So, Moudz posted a blog "Why I hate Apple".
This so enraged me I felt I had to respond. Since the maximum size of a comment post is 4KB of text, I set up a blog to post my response.
Below, black is my text blue is Moudz blog (copied in full).
I have been an Apple / Macintosh user for over 20 years, I have never before responded to a posting of this type, but this posting irritated me beyond belief.
Why I Hate Apple
Posted by Moudz at 1:45 AM
My friends and probably people who follow me on twitter probably know that I do not like Apple (probably much more than not liking - perhaps despising). I'm sick of people keep bombarding their Apple products in my face every time I say something, and I am sick of the shameless brainwashed promotions from live conversations to social media to TV programs and ads.
Upon the request of one of my friends, I would like to share my reasons for this hatred to Apple as a whole, and not any certain product.
The Apple brainwashed culture
It is perhaps what I hate about it the most: the over-zealous fans (or shall I call addicts) who are eating, drinking and breathing Apple and are basically walking billboards for the company. I like Google and Facebook and you don't see me shamelessly promoting them like crazy every chance I get. And it's not even just that, Apple owners think they are better than other people, that they are some sort of super-humans. Let me tell you this: owning a Mac or an i-related device and flaunting it in front of the whole world doesn't make you cool, its makes you a douche.
The vast majority of people I know using Macs and Apple products would not discuss Apple unless it was with good friends and they where asked. Irritating people irate. They happen in all walks of life. Stop being so over-sensitive about Apple ones. Apple's market share of users is less then 1 in 10 PC users, and less then 1 in 25 phone users. How on earth can such a small share of people bother you enough to post this?
The Apple business strategy
This is what a lot of people fail to see. The whole business strategy of Apple is to gradually produce better products forcing the costumer to constantly pay more and more to buy the latest models.
The prime example of this is when Apple produced the first generation iPhone. It was lacking the most basic of features that a 1995 Nokia phone offered. These included forwarding an SMS message, copy-paste features, bad reception, no custom sounds for SMS & e-mails, video-recording, MMS, etc... Was Apple not aware of these features or did they not have the technology to include them? No. They just prefer to constantly release updates and new versions to make costumers run and buy them to make more money.
Yes. Apple sell you exactly what you pay for. There is no secret about what is NOT in their technology. There is more then enough people (like you) willing to shout it from the roof-tops.
When are you going to learn its not what some marketing droid / box spec sheet says that a product does that matters? Its what the end users is able to do with the product.
Other products may say that they can do something, but if the user who buys it can't make the product work, they don't care. They are going to buy the inferiorly specced product that at least they can work out how to use all the features off. That's why Apple's strategy works. When Apple says one of their products does something, the person buying it knows that they can make it do it, there is even usually a video of Steve Jobs doing it that they can view online first so that they can see how easy it is to make the product work.
Specs that people can use matter more then specs that only exists to fill checklists on some marketers spreadsheet.
Don't blame Apple for shipping a product that doesn't do copy / paste, doesn't do MMS, etc. etc. Blame all the other phone manufactures for shipping phones with such poor UI that nobody could do MMS or copy/paste so users barely noticed it was missing on an iPhone.
By the way, copy and paste was a free update. All OS updates for iPhones have been free. People buy new iPhones not for the software updates, but for the hardware ones (like Retina Displays).
Customer Service
Early last summer, when the iPhone 4 was released, many costumers were complaining about bad/no reception. Steve Jobs had to "teach" costumers how to properly use the phone so that they get reception - performing yoga every time they had to make/receive a call. But that's not the worst part, angry costumers were told to pay an extra £25 ($37.5) for a rubber bumper which presumably solves this problem.
Apple has reportedly told its employees not to promise the costumers free rubber bumpers even though the flaw in the phone is the company's fault.
Of course, after a huge media uproar about the topic, it was more or less forced to give these bumpers for free after realizing that sales will be dropping and the company's image is at stake.
Other companies (like HP) would gladly recall defective products and replace them, and not play charades with costumers who are already paying shit-loads of money for the product.
No, media companies where complaining about iPhone 4 reception. Most people who bothered to do testing showed that the iPhone 4 actually has better reception then the iPhones before it. (go ahead, google it)
Apple's response was:
1) Our customer's aren't complaining, if they are they sure as hell aren't calling our call centres to do so.
2) There is a 30 day, no questions asked return policy. Nobody is making use of it to return iPhone 4's
3) Since in some rare cases *cough* bad AT&T network *cough* a case makes a difference, people who so wish can requests a case.
Funnily enough, iPhone 4 sales figures pretty much show that no customer cared about reception issues with iPhone 4's, dispute the media's near universal hysteria about the issue.
Apple is so perfect, so let's blame others
After many iPods got infected by a worm (virus) last year, all Apple did was blame Microsoft saying "As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it." [source] Personally, I don't think Microsoft is responsible to ensure proper security for Apple products. They didn't even apologize or call back the alleged 1% of the defective products.
They emailed every registered customer with an affected iPod and published to the media the details of which iPods where infected. Since this made front pages of all technical sites worldwide, I think they more then did enough to to get to the attention of all involved.
Here is the page with the details for your edification:
Pay Your Heart Out
Okay I get that Apple is so proud of its design and that it is very unique, but that doesn't justify charging for their products with at least a 200% profit margin. They even charge for Microsoft Office for Mac more than what Microsoft is charging for it. I'll let the adjacent infographic speak for itself.
