First of all this is my first poll, so I will apologize now on the chance I horribly bungle the operation.
Based on general observation over the years, I’ve come to the notion that most if not all people have owned or regularly used an Apple product of one type or another. It is my curiosity about this observation that pushed me to finally get a feel for how right or wrong I am about this.
The poll is strictly based on whether or not you owned an Apple product. I’ve personally never owned one, and never intend to, but even I once farted around on an Apple IIe in school. This poll is also just for physical products, not things like Itunes and the like, though you can feel free to discuss them below.
Lastly, please let’s not turn this into an Apple Sucks vs fanboys thread.
I clicked on “No, but I would consider it,” but I don’t think it is actually very likely to happen.
Also, I think it is worth noting that people who once owned a pre-Macintosh Apple computer are really in a very different category from owners of iPads, Phones or Pods. My guess is that a majority of the former group have PCs now, with probably a very high proportion of them running Linux.
I have owned one and only one Apple product, an Apple Quicktake camera which we used the heck out of until it finally stopped working. Very satisfied, however… I have no plans to own any other Apple product. We didn’t buy the camera because we wanted an Apple camera, we owned it because we were looking for a digital camera and it met our criteria. All the i-products do not currently interest me or fill my perceived needs. If that changes I’m not opposed to buying an Apple product again.
My husband had an iPhone before his Samsung - obviously he wasn’t brand-loyal. I messed around with the iPhone, but I never felt I had to have one. He’s got an iPod Nano, but it wasn’t because it’s an Apple - it’s just a device that met his needs when he bought it.
About 15 or 16 years ago, we had some sort of Apple desktop computers at work, but for whatever reason, they were mostly used for doing our time cards. They were gone within a few years of when I was hired. I didn’t much like the single mouse button, probably because I was used to PCs.
I’m not anti-Apple, and I’d likely consider their products should I be shopping for something and they had an item to meet my requirements. But in my life in general, I don’t have a lot of brand loyalty.
… except for my toothpaste…
I was indifferent to Apple products until I knew a lot of people who use them. Now I actively dislike them because of the difficulties they present when trying to share anything. Thank god for Dropbox.
It would be nice if there was a positive choice between love and indifference.
I prefer Apple to every other computer company and to almost every electronics company, but there is a lot of annoyance mixed in with any love.
I like the platform and the OS, but I’m not married to it. I’ve had several Macbooks and Macbook Pros, and at least 3 iPods. I do not have an iPhone (I’ve got a Samsung Galaxy S) or iPad, and I don’t plan on ever getting either. I have an iMac at work, but that’s just what I was given.
They might be decent products… doubt it, but they might… but I dislike the marketing and the cult community too much to ever put serious thought into buying one. That, and I’m far too computer-literate to ever pay their prices or care about it “just werking”.
I have a crapping-out iPod classic which still somewhat works OK despite the abuse I’ve dealt it, an iPad 2 which I don’t use anymore in favor of a Nexus 10, and I had an iPhone 4S for about 6 months before ditching it in favor of an HTC 8X.
I generally try to avoid getting emotionally invested in any multi-billion-dollar corporation who only cares about me if I give them money.
The only one I ever owned was a Macintosh LC computer in college. The Comp sci department had a deal with Apple for cheap prices for students, and most of the provided software was Mac. Never bought a product where I had a choice though.
We have a pretty Apple-centric house- iPads, iPhones, a MacBook Pro and an Apple TV. I run with a pretty yuppy crowd, and Apple products are pretty much the norm among people I know.
FWIW, I’m not particularly emotionally invested in Apple. I got the MacBook because I needed something for grad school that would be absolutely reliable, the iPhones because they were the best smart phones at the time, and the iPads because there still isn’t a tablet quite like the iPad. The AppleTV was a gift.
I admit my exasperation with Apple products began in the 80’s. I did a fair amount of work at home on a DOS PC with a design application I liked, but couldn’t afford a laser printer ($$$ at the time). My work around was to print to file using a laser printer driver. Then I could take that file to the office, simply copy that file from a PC to LPT1 where the laser printer is. Voila, laser printed documents, without having to have the application installed on the PC.
Fast forward to a new job in an Apple-centric office; even though I could print to file at home with an Apple laser printer driver, the Macs they were using had no way to copy a formatted file to the Apple laser printer. Mac users could not comprehend what I wanted to do, or why I wanted to do something Apple did not support. That is the attitude I resent; if Apple doesn’t do it, it must not be worth doing. Apple knows what’s good for you; if Apple doesn’t do it, trust us, it is for your own good.
I had an iPod once, and it was simultaneously very cool and ridiculously infuriating. In the end, infuriating won out, and I ditched it in favour of an .mp3 player that wasn’t such a control freak. It didn’t make sense to me to carry a device that couldn’t be charged with whatever standard usb cable was lying around, and that I couldn’t simply move music on and off of. It used the open mp3 standard, but only mediated through the proprietary (and unnecessary) iTunes - and although it used open USB mass storage, and I could see the .mp3 files, they were all assigned randomly-generated filenames, and the open-standard id3 metadata was stripped out and copied into an itunesy database.
With any non-Apple .mp3 player, I could simply plug it into my computer, copy my music folders over (they are already organized and indexed) and the player would let me navigate and search based on the id3 tags - and if I put my music on there, I could easily get it off again, like say if I arrived a work and wanted to transfer my music to my work computer for convenient listening there.
So much nonsense with no benefit to me as a user of the product, and so much that senselessly got in the way of my use of my own music. I bought a new Sandisk .mp3 player within six months and gave the ipod away.
This sort of attitude is in Apple’s DNA, and while I can appreciate that they are great products for the sort of consumers that are in their target demographic, they aren’t for me.
Edit: I can’t think of anything negative to say about the Apple II I had in the eighties - I loved that thing.
They were gone within a few years of when I was hired. I didn’t much like the single mouse button, probably because I was used to PCs.