# How Universal Is Ownership of Apple Products? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [June 15, 2013, 6:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054 "2013-06-15T06:48:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![geneb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a88e4f/32.png) [@geneb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/geneb)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2013, 4:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054/61 "2013-06-17T16:19:08Z")
I had a Macintosh Classic in 1991. Haven’t had an Apple product since then and I have no intention of getting any. ---
**Author:** ![Student\_Driver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/3da27b/32.png) [@Student\_Driver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Student_Driver)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2013, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054/62 "2013-06-17T16:50:15Z")
When I was a kid, Apple computers were boring, expensive machines, and I studiously avoided their systems (though I did end up with a Franklin Apple II clone to put alongside my Commodore/Amiga, Atari 8-bit, and PC set-ups). Thought the IIgs was interesting but terribly expensive. Never have been interested in the Mac line. For a while I owned a Pippin as part of my video game console collection. My ex-fiancee ended up getting me into their phones eventually, though. She was an Apple fan. She got me an iPod Shuffle that I rarely used, then a Touch, then a 3gs phone, which was a serious upgrade from the crappy Samsung Blackjack II I owned. Hated her MacBooks (and she hated my Windows laptop), but loved the phone. We synchronized our iTunes libraries, and I found that I constantly used the Touch and 3gs… music and games and interwebs and maybe the occasional call. When we broke up, I gave her back all of her gifts, went back to the Blackjack II, and realized I missed the iPhone more than I missed her; within days, I was at an AT&T store plunking down money for the newly-released 32 gig 4. Then a couple of years later, the 64 gig 5 (which is still only large enough to hold about a quarter of my music). It was pretty much an accident that I ended up in the Apple ecosystem, and could see myself happily using a higher-end Android or Windows phone. ---
**Author:** ![Kenm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/bc79bd/32.png) [@Kenm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kenm)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2013, 5:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054/63 "2013-06-17T17:41:03Z")
I’m on my fifth Mac, a 2008 iMac, since my first Apple computer I bought in '91. I have an iPod and and an iPad, both of them gifts. My machine is Microsoft-free with the exception of Flip4Mac, free software that Microsoft bought so it would slow the decline of its Windows media song-and-dance protocol by playing it through QuickTime. ---
**Author:** ![Justin\_Bailey](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/justin_bailey/32/8792_2.png) [@Justin\_Bailey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Justin_Bailey)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2013, 6:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054/64 "2013-06-17T18:25:24Z")
> [@pbbth](#): > > As he was telling us this, the phone in his pocket rang and he pulled out some old cordless phone that looked like kids had been playing street hockey with it and took the call. After he hung up I asked him why the hell I would buy an Apple phone if the Apple store didn’t see fit to use them and he mumbled something about how they needed a landline phone for the store in case of emergencies. I couldn’t believe that Apple allowed them to have a cordless phone from 1992 as a store phone! I think it’s very unusual for a store (especially a corporate store like Apple probably operating in a mall environment) to route calls to an employee’s cell phone. Or even a store cell phone for that matter. There are just some things a land line is better at and when you’re stationed on the same piece of “land” all day, it makes sense to have a land line. ---
**Author:** ![Pixel\_Dent](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/bc8723/32.png) [@Pixel\_Dent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pixel_Dent)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2013, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054/65 "2013-06-17T18:33:27Z")
I do Unix software development for a living and Apple has by far the nicest platform for doing that sort of work. If I were buying just for personal use I might buy something else, but as long as I’m programming for a living I’ll own a machine running OSX. ---
**Author:** ![Deegeea](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e9bcb4/32.png) [@Deegeea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Deegeea)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2013, 7:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054/66 "2013-06-17T19:39:51Z")
I’ve owned one Apple product: a Mac II cxii (I think that’s the right number) in the early 1990s. It had a 40 megabyte hard drive. I liked it very much at the time, but it was not value for the price. I chose “neutral” because I had a dual, ambivalent reaction: I really loved that computer, but at the same time, I never wanted to buy another Apple product. Cancels each other out somewhat 😉 ---
