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r/Apple is legit?
I am a constant lurker in the Apple subreddit but I always wondered if people defend the company so much because they really are rabid fans or are they shills?
Don't get me wrong, I know that some people there can be really critical of Apple but it is still surprising to me the attitude of some of its users.
Some educational context: I have a deep understanding of tech. I hold a ChemE degree, with concentrations in Biomolecular Engineering and Nanoscale sensor design. I also have a Masters in BioE, and an MD. I'm an autodidact in Electrical Engineering (self taught to the point where I hold 2 patents in low noise circuit design). I design/engineer/build medical devices for a living. To me, Apple is a really interesting company.
Why do I bring up my background? In the medical devices world we talk a lot more about the implementation because it really matters when you're using something for diagnosis. We don't care that a heart monitor can monitor "up to 300 beats per minute" and there isn't a spec war like there is on the PC hardware / Android side. It's "is this thing accurate, and insanely reliable? Is it sensitive and specific enough to diagnose a condition before someone cuts a person open?
Furthermore, we also have to extract extreme performance and accuracy out of hardware -- far more than can be done through hardware alone. Therefore, you have to have excellent software, and software does matter when extracting performance from hardware. Apple does something similar.
The biggest lesson my industry has taught me is that Specs are only effective at describing a thing if you know what you're measuring and why
On the surface, or especially if you look purely at specifications, Apple does not seem to offer a good value. But if you look at the implementation of the technology it's very very well done. So specs alone don't tell the whole story. But you have tons of reviewers who only review something by Spec sheet / Dollar you pay. Look at most of Tech Youtube.
However, like in my industry, Apple's Implementation of tech is amazing. The amount of performance they extract out of their custom SoC is nothing short of incredible. Their implementations are extremely thoughtful - MacOS has properly supported HiDPI displays since 2012. Windows 10 still struggles in this regard. MacOS has proper color support (DCI P3, and Adobe sRGB color management is baked into the OS). In fact, both of these features are also baked into the iPhone, iPad, and even the freaking watch... Apple extracts so much performance that the latest iPhones only need 4GB of ram, and they run circles around Android devices with 8+ GB of ram. Their ULV Core m notebook with integrated graphics is capable of smoothly editing 4K video (if you use final cut) because of how well apple optimized their software. The iPad pro is capable of editing 4K video with LUTs and color correction... and it has a fanless arm chip. If you know what kind of power these workloads take on a PC, that should blow your mind. Anyways... I digress.
The Apple user base is divided into several camps:
Most of /r/Apple falls into the last 2 categories (and really most of the internet) -- there are few Tech experts on reddit. There are few Apple Experts on reddit. Reddit as a whole has demographics that lean towards "tech literate" and they often clash with the apple fanboys... This is what leads to /r/Apple being so damn toxic at times.
Edit: minor tweaks, grammer fixes, spelling.
The problem with Apple for me, (and this is by no means a problem with Apple alone, it's endemic to the tech industry as a whole) is that they are just so anti customer with so many of their decisions. None of their devices have user replaceable batteries. None of them are designed to be user repairable, even for the most absolutely basic maintenance tasks (cleaning fans even).
Everything they make is designed to work well with apple devices and only apple devices, which means once you buy a single device of theirs, if you want other devices to work well with them, those other devices will most likely be apple devices.
I realize that Samsung, LG, Microsoft, and Google all do the exact same thing to varying degrees, however, Apple is the only one out of all of them that will have people regularly defend them for it. This is so evident on reddit.
On the Android subreddit, if someone complains about the Pixel not having a removable battery, most people will agree and say it's a shitty decision and they wish Google was more customer friendly.
On the Apple subreddit, I made the comment that Airpods weren't a particularly great value for me, because they're 160 dollars, and come with embedded non replaceable Li-ion batteries, essentially giving them a hard lifespan of two years. They're 160 dollar disposable headphones. The top responses were just people saying "What are you, poor?" and "160 dollars isn't that much for headphones, you can spend 1000 dollars on headphones".
It's not just the anti customer policies that bothers me, it's that, coupled with a free labor force of internet relationship managers in the form of zealots with too much brand loyalty.
