Apple sucks (in one FAQ)
I hate the Apple thing. It’s a “cultural problem.” More specifically, the turtlenecked, Steve Jobs, thumb-up-the-ass, liberal-with-too-much-money “cultural problem.”
The ramifications? Well, ridiculously expensive hardware, for one. A CEO cast in the image of L. Ron Hubbard. A collective arrogance among Apple owners that “we know better,” quite similar in fact to the tilting-at-windmills of Bose WaveRadio™ owners (ha!). And maybe the worst? The worst? The advertising.
But here’s a piece of arrogance that’s indisputable. It doesn’t even take a rant from me to point it out. The assclowns at Apple do a good job of it themselves. From ArsTechnica: Apple’s disingenuous ratings system confuses, amuses. A snippet:
People who shop online are undoubtedly familiar with “user reviews” of products showing up on websites. … But when you look at any of the products that Apple sells, you’ll see something different: no reviewer comments are allowed, and the product is rated 5 out of 5 “Apples.” Normally ratings will range from 0 to 5 stars. So what gives? Apple has this to say in their FAQ.
What is the Apple rating?
We give all Apple products a rating of “5 Apples” because we think they’re great.Earlier today it also read, “Why can’t customers rate Apple products? Would you trust us to display less-than-perfect ratings on our own products? We didn’t think so.”
Here’s a nice analogy. You go a grocery store and buy the generic, store-brand corn flakes. Once home, you find they’re stale and taste awful. You take them back to the manager and demand a refund. “Sorry,” he replies. “We don’t allow complaints about our brand of cereal. We think it’s great.”
Then they wised up and removed the ratings for their own products. Fine. Great. Did it really take a collective outcry of blogosphere common sense for Apple to change their ratings and FAQ from:
- “Would you trust us to display less-than-perfect ratings on our own products?” to
- “We give all Apple products a rating of ‘5 Apples’ because we think they’re great.” to
- no ratings at all?
WTF?
You know what I think is great, Apple? That even with all the fucking hype you get on blogs (like this one!), you’re still only 3% of the market. Put that in your iMac and smoke it, (Hand)Jobs.
March 12th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Oh come on! If Apple products were obviously bad and the company so obviously crappy, then they wouldn’t be gaining marketshare each quarter, slowly and surely (btw, it’s not 3% anymore, folks). iTunes wouldn’t be the #2 music seller (soon to be #1), and you’d have nothing to blog about.
March 14th, 2008 at 12:33 am
Oh, I’m not disputing that Apple makes some great products (and some screwups, too). And they may well gain more market share. It’s just that having worked here for a while, I have to say it’s the only job I’ve ever had that I really have not liked. You get politics everywhere, but in my opinion the lack of straightforwardness and the turf wars and backstabbing are worse here than anywhere else I’ve seen. And there’s much more of an attitude that Apple is some sort of Nirvana, so employees should be grateful to work here and not care about vulgar stuff like good compensation (fine, Steve Jobs looks so cool in his black turtle neck, but I’ve still got to put my kids thru college). Put it this way: I wouldn’t really recommend coming here to a friend. And I know I’m not the only one with these kinds of experiences around here. Will that hurt Apple’s bottom line? Certainly not in the current employment market. In a more competitive market for employers, maybe yes, b/c they do need to attract and retain good people.
March 14th, 2008 at 11:47 am
One P.S., to be fair. Apple does have a lot of bright and good people working for it, but some aspects of management that in my opinion don’t serve employees or perhaps the company very well in the long term.
March 14th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
I like Apple products to some extent (certainly more than PCs), but the original blog is correct in regards to the “we’re better and smarter than everyone else” attitude of Apple and it’s loyal customers. It’s like Starbucks… they make awesome coffee, but the associated attitude/atmosphere in your local Starbuck’s is something I avoid like the plague. It leaves me buying my Starbucks coffee online.
I honestly believe that if Apple would can the snooty, condescending attitude, and bring their prices down to Earth, they might just find themselves having a lot more market share than what they currently have. But as it is, they turn off a lot of potential buyers from an emotional standpoint; as well as a financial one.
March 20th, 2008 at 2:25 am
Dude, get a clue. Yes there are many thing about working at Apple I don’t like. But the compensation is not one of them. Salary plus options has put me higher than anything else in my 28 years in the industry. That said the level of secrecy sucks. I am senior and I can’t even know all about all the software and plans that affect my own design decisions? That is a waste of energy, talent and innovation. And on design mostly Apple doesn’t do any except seat of the pants over coffee when it comes to much of its hardware. No docs, no reviews except for public APIs. A major rev of the OS is hell. It isn’t built in layers. Everything is in flux simultaneously including dev tools! All engineers live on the raw next great thing (or not). We eat a lot of dog food so we don’t hire QA. As long as it eventually works everyone blesses the same broken process. How many creative mind get burned out banging on this landslide of in flux crap? How much productivity is wiped out year after year?