**Author:** ![RickG](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rickg/32/5174_2.png) [@RickG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickG)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2013, 10:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054/67 "2013-06-17T22:16:21Z")
I’ve been mostly a Mac user at home since 1987 (with an interregnum in the late 90s/early 00s). It used to be because I liked the OS better than DOS/Windows, but in the past 5 years it’s been because I am going blind. Apple has the best out-of-the-box accessibility features for the visually impaired. VoiceOver support is ubiquitous throughout both OSX and iOS (and Apple strongly pushes its developer community to incorporate it in all third-party apps). Even the camera app on the iPhone has VoiceOver support. I can manipulate all the controls with the phone telling me what I’m touching on the screen, and it will also tell me how many faces it detects in the frame and I can find them by touch. Think about that–Apple included support for the visually impaired in a freaking **camera**. Instant toggling between normal and inverse video makes it possible for me to read nearly any text in white-on-black (I am extremely sensitive to large areas of glowing white screen). In iBooks on the iPad, I don’t even have to invert the screen, as they’ve kindly provided white-on-black as an option. I can continuously adjust the size of my cursor (no small/medium/large) so I can make it just the right size to see. I know some Linux distros have similar functionality now (Ubuntu seems to look more Mac-like every time I try it), but Windows still seems to require a lot more 3rd-party tools. At work, I have the only Mac in a Windows development group, just because of the accessibility features. For Windows development, I just run Windows in VirtualBox. For cross-platform stuff like Java, I just use the Mac directly–it’s Unix, so the old days of compatibility problems just don’t apply much anymore. Apple’s products meet my needs better than the competition, and when you do an apples-to-apples comparison on capabilities and build quality, the fabled “Apple tax” just isn’t that big anymore. Not to say there are no annoyances. They’re just far outweighed by the advantages. So I live in the ecosystem and am happy with it. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2013, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054/68 "2013-06-18T01:01:25Z")
> [@RickG](#): > > Even the camera app on the iPhone has VoiceOver support. I can manipulate all the controls with the phone telling me what I’m touching on the screen, and it will also tell me how many faces it detects in the frame and I can find them by touch. Think about that–Apple included support for the visually impaired in a freaking **camera**. Heh. Reminds me of the fake commercial from Saturday Night Live for the camera “so advanced, so simple, even Stevie Wonder can use it.” ---
**Author:** ![RickG](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rickg/32/5174_2.png) [@RickG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickG)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2013, 1:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054/69 "2013-06-18T01:07:36Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#): > > Heh. Reminds me of the fake commercial from Saturday Night Live for the camera “so advanced, so simple, even Stevie Wonder can use it.” I’d completely forgotten about that. Thanks for the reminder. 🆒 ---
**Author:** ![CrazyCatLady](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/dfb087/32.png) [@CrazyCatLady](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CrazyCatLady)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2013, 2:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054/70 "2013-06-18T02:00:22Z")
> [@Suburban\_Plankton](#): > > He wanted a music player. Not a phone or other device that also plays MP3s, but a dedicated music player. There are basically only three of four choices out there these days, and they all start with “Ipod”. Where on earth are you shopping that you think such a thing? Sony, Samsung, Phillips, and RCA all make MP3 players, as well as “off brands” like Coby and Ematic and such. My Walkman (yeah, Sony still calls its music player that) was about a third the price of the comparable iPod. I don’t have any Apple products, and I don’t foresee that I ever will have any, because I just can’t see spending several times the money for no increased functionality, the inability to use standard cords, and an obnoxiously finicky, counter-intuitive control setup. ---
**Author:** ![Mister\_Rik](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mister_rik/32/491_2.png) [@Mister\_Rik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mister_Rik)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2013, 3:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054/71 "2013-06-18T03:22:46Z")
I’m on my fourth Mac. I started with a PowerMac 7200/75 in 1996, then upgraded a couple years later to a used 7600/120, purely because the 7600 allowed me to upgrade the processor (I installed a G3 processor upgrade). Then I upgraded to a PowerMac G4, which lasted me a good seven years. I ended up upgrading pretty much everything - the processor, maxed the RAM, put in a new video card, replaced the factory CD-ROM drive with a CD/DVD SuperDrive. Eventually the hard drive died, and I took the opportunity to upgrade to my current iMac. I used to have a 4GB iPod Nano, but I never used it much, and it was eventually stolen (along with other things) when my storage unit was broken into. I’ve never replaced it. No iPhone (I make and receive _maybe_ 2 phone calls a month, so an old flip-phone is good enough for me), and no iPad - I don’t see the need. But I’ll definitely buy Macs in the future. I just like Mac OS X much better than any flavor of Windows. ---
**Author:** ![stui\_magpie](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/stui_magpie/32/11010_2.png) [@stui\_magpie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/stui_magpie)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2013, 4:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054/72 "2013-06-18T04:35:02Z")
I don’t like Apple stuff, never have. My Computers and Laptop are on Windows and my Phone and Tablet are Android. Unfortunately when I got a new car late last year, it came with a built in ipod connector for the sound system. No other option I could google gave me the choice to plug any other kind of portable MP3 player into it. So I bought a small iPod from the local pawn shop, put music on it and plugged it in. It lives in the centre console of the car, never gets touched and is used when I’m driving somewhere and want some different sounds to the radio or the CDs I have in the car. If I go walking I listen to the music i have on my phone. So yeah, I own one thing that i wouldn’t have if I had another viable option and would only buy another in similar circumstances. ---