The fanboys won't criticize them for this kind of thing, but there are those of us who have criticized them--vituperatively--in this very thread. Expand all the comments and search for "keyboard" and "cable" and "Mac Pro", for example, and you'll see a few of mine. Knowing something really well--while avoiding being a fanboy--gives you a really good perspective from which to criticize. I will absolutely agree that there are a lot of fanboys, just like for everything, but there are also those of us who are absolutely exasperated about some of Apple's decisions. I even commented about the soldered-on RAM and storage. We do exist, we're just not as loud as the fanboys. ;)
Same here! I think we both fall into the "Apple expert" category another user documented here: we're judging how well Apple realises its vision through its products & services. This is probably the best place to be as a fan, because it allows you to stay highly critical when Apple make missteps, but also gives you those brief moments of joy, when something just works, and you sit back and say, "woah, they nailed this".
On the keyboard topic: I've already had to take my MBP2018 for a stuck 'e' key once already, and it's less than six months old. Not a fun experience. What's worse is that I actually do really like the travel with the newer post-2016 keyboards—now obviously that's a personal opinion, but it's just a shame the keyboard actuation mechanism is prone to failures from molecular-sized bits of dust; which is unacceptable in a professional product.
Absolutely agree; I have the 2016 MBPr and have the same issue with my
nkey and a rotating selection of others--I just don't want to bring it in and be without a laptop for a few days until I have a break.The typing on it is just so much more satisfying than any other laptop I've used, and the design is beautiful.
And this is by design.
Apple's whole point is to have an Appliance-like feel to their devices. Think of your stove or microwave. Neither is designed to be user serviceable... That's the feel apple is going for. It's deliberate. I don't like it, but I appreciate the foolproof design. -- You can't put in batteries wrong, or have a loose ram stick in shipping if the batteries are glued in and the ram is soldered to the board. - This is also why their switch to nothing but USB-C on their laptops makes so much sense. You can't plug it in wrong if it's one reversible port that does everything, haha. (unless, ironically, you shove a lightning cable in there)
To be very clear, I'm not defending them. I'm explaining that this is a conscious decision made by apple to achieve a goal of simplifying the device (most say that this is "too far" in terms of simplification)
We can thank all the rabid apple fanboys for this one :/ However, yes, it absolutely transfers cost to the customer. As with any decision, there are pros and cons. I highlighted the pros above, but the cons are exactly as you stated: Apple has you by the balls for battery replacement, and they have you by the balls for RAM prices... you pay more and you cannot upgrade anything yourself.
That's absolutely mental! o_O
Agreed. /r/Apple is a cesspool and I simply stopped going there except for the occasional post. 90% of my attempts at detailed discussion will either anger someone and devolve into bickering.
To me... I use Apple devices because I need stability, and I hate having to troubleshoot things in my downtime -- that is, at home it all just works together, and thats really nice. I do want my devices at home to be "appliance-like" in nature. And I consciously pay a bit more for that. For tinkering, I do have a PC that I run windows 10 and Linux (elementaryOS) on.
Apple is still much more consumer friendly in two areas that no other (major) manufacturer even comes close in. I'm mostly talking about their phones, since I've never been a fan of their overpriced laptops and other computers.
1: User Privacy. Apple's primary business model is selling you overpriced hardware and software with a fat profit margin, whereas Google gives you cheap or free software in exchange for peeking into your private life for the purpose of pushing targeted ads. Apple has taken an increasingly hostile stance towards apps and services that pose a privacy risk to Apple customers. Their default messaging solution (iMessage) uses end-to-end encryption, and they have made it clear in court that they are unwilling to compromise the security of their devices at the behest of law enforcement. For me at least, the Apple tax is worth evading Google's prying eyes.
2: Device longevity. Barring the need for battery replacements every few years, iPhones dramatically outlast competing premium smartphones by a wide margin. Apple's investment in in-house silicon and continued software updates mean a 5 year old iPhone is still a perfectly viable smartphone. Even Google's premium first party devices don't get that kind of support. My little sister in college replaced her two year old Galaxy Note with my four year old iPhone 6 because it actually runs better after all these years, and still gets security and feature updates.
This is such a lovely response. I'd like to emphasize a few points. But first...
I see what you did there.