March 20th, 2008 at 2:26 am
oops. make that software not hardware in the above. I can speak for hardware side.
March 22nd, 2008 at 9:34 am
Getting downloads of Epson software that means that the printer will not work, then getting the right software, then getting software to make sure it cannot use generic cartridges and prints 3 pages instead of one, then getting new software with the fifth line italicized. Epson software for apple sucks.
March 25th, 2008 at 9:57 am
No, we hated Apple from time to time (Score:3, Insightful)
by postbigbang (761081) on Tuesday March 25, @09:56AM (#22856526)
Crappy, closed-technology machines. The cult of the single-button mouse. Reseller programs from hell. Lovely laser printers that became ultimately useless. Two wire AppleTalk networks with all of the speed of ISDN on a good day. Cute little useless Newtons. Servers that could never rise above simple workgroup needs. Special connections and exceptions needed to network with anything else but perhaps NFS or wicked Novell patches. Wonderful and proprietary (given few others used them) PPC CPUs. I’m sure others can count the way. Others can see the bloom on the rose, and I still have marks from the thorns. Oddly, I still use a PowerBook G4, alongside a heavy-duty (and less expensive) HP core-duo notebook. Only for games, of course….
March 31st, 2008 at 2:04 pm
All political correctness and such aside…Apple sucks. Apple users suck. Every encounter I have ever had with these zealots has me pulling my hair out. They are almost as bad as the Linux and Open Source zealots. Every Apple user that tries to make up reasons why their Macs are so great can’t seem to do anything more then rehash Apple’s own marketing drivel. They say shit like “it just works”. Apple does nothing but lie to their customers because they know what the rest of us who didnt waste our money on their crap knows, People who buy Macs dont know shit about computers. Apple doesnt want you to know anything about your machine. They want you to believe its ok to be uninformed. They just want your money. They dont give a shit about you. I keep hearing all this shit about innovation. I hate that word. Every company seems to have their own definition. Tell me, What’s so innovative about an iPod? Let’s see…..its a Harddrive in a stylish box with firmware attached that can play audio and video. Where’s the innovation there? How about Mac OsX? Its a posix compliant unix clone with proprietary software added. Hell….the only thing that made Macs unique in the past was the platform. Using the motorola series of cpu’s (remember though….that only made it unique after all the other computer companies (commodore, atari, amiga, ect.ect.ect.) that used this platform went belly up. So what is a Mac? It’s a PC. you are paying x amount more money for standard (or should I say sub-standard) hardware. How is it a PC? well….it uses and Intel CPU…connected to an Intel chipset…..that is based on the x86 code base….with your choice of outdated ATI/nVidia video…ect.ect. What makes the Mac unique now isnt its hardware….it isnt what it can do but what it CANT do. Which is run Windows natively without a hack even though Windows is designed up and down for x86 cpus. Why? Because Steve put a drm like chip in your over priced PC that moshes it all up. Why cant I run MAC OSX on my PC without a hack if its so great? Same reason. What about the enthusiasts? Can you go to newegg.com or some other place and buy MAC parts? Can you custom build me a MAC? Oh, so your mac has a pretty case and all. Are you overlooking the fact that with a PC I have an endless choice of cases provided by third parties that covers every facet of computer case aesthetic wankerdom? Do you know what a “third Party” is? How about upgrading your MAC? Say you wanna overclock your CPU…can you get a MAC motherboard?
Oh..I know I know…you bought a MAC because you dont care about all that stuff…you want something that “just works”. So in about 2 years when you are forced to buy and entirely new MAC and I spend maybe 1/8th of that on a few pop in cards/chips/ect. to get my PC back on the modern track Maybe we can all be friends and play Crysis online together. Oh wait…MAC’s cant play Crysis….or HL2…or any game that is actually cool for that matter.
April 30th, 2008 at 6:37 am
Apple sucks. Apple has always sucked. Apple will always suck.
The fact is that Mac OS is good; it’s far more stable than Windows and far more user-friendly than the average Linux distro (though the margin is getting smaller). Also, Apple is good at innovating.
But Apple is also good at demanding exorbitant amounts of cash in what is always a case of style over substance once rival products hit the market.
Well, at least Apple has finally started releasing some affordable notebooks but they better, now that they can’t even claim they’re running on better hardware.
In the end, I pity the misguided hipsters that are willing to pay top dollar for a shiny case with glowing Mac logo. One mouse button indeed.