I may be mistaken on that point - I was under the impression that the processor in the iPhone, while not necessarily ground-up custom for Apple, was customized for them.
And again, to reiterate my previous point, Apple has done a good job with this iPhone and previous products of making it feel snappy. I don’t care how much else it has going on under the hood, and I’d imagine that your average consumer doesn’t, either.
I don’t have enough interest to complain about the products–I’ve just noticed how their marketing tends to operate. They’re selling smug, really–more than a product. I have enough smug already, thank you.
Oh, you don’t have to persuade me of that - as I said, this is clearly a winning strategy for Apple, and their consumers are well served, if they are the sort of consumer that Apple is designing for.
If you amended this to “play games or tinker” I would be in perfect agreement - if by “tinker” you mean anything outside the most pared-down use of the product.
I don’t think the sort of people who aren’t going to be served well by Apple products are “few and far between” - but they’re certainly a minority when compared with the market that will be perfectly happy with Apple’s appliance-like approach to design.
The point is, there are many many things you can do with a usb device that includes a file storage system containing .mp3 data - and that describes pretty much every mp3 player. It costs absolutely nothing in engineering terms to allow the user to do anything with the music on the device that they could do with any other storage device full of mp3s.
Rather than ask, “Why not just spend money on an additional device, or install iTunes on your work computer?” many people would ask “Why should you have to?” What is the benefit to the consumer of assigning randomized filenames to your .mp3s and divorcing them from their .id3 data? What do I get out of being required to install a huge application to manage the music on the device? These people are not going to be attracted to Apple products.
Well, sure - and this is why Apple is a good fit for people who aren’t very techie and are happy to pay a premium for a more trouble-free appliance. For people who expect to do as much as possible with their devices, it’s probably not going to be the best option. Personally, I’m happy to dual-boot Linux/Windows. (I only boot into Windows to run Windows-specific applications.) Anyway, if you aren’t clueless, the “headaches” of Windows security aren’t really going to affect you much. The last time I was troubled by malware at home was probably around 1999. I am the network administrator for a 50-user Windows network which allows all users unfiltered access to the internet, and in the past five years, the only time I have spent removing malware, it has been as a favour for people who brought in their home computers.
That’s not to say “Apple sucks!” It’s just that there are different types of consumers, and Apple’s approach is never going to appeal to people like me. While I can see that in certain ways “Less is more,” it’s going to be hard to persuade me to actually pay more for less. My seventy-year-old mother only needs a computer for use as a web browser. A Mac would be a better fit for her than a Windows PC, because she’s not going to be playing GTA IV any time soon and it would provide more trouble-free access to the internet. But since she needs less, why pay a premium for it? When she turns her laptop on, she gets the Chromium web browser and Empathy chat in a locked-down environment, running on much better hardware than could be had for spending significantly more money on a Mac.
Of course, she has a nerdy son to look after her - someone with her needs trying to pick something off-the-shelf at Best Buy would probably have a better experience with a Mac than with a Windows box.
Oh I’ll gladly add “tinker” to the list 
I think the “sort of” consumer Apple is going for is the one with deep pockets. I read recently that Apple makes enough profit from 1 computer (iphones/ipads excluded) as PC makers make from 7.
But the point isn’t cost, it’s convenience and security. By not allowing the user to do anything with their music, they 1) ensure the profits of the Itunes music store and 2) they prevent a lot of security issues from cropping up.
Oh, I agree they won’t be attracted to Apple products - but I wouldn’t call Itunes a huge program considering how slow a Windows computer runs just at the baseline of Vista (I haven’t experienced 7 yet.) Purchasing a device is for peace of mind and ease - you’re buying yourself the ease.
Actually they affect windows users a LOT - your mother would be up to her ears in viruses if not for you. Why shouldn’t computing be a pleasant, hassle-free experience these days? I quit Windows because of the hassles and so I wasn’t the go-to tech person for my whole frickin’ extended family, whose problems paled in comparison to what I saw on a college campus day to day.
And that’s the trouble - lots of those “nerdy kids” are jumping ship to Macs because they can’t be bothered with their relatives opening stupid shit on their computers.
Money wise, I obviously can’t argue with you - it is cheaper to get a Windows machine. With comprable hardware, less so. But if you don’t have a techie kid to go to, paying somebody is gonna eat up those savings in the long run when their computer “slows down” or “won’t turn on”. Lotsa people out there still use Internet Explorer, tragically enough.
And in 5 years when too many people jump ship to Macs and there are more, brutal attacks I’ll be leaving for Linux :p. Ya just can’t win!
You can’t have been very good at what you did, it seems to me, if you had to clean your own machine.