I'd argue that the folks at Macstories (which is more than just about the Mac), including Federico, are definitely in this category as well. I see a lot of criticism of Apple from Macstories which is why I keep reading them. I would be put off if there wasn't any criticism (as with r/apple as you've described). Some of the larger publications are sometimes in this category, but they tend to be about as reserved in actual criticism as the major gaming "journalism" sites.
I would argue that this is most people. It pretty much has to be, because of how the Bell curve works. I think most folks could be just fine with a Mac mini or MacBook (modulo the awful keyboards that have seen some mention in this thread). Note that if you're reading this, you are not most people. This is a very important point that a lot of folks in tech discussions don't realize. They think that most folks are like them, but that's not the case. That you're on a text-oriented discussion site that's in private alpha means that you care more than the average user on Facebook. Even being on tech subreddits means you're an outlier.
This is so, so true. Speaking as someone who's needed to use those accessibility features, they are top-notch and far beyond anything available on other platforms. Reduce White Point has made it possible for me to comfortably use my devices far more than anything any other platform can offer. And it's so easy to enable and toggle.
Developers, designers, and writers also love the crisp text! This is absolutely anecdotal, but my first memory of my first experience of sitting in front of a Mac was just how beautiful the text is, and this was years before retina displays. It's not just the Unix CLI, it's the beauty of the text in the terminal too.
From the poweruser point of view, one of the big ones is 64 bit support. As usual, Microsoft lagged far behind everyone else (especially open source Unix, but also Apple) in this regard. Sure, they released a 64 bit version of XP Pro, but it was unstable and prone to crashes / driver compatibility issues. It wasn't until, what, Win7, that 64 bit Windows was a viable option? Meanwhile Apple had 64 bit versions of Mac OS X (as it was still called at the time) for PowerPC before even making the Intel change.
I don't quite think it's misinformed, but rather simply uninformed. A lot of Windows / Android users don't seem to know the joy of being able to use the same app on every device they have, of being able to have a consistent interface across all / most of their everyday applications with consistent keybindings, of being able to configure their phone to switch from their wireless headphones to their wireless speakers with a few taps with little interruption in what's playing, etc. Windows 8 was an honest attempt at it, but MS doesn't have the expertise to execute on it (nor the hardware ecosystem to really make it worthwhile). If it wasn't Windows, I'd've been interested. I always have loved hardware + software marriages; Sun will always have a place in my heart.
Furthermore, when you only consider a single computing environment where everything else is equal, what else are you going to use to compare systems, if not specs? One Windows box is just like every other (especially with how updates work these days); they only differ by specs. When you bring that kind of mental model of comparison to a different ecosystem of products, of course it's going to break down. But this goes back to my "uninformed" point, and goes back to the beginning of your lovely comment. What matters is the implementation, it's the software. What keeps me using Apple isn't the hardware (I could get much more capable hardware, much cheaper, delivered more quickly). It's the experience.
Most of the internet as a whole has demographics that lean towards tech literate. Most places you go that are at all informed about tech but aren't dedicated to Apple tend to be very hateful of Apple largely due to being uninformed (e.g. they criticize Apple for their manufacturing practices without knowing that their precious Android phone is manufactured often in the same buildings by the same people). This is especially true of any kind of gaming community, even though you absolutely can play a lot of games these days on a Mac without issue. Will you get the same performance as your dedicated gaming machine? Of course not, and it's foolish to expect that.
edit: grammar
;)
You're right. I totally forgot that Federico is part of Macstories. In my head Macstories, and the 'voices' on ATP are different. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I agree. And most of them aren't online, or on reddit. They're out in the real world and perfectly happy with their appliance-like apple products. And they're also the ammunition that "tech literate" folk throw around when they call all apple users "sheep" in a really condescending fashion. Apple is popular because they put the needs of the regular user ahead of the needs of tech literate folk. They are also despised and derided by tech literates for this.
It's that beautiful sub-pixel antialiasing on text, system wide. Recently it's been changed to greyscale AA, but with retina displays, it doesn't make a noticeable difference.
Yup. totally forgot this, but you're absolutely bang-on. Another (and one of my personal use cases) is how easily the mac command line interfaces with a compute cluster running linux. The fact that I can drag/drop files into terminal for cloud computing... is the dream. CLI combined with Drag/drop makes is witchcraft, and it comes standard :)
Also the terminal customization options image for anyone who's curious are so far beyond anything on Windows... click that and bask in the glory of options. that is a professional command line.