Yes, Apple Inc. sets the price Microsoft charges on its own webpage for Microsoft office. Its all Apple. Evil Steve Jobs goes to 1 Microsoft Way and holds Microsoft employees hostage until Steve Balmer sets the price of Microsoft office the way Jobs wants it. (for those of the American persuasion that was sarcasm)
Do you think that Microsoft might set the price that way cause it would prefer you to NOT buy the Mac version of Office and instead buy the windows version? Where they (Microsoft) would also get you to pay for a Windows license at the same time? You know, pay them (Microsoft) more money?
Apple's so committed to higher Microsoft prices that it doesn't produce a Microsoft office compatible competitor that it sells for a lot cheaper (http://www.apple.com/iwork/) (yes, again sarcasm. The rest of the world uses it a lot, try and keep up)
Touch Obsession
So what's great about touch phones and pads really? Touch screens on phones and pads greatly decrease productivity. Using a regular keyboard or phone buttons, you can type a text message or email ten times faster than with a touch screen keyboard
Unless of course you are part of the great multitude of people who are not computer literate, who find the iPad and its touch interface very welcoming and easy to use. Please remember that Apple has for a great deal of its history been chasing the demographic of non-computer users. Non-smartphone users. Non-tablet users. Please allow that Apple has been very successful in bringing many more people into the fold of "computer user" through its successful touch paradigm.
Lockdown
It seems very ironic when the world is going towards open-source programs and information sharing that Apple decided to lock their products to certain mobile service providers. Not only does that limit their sales, but they are missing out on so much profit internationally where the phones are being cracked or jailbroken and sold for twice if not three times the actual price. Besides, why would someone by a product that forces me to buy another service that I may not be satisfied with? Or why would I buy a cracked product that I need to re-crack every time there's a new update to the OS?
US of A … not equal … the world.
Please look here for a list of enlightened carriers and countries around the world in which Apple themselves will sell you unlocked iPhones, free to be used on the carrier of your choice, in the country of your choice.
Please don't blame Apple for the shortcomings of your telephone carriers and consumer laws.
The lockdown is not just limited to the iPhone. How about iPods that do not read music formats except .AAC and .MP3?
And WAV, Audible, Apple Loseless, AIFF.
Actually, bar MP3, AAC, WAV and AIFF (CD standard), what format digital Music files can you buy? WMA? The Microsoft only proprietary format? All the formats supported by Apple are open standards available (and implemented) by multiple parties with no Apple required parts.
Or the fact that you cannot extract the songs bought from iTunes to any non-Apple product because the are encrypted?
Why would I put myself through such a limitation?
iTunes sells DRM free music, usable on all the many devices that can play AAC … like, nearly any music player / phone in existence.
Incompatibilities
It's bad enough that you are being charged so much money for your mac, you then discover that 90% of the programs or games are not compatible with MacOS. It's either you have to put yourself through enormous amounts of trouble to find a way to make it work or just forgo that program. What Macs seem to be useful for is designers (its not like PCs can't do the same job). But designers (don't even get me started on them either, you'll probably soon be reading a list of why I hate graphic designers) think they are sooo special because they forced their mommies and daddies to buy them their Macs because they cannot possibly live without them.
What irritates me the most is the refusal of most of them do you photoshop on a regular PC. Are you really that thick-headed that you cannot manage to use a PC anymore?
AppleScript & ColorSync.
Those 2 technologies alone will mean that any professional designer will be able to make real, monetary significant savings in time day after day by using a Mac for their professional design work. These are both Apple technologies they have been around for decades.
The second thing is, professionals know that buying the latest and greatest processors, GPU's, fastest memory and having it all provided in an easy to use, reliably manufactured tool is worth real saving to them over the life of the computer, and that life can be measured in months, not years, so resale value is a not inconsequential issue to them.
Oh, and when your job is only as good as your next deadline, you want a tool, not a computer that needs to be maintained.
Back to incompatibilities, what's up Apple feud with Flash? Seriously? Why would I buy a product who's producer are so moody and keeps fighting with other big companies that I daily depend on (like google)?
10 years of the number 1 product reported as crashing their machines being flash. 5 years of support calls, paid for by Apple (not Adobe) of fixing 100% CPU utilisation and computer's overheating because of flash. 3 years (and an unknown amount of time before the iPhone shipped) of Adobe promising a version of Flash that will work for phones, but not actually shipping anything that doesn't repeat the mistakes of their Mac desktop products.
You know my question? Why didn't Apple declare war on flash years ago? If all it took to get Adobe to finally try and fix flash was Steve Jobs to put their toes in the fire and turn up the roasting heat, we could have had fixed versions of flash years ago!
Thank Steve Jobs for getting Adobe to fix their pile of shit. Don't blame him for being brave enough to stand up to them and call them out on what everyone has been complaining about for years, that flash was a resource hungry, crash-prone, dinosaur of a program that we would all be better of without.
There's a lot of more things that I could probably add to this list and I could go on forever but honestly I don't think this topic deserves much more typing so I'm gonna end it here. Enjoy your intentionally prehistoric products, as for me, I will be sticking with PCs for now; thank you.
Yes you could go on forever, the question is, would you actually say anything?
You’ve shown that you don’t care for anyone who living is dependent on computers being tools, not support nightmares. You’ve shown that you have no symphony for people who aren’t already part of the techno illuminate, but just want things to work. And you’ve shown that you can’t even back up your irrational hatred with facts.
So please, do stop and leave those of us who buy tools, not clingy, emotionally needy technocrap to get on with our lives.
