Mac users - why do you like so few choices?

In My Humble Opinion
41

A few points.

  1. Choice is a pain in the ass. It takes time and mental effort. All too often, designers who are too lazy or inept to determine the best configuration for their products decide to punt the decision down to their users and pass it off as “choice”.

Look at Apple - they make the iPad in a single size, 10", because after probably years of effort and multiple prototypes at all kinds of different sizes, they determined that 10" worked best. The same kind of thinking drives their other product lines. They spend countless hours determining a “best” configuration, and then devote all their resources to executing it and perfecting it.

Samsung alone has released tablets in about 8 different sizes, as far as I can tell - 6", 8.9", 7", 11", etc. (most of the smaller sizes are because they actually can’t compete with Apple on price - see #3 - but that’s another story). I don’t want to be standing in goddamn Best Buy for two hours, fondling 10 tablets and playing Goldilocks and the three bears (this one is too little, this one is too much, this one is too heavy, etc.) - I want the designer to do that for me, that’s what I’m paying for.

Most companies are afraid to limit the choices they offer to consumers because they’re not confident in their ability to get it right (perhaps justifiably so). Apple has seen the success they’ve had because they’ve been able to consistently get it right, and put huge resources into offering consumers a single choice that actually corresponds to what people want. This is a huge gamble that other companies are not willing to take.

  1. The PC market is filled with so much crap, you have to put a lot of effort in to make sure you’re buying something decent. You don’t have to worry about that with Apple. Rather than read reviews to figure out which of 119 currently-offered Dell laptop models you need, you go to Apple’s website and see three or four options, all of which are clearly differentiated. Same thing for phones, music players, etc.

Most consumer electronics “reviews” these days are written by barely literate contractors who do little more than regurgitate the spec sheets. Their real skill is not technical knowledge, but ability to barf up a review that will be favorably ranked by Google’s search results. Invariably, these reviews are plastered with ads and spread out over 20 pages in order to maximize page views and boost revenue for the site. I really don’t want to have to spend 30 minutes reading that shit when I decide I want to buy a new MP3 player - I just go to the Apple store and buy what they have, because I know Apple’s stuff is consistently good.

Some people treat consumer electronics as a hobby and enjoy obsessing over which device’s features fit their “digital lifestyle” the best, or whatever the fuck. That has zero appeal to me. My life doesn’t revolve around the color of my laptop, or whether it has USB3 or not. And I’m a computer scientist!

  1. Apple’s stuff is actually cheaper because of the lack of choice. If you look around, the MacBook Air is actually priced extremely competitively with similar models from other manufacturers. Last I looked, it was actually cheaper than the competition for almost all configurations, especially $999 for the lowest-end one. As is explained in this wonderful article on Ars Technica, Apple is able to do this because they’ve put an enormous amount of effort into minimizing manufacturing costs by minimizing the number of product variations they have to build (that’s a huge oversimplification, but basically accurate). This is a huge change from the tired old cliche of Apple products being “overpriced” - if you want a thin laptop with a fast processor and decent battery life, the MacBook Airs are the cheapest options on the market.

If you are actually interested in this topic, that article is a fantastic read.

  1. Focus improves quality. Apple is now a huge company, but they still have finite engineering resources. Limiting their efforts to a small set of products improves the quality of what they do produce, even if it results in limited choices for consumers. In most cases, I would rather buy a product that does 75% of the things I want extremely well than something that is merely adequate but can technically do 100% of the things I want.
42

I guess it’s important to remember that when Apple was going broke before Steve Jobs returned they had over 20 different products.

Jobs said:

And I started to ask people, why would I recommend a 3400 over a 4400? Or when should somebody jump up to a 6500, but not a 7300? And after three weeks, I couldn’t figure this out! And I figured if I can’t figure it out working inside Apple with all these experts telling me into it, how are our customers going to figure this out?

He then set out to create four products - pro and consumer desktop and notebook.

Seems to have worked out OK.

43

You’re right, I feel so jilted! What oh what was I thinking?

I have all the same choices you do. I chose a Mac… What’s it to you?

44

Junior wanted a Mac, but dad would only get him a Lenovo. :smiley:

45

I just googled Lenovos. They look like Fisher Price’s My First Computer™ or something.

46

I’m mostly a PC user, but this is hilarious.

47

The Mac has been giving me more and more and more choices the more mature and refined it gets!

In 1987 all I could do was run System 5. The dead guy (¡que en paz descansa!) had no influence over me at the age (and as a Commodore kid, I generally detested Apples until I met the Mac).
In 2011, I can natively run any modern flavor of Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. With emulation, I can run anything that’s ever been popular.