In this context, I meant misinformed about software/hardware features in macOS and iOS. One recent example was Linus Tech Tips saying that the iPhone XS only has dual sim in China (everywhere else, there's an embedded SIM + removable SIM, and dual SIM is available via software). Little things like that. Or people who think Airplay is just "bluetooth with Marketing" (not a Wireless display/audio protocol that's capable of 1080p with minimal latency, and 16bit 44.1 Khz lossless). But you make some good points about them being uninformed.
This comes up a lot -- and once again highlights the difference in how designers in my field vs people in the tech field think. We don't evaluate hardware or software on specifications, but on Task-Oriented performance metrics. We benchmark everything. I mean everything. Does our heart monitor take 4 seconds to sync up, or 12 seconds. What's the bluetooth range for this antenna design and chipset and software? etc. We benchmark hardware and software together. If you have a cheaper bluetooth chip, but write good software and extract better performance than the next person, no one in my field gives a damn what the specs are... The one that gets greenlit is what works.
So, my answer to your question is I would benchmark each machine based on intended function, hardware and software together -- rather than synthetics and specs, I'd look at hardware and software together, and answer the question: If I bought a MacBook air vs a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon, how fast could I edit and export 4K. I would use DaVinci Resolve on the Lenovo, because its the best video editing software (in terms of optimization) available for windows. I would use Final Cut Pro on the mac, because it's the best software there. And I would say "If I want a laptop to edit video on the go, and I spend $1200 vs $1500, how much faster are my exports on the mac vs the PC?" -- if my exports are 2-3x faster on the MacBook, why wouldn't I spend $300 more, if that's what I'm buying it for?!
Yet, someone who's watching this from the sidelines would say "He left a faster Intel CPU, extra ram, and an Nvidia GPU for a low wattage Intel CPU, and integrated graphics. And he paid more!!?!??! WTF stupid apple sheep." -- And everyone who's tech literate would agree. Until they saw how far those specs go on MacOS running on a fanless macbook...
On a side note, unless you're using something like Spec or some other gold standard low level benchmark suite that only benchmarks instruction throughput, you're basically beholden to software in some form -- the kernel, schedulers, or GPU drivers, etc...
Task Oriented performance evaluations are king in my line of work. Because getting a diagnosis 2 minutes faster, that's life or death.
<3 You know... if you look around on Ebay, old SunBlade systems are (relatively) pretty cheap ;)
Totally.
Also, thank you for your incredibly detailed reply and thoughts... It was a joy to read :)
Windows is far behind MacOS and Linux in may ways, actually. When you compare MacOS against Windows, I don't take it to mean that MacOS is great, I take it to mean that Windows is terrible.
Take printing for example. Printing is the single worst user-facing issue with Windows. If a user is having a problem with a printer, the Windows print queue is usually involved making the problem worse. You can't even reliably cancel a print job. Because Windows has not taken a wholesale approach to PDF support like MacOS has, it is generally worse at handling printable documents at every step. Don't even get me started on XPS.
This is such a fantastic response. You've summed up the camps perfectly. The pseudo literate camp is one that I have encountered frequently. They have some of the right ideas but generally refuse to look any deeper than raw specs and so to them, the iPhone will always be inferior to the $200 alternative that has more RAM and CPU cores.
Thank you.
Pseudo Literates are not bad people. They're just newer to the world of tech, and have yet to dive deeper into it. But they appreciate it nonetheless. I would urge everyone who encounters those people to encourage them to dig deeper and understand the specs. explain the underlying tech to them. Don't greet them with hostility or scorn, they're just curious and want to know more, and they're giving people advice based on their experiences, not out of malice.
This is a fantastic approach and one that I try to take myself. I was also in this camp myself a few years ago before diving deeper in my understanding of tech.
