Agreed, Apple ownership is far from universal. 
Part of it would seem to be all the Apple products seen in entertainment, as others have said. Perhaps also there is some confirmation bias at work: I only pay attention to those who do have Apple products.
Interesting stuff.
I won an iPod in a competition.
And I was actually kinda glad when I lost it a few months later…I could replace it with something not crippled by its own firmware/design and awful iTunes (I would’ve felt flash buying a second music player :))
Yes, and I felt neutral about it.
I really like my Mac, as a consumer computer. But despite the Unix shell (which is nice) and some package managers, I eventually grew tired of its silly limitations on software development. I ultimately couldn’t do my research without booting into Linux*, for instance, because OS X only supports up to OpenGL 3.2 (I needed 3.3+), and it looks like this isn’t going to change any time soon. Why? Because Apple is insistent on writing their own OpenGL implementation and they don’t care enough to implement several year old features. The JVM is also a little bit shaky since Apple decided that work on Java is not cool or something. I don’t use Java much anymore (in fact I actively avoid it), but it was obnoxious at the time since I was writing an application that actually ran into implementation differences of the JVM on different platforms (FWIW, the JIT Compiler on Windows has some absolutely stellar loop unrolling).
There’s a lot of that with Apple, like not supporting Flash** on iOS devices. Apple being control freaks can lead to some cool, optimized, and secure stuff. I’m not saying it can’t, but the limitations it can put on what you can do with the OS when you’re a technical person can be annoying.
ETA: Also, my Mac is borked due to my Linux install. If I try to boot into OS X I get an error (something like “waiting on device”). That’s not their fault, but I haven’t gotten it fixed just because I haven’t cared enough.
I loves me my iPod, which means 10,000 songs in my pocket. It’s the only Apple thing I own.
I have an old 40GB original iPod (3g?) and a 64GB iPod Touch 3g. Both were great for what they did, especially their music storage capacity versus other devices of their generation. But iTunes and other artificial limitations have soured me on Apple devices. I’m now on Android and loving it. My Motorola Photon is several generations behind and not as smooth as my iPod Touch, but it’s incredibly customizable and I can freely move files to and from it, in any hierarchy I want. I still leave my iTouch in my car to play music.
Have never owned an Apple product. I don’t think I’ve even even *used *an Apple product, ever.
Not b/c of any hatred. I’m just not a gadget freak (I still use a dumb phone and don’t know an i-tune from an i-pod).
One day, if I want a fancy gizmo and Apple provides a product with price and features that attract me, I’d consider it.
I have itunes on my computer because it seemed like the best way to get podcasts and I buy albums off of it, infrequently, but I’ve never owned an Apple computer or other electronic device. I used to use them in college sometimes and, to be honest, my years of experience with PCs often made me quite frustrated because I couldn’t always get the Mac to do what I knew I could do on PCs, with one exception: Preview’s ability to manipulate PDFs seems to me to be extremely intuitive and user-friendly.
Also, every single friend I had in college who had an apple laptop experienced extreme, sometimes paperweighting issues with their laptop while my dell laptop hung on for about 6ish years with some hiccups (I once had to restore to factory settings and since I almost never back things up, meant I lost everything I ever wrote for my first two years of college) before final suffering a fatal power supply/mb issue last summer. It makes me gunshy about dropping a grand on a laptop.
This is the exact opposite of the experience I had with my Dell laptop (essentially turned into a brick after about 2.5 years, and experienced severe overheating and charging issues for the last 1.5 of those) and my MacBook Pro (had it 3 years now, no problems, still runs great).
Maybe just luck, or maybe things have just changed since you were in college. Like I said before, I’m not a zealot about this and I’m not trying to “convert” anyone (ugh). But based on my personal experience, I’m happy with Apple hardware and even if I wanted to buy another PC laptop again, it sure as hell wouldn’t be a Dell.
I have an iPod Touch that I’ve used daily since I got it. Great device for my needs. Last year I received an iPad as a gift. I thought from the shape that it was a calender, and didn’t bother opening it till later that day. There was no manual, but it was so intuitive that I was comfortable using it in no time.