Fundamental question to the OP: what do think “lack of choice” means, especially in context to your question?

Maybe… just maybe your question is “Mac OS X users, why do you like so few choices?” You could have a good point, I must grudgingly admit. Even though I have my own hackintosh (in addition to all of the bona fide Macs), installing it isn’t for everyone. Well, it’s for anyone who can follow instructions, but disappointingly few people can do such.

But if that’s your question, then the “lack of choice” isn’t meaningful yet. The only real danger is if Apple decides to sunset the Mac OS and/or Mac hardware. But if that were to be announced tomorrow, then we’d all have several years of useful machines and support. Hell, look at how long third parties supported Commodore and Amiga once CBM went bust.

48

History lesson.

When the Macintosh was in development, the market leader was Commodore. By the time it made its debut the IBM PC had pretty much taken the lead but there were no clones; no other piece of equipment could run MS-DOS at that time.

At no point did either Apple or IBM or Microsoft do anything directly to make it possible to run either the Macintosh operating system or MS-DOS. The physical characteristics of the IBM PC were essentially hacked and reproduced as “clones” without IBM’s cooperation. Microsoft, of course, was happy to sell more copies of MS-DOS.

Windows had been around but no one noticed until Windows 3.1; that one was a decently good GUI, enough so that it caught on. (Sucked, compared to the Mac System 7, but brought the PC out of the text-centric Hercules monitor, mouseless DOS world). The clones stole market share from IBM. Sure as hell wasn’t their idea.

No one reverse-engineered the Macintosh hardware though. The ROM was too complicated or something.

Was Apple supposed to SHOW other hardware manufacturers how to make Mac clones? They tried that, later on down the line. It didn’t grow the MacOS market share, it just ate into the Apple share of the MacOS market.

You have “choices” only because the IBM hardware model for running MS-DOS was simple enough to hack. And, in the long run, because IBM outsourced their operating system, obtaining it from Microsoft, which had a reason to support different hardware platforms (the NT family does hardware abstraction and could run on different hardware platforms), which was easier precisely because most of those hardware platforms being sold were clones with a common ancestry, the IBM PC.

We don’t have “choices” because the Macintosh hardware that ran the early Macintosh operating sytem was NOT simple enough to hack and because Apple, the manufacturer of both the hardware and the OS that runs on it, had fewer reasons to port the original Macintosh operating system to run on different hardware (NONE of which had a common ancestry with the hardware Macintosh platform; the “different hardware” would have been nearly entirely those above-mentioned IBM PC clones) and then later, with MacOS X (which, like NT, does hardware abstraction) by that time the company’s experience showed that they were better off keeping their OS running only on their own hardware.

Oh, and if there’s some non-Apple hardware that’s just irresistible, you can probably make a Hackintosh out of it. But mostly you can get decent hardware from Apple. They make good machines. It’s a good tradeoff. The OS is really nice.

49

For most microcomputers of the time (Commodore, Atari, Apple etc.), it was given that the operating system was built into ROM. Fixes to the ROM in later generations of machines could royally screw things up. The IBM PC is really the first microcomputer that required a disk-based DOS. Its built in hardware was only a BIOS, which as you said, was easy to reverse engineer. Since the hardware was basically off-the-shelf and IBM didn’t have an exclusive license to MS-DOS, PCs flourished.

Although the Macintosh required a disk-based DOS (“System x” through 7.5 or so, then “Mac OS y” through 10.7 or so), much of the basic Macintosh Toolbox was built into the ROM. While one could argue that you could buy the Mac OS and run it on any machine (Pystar lost that argument relatively recently), there was no way to duplicate the functionality of the built-in toolbox, short of stealing it entirely. Or re-purposing an extant ROM.

Outbound produced some of the first Macintosh clones, and arguably the first Macintosh laptop computers. You needed to provide an existing ROM, though, or pay a premium that included the price of an existing Macintosh to cannibalize.

50

“…so few choices” for me, means having to buy a new computer every eleven years.

Eleven. Count them.

51

They have got choices. They choose amongst all the many computers available, and their choice is the Mac.

How is that not having choices?

52

I’m on my third Mac since I started using computers in 1995: a Power Mac I bought at Office Depot which I replaced with an eMac G4 that I bought so I could use a cable modem instead of dialup, and a black MacBook because I wanted the portability of a laptop. I’m still using it now, and the other two still work. I think a better car analogy would be why people will only buy a certain kind of car like Honda or Toyota. Certainly, there are cheaper cars that have identical features, why do they not buy the cheapest thing out there? If you’re looking at only one or two manufacturers doesn’t that limit your choices?