We all started there :)
You’re absolutely correct. People have varying degrees of expertise in various areas, and we can all learn from one another. Cheers! :)
I just want to touch on a point briefly:
Part of why Apple's implementations are so solid in terms of extracting performance is their intentionally restricted ecosystem. That is, if you know exactly what hardware your software is going to run on and only have to make minor tweaks for a few different variations, you can get a lot of mileage out of your optimizations. If your software is going to be running on virtually any hardware, however, then you don't have nearly as much room for optimization, so an OS like Windows is naturally going to be at a distinct disadvantage in that regard. The drawback to that restricted ecosystem, of course, is the restricted ecosystem--you don't really have much choice in your hardware. You either buy what Apple decides to make available, or you go without it.
It's a lot like needing to design a hat that fits your particular head vs. a hat that can fit almost anyone's head; the former can be made to fit you perfectly, but the latter will probably be too loose on you so that it can also fit on larger heads, and as a result it won't stay on most peoples' heads very well at all.
That's kind of an over-simplification, but the general idea is there.
It's not just restricted ecosystems, but well thought out software. Apple isn't late to various markets by accident. They generally avoid v1.0 products on purpose -- they were over 4 years late to the MP3 player market, and the cell phone market. They were also late to the smart watch market (Fitbit and pebble had that figured out a few years before)
What Apple does is carefully evaluate other devices' shortcoming. Holes and frustrations in the experience... this includes ironing out software bugs... and trying to get the experience as refined as possible. It's not just a consequence of limited/restricted hardware, but a consequence of waiting a few years, and exploring the shortcomings of devices in the market.
I'm probably not going to remove this thread at this point because I think it resulted in some decent discussion anyway that I don't want to kill, but the topic itself was really low-effort and has a couple aspects that I strongly dislike:
I'm going to move it to ~talk, but I think it deserved removal if I had seen it earlier.
I would encourage you to keep it because some of the comments and discussion here are absolutely interesting and worthwhile.
Edit:
but I do agree with both of your points on principle. I think that the way this thread turned out, and the discussion it generated is a really good look into how Tildes works to encourage discussion. I saw very little namecalling and no malice.
Wait what?
Revenue numbers from the last four quarterly results (3 months each):
Jesus, I knew they were profitable but this is insane.
It’s a staggering amount of money. Keep in mind that they also have. 350 Bn in cash reserves just sitting in a war chest for acquisitions and emergencies.
Remember: revenue =/= profit.
I’m sorry, it wasn’t my intention to be negative.
It's a rabid fan mentality. I know, because I am one :). Apple is one of those polarising companies, often for different reasons. I can't name another single company's virtual discussion-sphere online that generates so much hatred, vitriol, buzz, and excitement.
Sadly, with such a polarising set of arguments, essentially all of the nuance is lost. I find it near impossible to have reasonable discussions with Apple fans and detractors alike; because both camps are so invested in their own opinions that any level of reasonableness goes straight out the window.
If you want quality Apple news that's well-considered, free of intentional baiting, and easy to digest, stay clear of r/apple, especially stay clear of YouTube (MKBHD, UnboxTherapy, Dave Lee, etc aren't refined at all). Everything important you need to know can be found on daringfireball.net, Rene Ritchie's Vector, Jason Snell's Six Colors, and a smattering of other twitter accounts like those run by Walt Mossberg & Mark Gurman. These are the types that are able to express both positive & negative sentiments about Apple.
My litmus test for whether I engage in any discussion Apple-related is if the comment I'm responding to is reactionary/reflexive. If it is, the person behind it is so blinded by their own opinions & views that there's nothing worthwhile to be gained by engaging.
r/apple doesn't meet the litmus test very often.
Roger Ebert had a bit about how a lot of critics seem to judge movies more based on how well it matches being a movie they wanted to see versus how well it executes on being the movie the creators wanted to make. That's always been kind of a lodestar for me when evaluating anything, and for some reason the tech world is just [I]really[/I] bad at seeing things that way. There is a certain kind of solipsism for tech coverage where they're just kind of incapable of understanding the concept of other people valuing different things at different weights.
The tech press, and tech/gadget fans always focus on specs and price for specs to the exclusion of everything else. The reason Apple is so polarizing is because their approach, as a company, just doesn't care about those things. It's also why the old Apple blogosphere is the only place you can find reasonable discussion about the subjects, because they actually understand that the design focus and target market of Apple's products isn't really the same as the traditional tech companies. So they tend to evaluate Apple's offerings in terms of how well they're executing on the stuff Apple's users care about rather than the stuff the MAXIMUM GIGAFLERTZ PER DOLLAR! crowd cares about.