**Author:** ![MsWhatsit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/eb8c5e/32.png) [@MsWhatsit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MsWhatsit)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2013, 6:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054/73 "2013-06-18T06:06:25Z")
> [@stui\_magpie](#): > > So I bought a small iPod from the local pawn shop, put music on it and plugged it in. It lives in the centre console of the car, never gets touched and is used when I’m driving somewhere and want some different sounds to the radio or the CDs I have in the car. If I go walking I listen to the music i have on my phone. Smashed or cracked iPods are also very good for this purpose. If you really want to avoid Apple, though, you can get those FM transmitter things to hook up your phone to in the car. The disadvantage is that then you can’t use the on-board controls for the music player, and also some people don’t think the music quality is as good (I don’t have a problem with it, though); the advantage for people who want to avoid Apple, though, is that you can avoid Apple. Or just buy a broken-ass old iPod and leave it in your car permanently. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![stui\_magpie](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/stui_magpie/32/11010_2.png) [@stui\_magpie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/stui_magpie)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2013, 6:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054/74 "2013-06-18T06:15:01Z")
> [@MsWhatsit](#): > > Smashed or cracked iPods are also very good for this purpose. > > If you really want to avoid Apple, though, you can get those FM transmitter things to hook up your phone to in the car. The disadvantage is that then you can’t use the on-board controls for the music player, and also some people don’t think the music quality is as good (I don’t have a problem with it, though); the advantage for people who want to avoid Apple, though, is that you can avoid Apple. > > Or just buy a broken-ass old iPod and leave it in your car permanently. 🙂 I have one of those FM transmitter things somewhere but stopped using it because the sound quality IMO was not as good. And yeah, the cheap ipod I got lives in my car.🙂 ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2013, 9:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054/75 "2013-06-18T09:54:52Z")
> [@Justin\_Bailey](#): > > I think it’s very unusual for a store (especially a corporate store like Apple probably operating in a mall environment) to route calls to an employee’s cell phone. Or even a store cell phone for that matter. There are just some things a land line is better at and when you’re stationed on the same piece of “land” all day, it makes sense to have a land line. There’s a lot of room between what you are suggesting and having an ancient phone. It doesn’t fit Apple’s aesthetic philosophy at all, so it does seem weird. But, even then, Apple is supposed to be pushing the cutting edge. And the cutting edge is not having a landline at all. If the landline is for emergencies, it shouldn’t be a portable at all. ---
**Author:** ![Dave\_Hartwick](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/7feea3/32.png) [@Dave\_Hartwick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dave_Hartwick)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2013, 11:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054/76 "2013-06-18T11:49:08Z")
I’ve never considered buying a Mac because I like games. I know Apple has caught up some but it still doesn’t make sense to me to pay extra for a gimped computer. I’m not big on phones. I have one for work that I leave at home unless I think I’ll need it. My wife has an iPhone, though. I do, however, have an iPod Nano. It was a gift. I’m glad I have it though, as the Samsung it replaced didn’t work with the DRM the library uses, and I get a couple audiobooks a week. It more than makes up for the stupid hassle required with iTunes. The mp3 player itself works fine, but so did the Samsung. I was surprised that nobody mentioned what a jerk Steve Jobs was. Reading his bio put me off the company. It didn’t help that shortly thereafter the news broke about Apple using slave labor. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2013, 4:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054/77 "2013-06-24T04:18:07Z")
In films and TV programs, the ownership of Apple products is 100%. ---
**Author:** ![GuanoLad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guanolad/32/42_2.png) [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2013, 4:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054/78 "2013-06-24T04:21:25Z")
Except for the carefully inserted shots of Windows 8. ---
**Author:** ![Xema](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/9de053/32.png) [@Xema](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Xema)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2013, 5:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054/79 "2013-06-24T05:07:28Z")
Is “58% universal” the answer to the OP’s question? Perhaps it’s “63% universal”? My point is that Apple product ownership is definitely not universal. The right word would be “widespread”. ---
**Author:** ![Tracijo67](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/9fc348/32.png) [@Tracijo67](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tracijo67)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2013, 5:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054/80 "2013-06-24T05:14:04Z")
iPod, iPad, and iPhone here. Doubt that they are superior products, but they are very intuitively easy to use. That is more important to me than price or additional features/options. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-universal-is-ownership-of-apple-products/661054.md?page=5)