I love the Apple products I’ve owned.
Maybe. I was in college from '07 to '11, though so I don’t know how much things have changed in 2 years.
One of my friends had a toshiba that lasted her all through college. She and her brother bought the same model laptop in the same order online. His died 6 months later. Computers is weird and you just never know what will kill it and what won’t.
Wrong thread. Try this one.
maybe it’s because you both are going on single-digit sample sizes.
just sayin’…
But then hardly any mobile device does support Flash that I’m aware of. In my last upgrade I went from single core ARMv6 processor to dual core ARMv7 ones (and twice the MHz to boot)–and I still can’t run Flash. Yet strangely, the GSMArena website says that both phones can run Flash. Maybe that was once true for these phones, but Adobe has since updated itself out of reach.
Having said that, though, lacking Flash support seems to be much less of an issue than it used to be.
My friend got an early ipod & killed the battery from usage. He was w/o an Mp3 player for a week or two while he sent it back & then sent him a new one. He did this again after some time with the new one. Nope, batteries wear out over time; won’t hold a charge as long. I won’t buy any product where I can’t buy/swap out a simple replacement part.
As for MP3 players, I like Sansa. They are small, lightweight, have a built-in clip & more features (FM, voice recorder) than the i-music players (at least the last time I looked a few years ago) for a fraction of the cost. Battery lasts about 15 hrs on a single charge & you can only go thru a fraction of the songs on it in that time.
Own no Apple products, never have. Not due to some kind of religious schism or anything, but while I love gadgets I really don’t have a need for many mobile devices, as I work from home, so I only have a medium-smartish phone and no MP3 player. When I am outside of the house I like to, y’know, experience the outside and not be hooked up to a nipple the whole time. (But that’s not an Apple thing, that’s smartphones in general whether it’s an iPhone or an Android device. I hate walking around NYC, one of the best cities anywhere for people watching or window shopping, and 60% of everyone is staring down at their phones. I feel like Wesley Crusher when he returned to the Enterprise in ST:TNG and found most of the crew had become addicted to a game you wore as a headset… oh God I can’t continue, I am such a nerd.)
ANYway, the funny thing is I’m in an industry–writing–where it feels as if everyone else I know owns a Macbook. I have tried them, I just think I prefer desktops, and if I’m going with a desktop I prefer the Windows environment. I’ve grown used to having access to the innards; it’s taught me a lot about how the system works. Really I’ve only had one PC that was a dud in the nearly 30 years I’ve owned computers.
Also, I like playing games, and I mean proper videogames, not casual mobile stuff, so I’ve been better off with Windows (though thanks in large part to Valve and Steam, Macs are getting some better coverage).
So. Among my family and friends, Mac/Apple ownership is about 99%. I think I’m the only one with a Windows PC and no iPhone, iPad or iPod.
Hey! There’s no call for bringing facts into it!
I have a Sansa MP3 player, a PC and a flip phone. But, my ipad Mini is like my third arm. I use it constantly and love it.
What happens when the battery in an Apple product does wear out? Will Apple replace it, or swap the device for you, at no cost?
BTW I’ve been leafing through a 1981 issue of Scientific American, and as we’re talking about about Apple perhaps this will be of interest:
I will always have a bad taste in my mouth because I went to college in the mid-90s, using many campus computer labs and later managing a facility that contained a small lab. The Apple machines in those labs suuuuuucked. It was the dark just before Apple’s dawn, but it was enough that to this day every time I work on an Apple computer I’m shocked when it doesn’t freeze up and inform me that an error of type 7 has occurred.
That said, I’ve owned exactly one Apple product, a 160GB iPod, and it was probably the best electronic device I’ve ever owned. And I considered a Macbook Pro when I had a chance to get one for about half the retail price, but the deal fell through and I ended up sticking with a PC. It’s possible I’d end up feeling the same way about the Macbook as I felt about the iPod, but I’m not paying that sort of premium to find out.