I’m not a tech worker, i run Windows, and i never have to “clean my machine up.” I installed some anti-malware software when i first got my computer, and it keeps the system clean. It updates itself with new definitions when necessary, and i have each program run scans at weekly intervals.
You make it sounds like spending hours running scans actually involves the user sitting in front of the computer monitoring every minute of the process. I’m sure my computer does spend a few hours a months running its weekly scans, but the scans run in the background (often at times when i’m not actually using the computer), and i figure that i probably spend a grand total of a couple of minutes per month actively dealing with the software.
It’s a real burden.
Awwwww, you came in to threadshit! How darling! I had a little side business doing it in high school and I had more work than I could handle and many referrals, so I think I did just fine. Like I said, my info is 5 years out of date, since I haven’t owned a Windows machine in 5 years and quit working on Windows machines at the same time.
Running the scans and choosing what to delete manually (always a good idea in my mind) is a PITA that does not occur on Apple systems. That was my point - one pleasantly responded to by Larry Mudd.
shrug. I was the same way five years ago with XP, Windows Defender, and AVG. Obviously, I was doing something wrong, as every month or two, some manner of malware would worm its way onto my computer, and, if I was lucky, it’d just be a matter of going through HiJack this logs and deleting suspicious stuff, along with a little Google research. So, maybe ten to fifteen minutes of work. If it was really something horrific, it would take me hours to find the solution. And this would happen on home as well as work computers (and the work computers I never did any questionable surfing on.)
Never had an issue on my Mac. Don’t particularly care if I could have been more vigilant or not with the PC. The end result is just that I’ve never had to deal with a virus, and whether it’s security through obscurity or if OS X really is better bolted down, once again, I don’t care. I’ve never spent a single second in five years trying to clean up my computer.
It’s just like you to consider a disagreement to be threadshitting. Doesn’t make it so, however.
And therein lies one of the fundamental problems of many Mac people who rag on Windows: the fact that they generally seem to have an idea about Windows that is at least five years out of date, and often ten or fifteen.
Last time i participated in one of these threads, one Mac supporter’s reason for preferring Macs was:
It sounds like the last time this guy looked at Windows was around the time of Windows ME. In Windows XP, i never had any trouble with printers, cameras, or wi-fi. Same in Windows 7.
As i said, if doing that takes hours of your time every month, you can’t be doing it very well.
In the year and a half that i’ve had my Win7 box, i’ve never had to choose what to delete manually, because if the software is allowed to keep itself up to date, it never lets anything onto the computer in the first place. Every time my scans run, the only message they give me is something along the lines of “The scan is complete. No problems were found.” As i suggested, if you’re having to clean crap off your computer in Windows on a regular basis, then there’s something wrong.
I think Macs are fantastic computers. My wife has a Macbook Pro for work, and she’s about to move to a Macbook Air. She had a choice of Mac or Windows computers, and chose Mac partly on my recommendation. None of this has anything to do with a desire to bash Macs or to threadshit.
hell if I know. I’ve been using Windows for like 20 years now and I’ve never had to deal with a malware infestation. I don’t know what the heck the rest of you are running into (though I find it rather convenient that you simultaneously condemn shitware on Windows and praise Apple.)
I truly find that quite impressive.
If you’d read the thread, sweet pea, you’d see that I’d previously disclosed the 5 years. Of course, if you’re willing to buy me a Windows machine, I’d certainly give it another try.
Hell, if I’d had your experience I wouldn’t be upset with Windows either. But I’d had trouble with printers and wifi myself. And I owned mainstream stuff - HP’s and then later a Vaio and only HP printers, so not some obscure piece of shit.
This is more in line with my actual experience; mostly it was 15-20 minutes every week but sometimes it took hours and that was a real bitch. And it was those times that I thought, “What the fuck am I wasting all this goddamn time for? Why can’t they (Windows) get their shit figured out?” As for “questionable surfing”, sure I downloaded music and movies without permission but never looked at p0rn.
I’ve been hit with nasty viruses two, maybe three times since I got my first Windows PC back in 1998 or so. Only one of those was in the past five years. And that one required me to spend a significant amount of time searching for the fix and then implementing the fix - going through forums, finding specialized tools, booting into Safe mode to run various antivirus or malware removal programs, rebooting again, blah blah etc. It took a couple of days, during which my computer was basically unusable, before I finally got it off. (It was Virtumonde, in case anyone is curious.)
Now, 2-3 viruses over the course of 10 years isn’t really that bad, but I am quite, quite happy to not have to deal with that crap anymore. It’s not the reason I got a Mac, but it’s a nice little bonus.
…well, there’s your questionable surfing.
Yeah, but she doesn’t look at porn!