53

No choices?

Let me pop to the Apple Store and ‘buy’ an iMac.

Models
[ul]
[li]21.5-inch: 2.5GHz[/li][li]21.5-inch: 2.7GHz[/li][li]27-inch: 2.7GHz[/li][li]27-inch: 3.1GHz[/li][/ul]

Okay, I’d like the bigger screen, but I’m not made of money, so I’ll go with the 2.7GHz.

Memory:
[ul]
[li]4GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM[/li][li]8GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM[/li][li]16GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM[/li][/ul]

Hard drive:
[ul]
[li]1TB Serial ATA Drive[/li][li]2TB Serial ATA Drive[/li][li]256GB Solid State Drive[/li][li]1TB Serial ATA Drive + 256GB Solid State Drive[/li][li]2TB Serial ATA Drive + 256GB Solid State Drive[/li][/ul]

So I get to choose my screen size, my processor speed, memory size, hard drive size.

That feels like quite enough choice to me!

54

Y’know, I’m a Windows user, and I don’t get the thrust of the OP either. Using MacOS on Apple hardware ***is ***the outcome of the choice process their users have made, out of ***all ***the universe of choice Win/Linux/Mac/whathaveyou. Do you think the decision to buy Mac did not *include *consideration of the range of equipment available?

As it stands, I am content to be aware with my Win machines that I may have to keep tweaking settings and maybe returning peripherals altogether until I find the set-up that plays nice with what’s already in my system. That is merely a minor inconvenience to me that does not kill the deal. Similarly, Mac users have a very specific range of equipment that runs their system yet that is at worst a minor inconvenience to them that does not kill the deal.

And BTW there’s nothing wrong or cultish with brand loyalty if the brand has served you well. My first choice for anything involving imaging hardware (cameras, photo printers, scanners) is Canon because until today their products have left me happy with their results; why should Apple users not testify to that effect?

55

I’m a Mac user primarily, but I’ve always also had Windows systems, and honestly, I’ve never really had those types of problems with any of my Windows systems. Windows 95, 98, ME, XP, and 7 have all pretty much worked with the type of stuff that I wanted to throw at them.

My complaints have always been limited to usability, lack of a consistent UI, malware, sludge requiring clean installs, dumbing-down, limited metadata, stupid directory and filename limitations (still exist in 7!), change for the sake of change, and so on.

In every respect that matters to me (not necessarily to other people), Mac OS X is superior; that doesn’t mean that Windows is necessarily bad.

56

I will go on record as saying that in my opinion, Windows ME is, in fact, categorically bad. That thing crashed more than it worked.

No complaints about WinXP, though. Or Win7, for that matter.

57

I stuck to XP until both of my PCs completely seized. Mac completely removed everything I hated about computers… well except for maybe fan noise… I find Mac fan noise more irritating (like a jet airliner) than PCs I had. Laptop coolers (Zalman) help somewhat but they are cumbersome and defeats the form factor/portabilty of laptop. Macs are like being in a nice hotel whereas PCs are kinda like being is a hostel: DIY/needing to work for your stay.

58

What I need to run is Unix. There are lots of choices of machines that run various flavors of Unix. The Mac happens to have, in my opinion, the best GUI on top of Unix. I can pretty much compile and run just about any program written for Unix.

In my office I have a Mac, two Linux machines, and a Windows machine. I invariably end up using the Mac for 95% of my work. Apparently I’m missing the limitation.

59

This is part of why I went with a Mac when replacing my IBM PC; I was used to replacing at a minimum of six to eight years per computer after purchasing an IBM employee special (last year’s model with all the bells and whistles). My undergraduate laptop was a six-year-old Thinkpad that had been refurbished by the manufacturer, and lasted me through all of my years of undergraduate work, including a great deal of hardware and software abuse. The one I had after that was also a used Thinkpad, but didn’t last as long due to the leaps and bounds that software requirements made between the time it was manufactured and the time I ended up replacing it-- occasionally one gets a computer that’s not going to last quite as long as you hoped, but it also lasted through five years without giving me any problems until the last couple of months.

Good hardware and durability means that I get more years out of my computer, which makes it more economical in the long run. A $1600 computer that lasts a decade costs me $160/year; if I buy a $300 computer that I have to replace every other year, I’ve saved $10/year, but have increased my aggravation rate substantially.

60

That’s everything to me.

I want to retain as many of my brain cells as I can.