I'm generally pretty white using the measures thought up by Christian Lander. After all, I'm suppose to love Apple products.
But today I've crossed the line and gone from not being a fan of Apple to actively disliking them as a company. Whats driven this? Well lets start with why I've never been excited by them in the first place. iPods, and more specifically iTunes. To be honest iTunes sucks - it is possibly one of the worst pieces of software I have ever used. As a music fan and photographer I've used dozens of different cataloging systems for music and images (frankly the issues are pretty much the same, locate the files, name them, group and grade them etc). And iTunes is the worst I've even had despoil my computer.
Everything is just so hard. Finding your files on the computer is hard, moving them is hard, editing them is hard (no I dont mean mucking with the music, just changing metadata like genre), its all a huge pain in the arse.
Which brings me to iPods. To start with they look cool, no denying that, but as a music player they are pretty average. Their sound quality is so so, their screens are pretty average and they certainly arent cheap. The user interface is an interesting one, some users absolutely love it, others arent so sure. I swing back and forth on this issue. When the iPod is out of its cover I'm a fan, but once you're exercising and that fancy little pressure sensitive disk is behind its protective screen it really really sucks.
So between iTunes and the iPod I was disposed to be deeply ambivalent towards Apple. Add the immense hype around the company and its aura of coolness and to be honest, ambivalence was always just a small step from mild antipathy.
But hypocrisy really pisses me off. Not to mention market manipulation designed to steal my money.
This brings us to the MacBook. Now I quite like these products. The Operating System is pretty cool, they are easy to use, secure and these days have decent third party software support. When recently considering a switch across from PC to Apple I was really close to jumping.
But.
MacBooks are by any measure massively overpriced duds. Lets look at the basic model, the simple 13inch MacBook. Right now Apple will sell you one of these for near enough to $1600 Australian. Now, lets be fair and guess that the OS isnt free, but then again looking at the overall pack price of the desktops (which arent bad value btw) it isnt that pricey so lets assume that the OS "costs" - say - $200.
So that means Apple wants me to pay $1400 Australian for a 13 inch laptop with a 2.13 GHz processor, 2 Gb ram, a tiny 160 Gb hard drive and an Nivedia 9400 M graphics card.
What a rip off.
But worse, this plucky little battler of company, out to help the little guy, the friendly company not like those bastards at Microsoft then take legal action to make sure I cant avoid being ripped off.
Where is the Mac clone. If I can buy a 13 inch HP with better processors, more memory, better graphics, bigger drive etc for less than half the price of the Mac that will run Vista or 7 why cant I buy one to run Snow Leopard.
Because Apple sucks and Steve Jobs is an arsehole - thats why.
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