the iPhone.

Secondly, Apple products are typically inferior, at least to the way Mac people see them. Case in point, iPod earbuds. They suck. Bad. No one has ever said, "These sound pretty good," about them. The ONLY reason anyone would ever pay $25 for them, is because it's Apple. Skullcandy makes far better earbuds for $10.

The newest iPhone has a poor quality camera that is dwarfed by half the other phones out there. The screen is typically narrower, the interface is less intuitive (there isn't ever a fucking 'back' button) and the phones often don't even work correctly right out of the box. My phone, right out of the box, had a voice recorder, synced my contacts list with my Facebook, runs multiple apps at the same time, does weather, voice activation etc. etc. The reason Apple had to come up with better voice activation was because the interface was rapidly falling behind the curve. (And I hear it doesn't even work all that good.)

Let's see, what's next, oh yeah, their computers. As I said before, Apple earbuds are $25. Obviously they are grossly marked up and probably cost 25 cents to make. That being said, why would you think their other products weren't marked up the same way? The parts of the iPhone are made in one of the worst sweatshops in the world for pennies and the camera, screen and all the other parts aren't exactly made of gold either. There are much more powerful phones on the market that have more processing speed, better res cameras, certainly a LOT better sound quality and guess what, they cost less! Care to continue?

Who do you think makes the parts inside an Apple computer? Apple? WRONG! Toshiba, Intel, ATI, etc. The SAME parts that go into a PC. YES the parts are that interchangeable and any experienced PC person can tell you that. Go online and look it up! Go to a Apple parts reseller and you'll see that everything you could possibly need for your Apple comes from PC manufacturers. So why DOES it cost more?

Last year, Apple had a (roughly, can't remember the exact figure) 15% market share in the cell phone market. That means that 15% of ALL phone in the world came from Apple. ALL phones. However, from ALL those phone sales? Guess what Apple's profit was? 15% would be what you'd expect if they had the same mark up as everyone else. 20% maybe if they pushed it a little based on consumer demand. No? It was FUCKING 60%!!!! YES! That means that Apple products have that much of a mark up! They made 60% of ALL the profit from ALL the cell phones sales from every company in the WORLD for that year. So again, why do they cost so much!?

The rest is specifics. The fact the Mac interface hasn't changed in the slightest since 2000 and they charge people money for the updates which only make the things into advertising machines. iTunes is the greatest example of that. Leaching system resources to send data from your machine to Apple to let them know what music you have so they can work to sell you more. Of course, only from the Apple store. Did you know that Apple makes 60% of all app sale profits and only 40% goes to developers whereas Android developers make 70%? Also, iTunes can't play half the file formats out there, has the visualization programming that Winamp had a decade ago and can't organize your files for shit? It's counter-intuitive in the way that it tags your files. If it does it wrong, you need to fix each track manually only to have iTunes fuck the tags up again when it updates your library. MOST OTHER PROGRAMS DO NOT DO THIS! That, and it can't convert files either or even properly keep track of album covers which, and you can look at this yourself, it looses within a labyrinth of folders which you have to copy in-total if you ever want to put any of your music on another machine. Yeah. Most other programs tag the covers directly to the files themselves so they never get lost.

And what pisses me off the most? Apple people. They think they are in some elitist club because they own a Mac product. Well guess what? Anyone can own one of those pieces of crap if they want to. Furthermore, PC users are more adaptable and can quickly get used to large changes to their interface whereas Mac users have been using the same damn (simple to use and learn btw) interface for the last 10 years. As a PC user, I have taught myself code and learned to do everything from rewriting my BIOS to editing features in a game. Why? A Mac user would say I need to, but it's because I want to. When you approach a Mac user and tell them why your PC or phone is better than their behind tech, they simply source the next piece of crap from Apple as the newest and greatest thing. Saying that despite the shortcomings of whatever it is they just blew money on, the next thing is going to be better. WTF!? I can buy something great NOW and have it last for five to ten years without ever needing a replacement, and yet Mac users are constantly having to buy new machines to keep up. Who is smarter again?

Whew, so, in short, Apple sucks and I dare anyone to prove me wrong. (And don't bother quoting that biography. You know who had that published? Apple.)

[Cheeky Stoat]

Well spoken!

[Rosette Contrail]

A great rant, even though everyone already knows this. x7

Only thing about it that irked me though was you were kind of everywhere in your complaints, wasn't very coherent and structured. One moment you were ragging the iPhone then you started up on the computers and immediately went back to the iPhone. It also seemed more like you were pissed at the phone than the computer, since you mentioned nothing of the ridiculous "Upgrade" prices they give you when putting together a "New" Mac on the site. They seriously charge you more than Microsoft for Microsoft Office as an optional program, to give an example.

But I suppose that's all cuz this is a rant, not a critique. x7 So good rant nonetheless. I feel like saying the same things sometimes.

[Nester Delgado]

Right Rose. This is just a random rant. As for focusing a lot on the phones, well I see them everywhere. People wave them in your face like they are the coolest people on earth to have them and yet they are totally ignorant about how bad the phones actually are. I don't see the computers that often unless I'm in a coffee shop. Then they are everywhere. I want to yell at them,"You support free trade coffee, but at the same time you support slave labor technology!?"