Lauren the Ghoti says:

#19 – Named

“He’s blinded to the fact that Apple sources the same parts from the same manufacturers.”

Blinded to Jack Shit is more like it. Unlike you, I’ve enough firsthand experience in electronics design, manufacturing and test – for starters – to know something you obviously don’t: computers are far from the only manufactured goods that are made of components and subassemblies from companies that produce the same items for their competitors. Big fucking duh.

When a company orders up those components, modules, subassemblies, & cetera, they can also pay more and have more stringent testing performed. You get the level of QA that you pay for. And that, dickweed, means that box A, made from the same parts as box B, is more reliable – and costs more.

Christ, but you’re dim.

Olo Baggins of Bywater says:

31…Macs use the same drives as PCs. Same CD drives, with the same little hole in the front. Except, the drive hides behind a nice shiny door.

BTW, the normal way to eject is to drop the CD icon on the trash bin. No, I’m not kidding. Maybe they added a right-click ‘eject’ option recently.

Macs are just as infuriating to operate as Windows. Power users on both systems get their jobs done well, and newbies struggle with basic tasks no matter which platform they’re using. Neither one is the least bit intuitive.

Angel H. Wong says:

#37 Named,

In regards to your link:

“Palmrest discoloration

MacBook users report the rapid discoloration of surface plastics, particularly in the regions of the wrist pads and areas that recieve a lot of touch. Discoloration has been reported to appear as yellows, pinks, and grays.”

That’s because sweaty, hairy hands and pancake makeup don’t mix.

Lauren the Ghoti says:

#41 – SN

The quirk you speak of is just that – a quirk. In point of fact, it dates from the very first Mac of 1984, and if I’m not mistaken, the Mac inherited it from the Lisa.

Anyway, it remains one of those “that’s the way it’s always been done” thingies, just like mousing down during startup. It wasn’t the perfect or elegant solution at the time, but since millions of users came to expect it (and, to be completely honest, it takes exactly once to learn it, and that’s the end of it…), it’s simply become a traditional idiosyncracy. But it is very much an isolated exception.

But when you attempt to equivocate ease-of-use between the two platforms, the last 22+ years have narrowed the gap and brought the Windows learning curve toward that of the Mac, but they never were, and still are not, on a par in user friendliness. Virtually all 3rd-party research into the issue has always given the edge to the Mac.

It should hardly be surprising or difficult to believe, since, among other factors, the most of the pioneers in UI research, Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, and many, many others, had a hand in the development of the Mac GUI. Add to that the fact that, after years of miserable failures (i.e., Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3.0) to copy the Mac, MS finally “succeeded” with 3.1, which was still a sad imitation, all will admit…

And MS tried, over and over, to copy many Mac GUI features but were stopped in court, time and time again, so they had to jigger all kinds of stuff – and reduce its intuitiveness – to avoid running afoul of the innumerable court rulings supporting Apple. Things like moving the close box to the opposite side of the window, attaching menus to the program window instead of the main screen… the list is endless.

And then the other factor of enforced uniformity; PC programmers could, and did, stick together any old thing they wanted to, good or bad, and the user had to relearn the behavior and even the meaning of the buttons, icons, scrolling, &c, &c, for each new program. OTOH, the Mac enforced (to the chagrin of the infamous nerds who could whip up fast & ingenious code, but sneered at the typical user’s lack of technical knowledge) a uniformity across apps. The first menu, File operations. The second, Edit: Cut/Copy/Paste/Clear.

Most present-day users are too young or too new to computers to remember how you could be running a PC app and be unable to find how to simply save what you were working on, because someone buried it in a totally insane place, where no one but a hardcore programmer would ever think to look for it. Every app on a Mac was the same, when it came to the most common and necessary commands.

We all take so much for granted on Windows that it’s easy – but wrong – to think it was always that way. It wasn’t. And as the Mac had the usability edge from the beginning, it still does. The gap has narrowed – because of Win becoming more Mac-like, not vice versa – but it ain’t gone yet.

Anyway, one was invented by naïve, idealistic hippies to empower people, and because it was cool, i.e. the Apple II. Then a bunch of uncreative, bean-counting, copycat suits came along and tried to take over, make the buyers dependent on them (to ensure a continuing flow of $, an IBM tradition) and pass the whole enterprise off as their own creation. That set the stage for the clash between loyalty to the original humanistic philosophy behind the Mac and the undiscriminating, shortsighted ‘pragmatist’ attitude of exploiting the masses – the philosophy of IBM and MS, that remains to this day.

Wouldn’t you think that maybe a few million, even 10 or 20 million, say, of the hundreds of millions of dollars that MS has earmarked for advertising – would maybe be better spent hiring some programmers – some American programmers – to hunt down and exterminate some of the more egregious bugs in Vista??

If that doesn’t indicate where their true priorities lie, then nothing does.

But – the tide turned on Bush, as it had to eventually. So has the tide turned on MS… whose stock has declined since the day they launched Vista. And I’ll tactfully refrain from mentioning any companies whose stock – and sales – and rep – continue to rise, unabated, particularly any companies based in Cupertino.

After all, there’s really no difference, is there? 🙂

Angel H. Wong says:

#44

And don’t forget that if it weren’t for competition from win95, mac users would still be using a glorified Super Nintendo :3

And now that Vista runs faster on Macs (thanks to bootcamp) than OSX and that the Hardware difference is nil. I’m sure Apple will have to make their next OS something really, REALLY good otherwise no one will bother for it.

Named says:

42,

Nope. No difference at all. Except for your zeal for a corporation.

What was the rest of your meandering crap about anyway?

GregA says:

Profile of a macintosh user.

http://tinyurl.com/2bmm87

The message is clear. Use a macintosh computer, wind up homeless.

None says:

You know what, I’m so sick of this bullshit from both sides. Guess what folks, you’re ALL idiots. Apple fanboys AND the Apple bashers. Look at all the time and energy you’ve wasted today in this utter nonsense. It’s all just drivel.

Get a fricken life won’t you? They’re computers people. No one cares what you all think and you’re choice of computing platform doesn’t define you as a person.

Jesus Christ…get over yourselves and just STFU.

Mike Davis says:

According to the original article this incident takes place in Mongolia, not in the U.S. where one might expect to find an insolent, rebellious, materialistic teenagers such as this one. This either shows that people are basically the same, no matter where one goes in the world; or that the U.S. is now better at exporting it’s culture rather than goods.

It is apropos that the father brought up the fact that when he was his son’s age they had only one black and white TV, not for himself, but for the whole village. Perhaps this is really where this problem first started.