The games press has this problem, too. There's a lot of loyalty and nostalgia, and not a lot of evaluating games on how well they execute what the developers had in mind (and that's not even taking into account all the garbage
shilling labelled asjournalism on sites like IGN).The games industry acts like a microcosm of the tech industry because it is.
I think the problem with journalism is actually more broad than that. Basically anything that covers entertainment as a whole tends to fall into that pitfall. Look at how many articles were praising Tailor Swift after her last album even though it was pretty objectively terrible compared to her last one. Look at how many articles there are praising whatever the last Marvel films as if they are the pinnacle of film-making. It seems like there are many outlets who don't have editors willing to say "You're too much of a fan; we need someone who can be objective".
The thing that bothers me so much about tech journalism in particular is that they have turned themselves into entertainment journalism and don't appear to have acknowledged it in any way. Because of this mindset, Apple is basically the tech version of Gucci - they make good quality fashionable products, then sell them for a high price to a demi-exclusive clientele.
You may find macstories.net to be enjoyable. They curate all the sources you mention and add a lot of their own quality original content. In particular, Federico's yearly iOS reviews have become the absolute staple that John Siracusa's Mac OS X (he stopped before it changed names to macOS) reviews were on Ars Technica.
Yes! Definitely honourable mentions and great sources of nostalgia for sure. I loved Siracusa's reviews.
Apple's "reality distortion field" has been the stuff of legend since before there was an internet. What you're seeing there is what we've been dealing with since around the time the original Mac hit the scene in the 80s.
I see apple as having one of the biggest "reality distortion fields" of almost any company that I know of, but I can't figure out why.
To be upfront, i'm not a fan of apple's products for myself (for example, I run linux because i want maximum customisability), but I think they make a product that is well suited to people that want a set-and-forget, simple machine (though this isn't the only use case). Basically, I see apple as providing a product that is aimed at a specific market; no more, no less. This obviously creates two camps of people - proponents and opponents. But what I can't figure out is why this fighting seems to be so much more heated with Apple than most other companies.
Perhaps it's just that people without strong opinions one way or the other don't participate much, or are downvoted because their views don't align with either 'side', and that one side eventually 'won'.
I'd say it's because Apple cultivates a culture of tech-elitism. They want people who buy their products to feel superior for using them. That high price tag says, 'I got money.'
Apples hardware is the same as everyone else. Same chips, transistors, components, everything - their computers aren't magically some other material, everyone buys the same basic parts from the same major manufacturers and puts their own name on it.
Come on now, that's a bit of a stretch. Apple has designed their own custom SoC's for the iPhone since 2010, and the Apple Watch since it was released. Same with the coprocessors in their headphones, desktops, & laptops. All custom-designed Apple silicon. It's not the constituents that make Apple products worthwhile for me, it's how Apple deftly makes those products work & interleave with each other.
I'm not paying more for my MacBook because it uses the same Intel chip as any other PC manufacturer, I'm buying a MacBook because it's fit for purposes, and meets my needs as a software developer & general user as a zero-configuration-needed machine.
To imply the price is high merely for the "Apple sticker" is disingenuous and frankly insulting. As I've already said however, I don't care for these sorts of arguments because you've made your mind up so there's not going to be any changing of views to be had.
You're really minimizing the role of software here. Software optimization is not cheap nor is it insignificant. It should be your emphasis so much more than the shiny fruit logo.
Furthermore, the hardware specs are there.. but Apple doesn't list them. One example -- Did you know that every MacBook has 3x3 Wifi antenna arrays? Yet, apple just says "802.11 b/g/n/ac" on their spec page.
Or that all the apple SSD's use high write endurance MLC flash (check the iFixit teardown, and run the serial numbers on the chips into a serial decoder) for better sustained write speeds than cheaper TLC flash memory?
Or that the Retina displays in macs, while not the highest resolution displays, have 500 nits of brightness, and bang-on color accuracy out of the box? I'm talking 99% P3 D65 support, and 100% Adobe sRGB support. They are highly calibrated near-flawless IPS displays intended for professional uses. But people see the 2880x1800 resolution, and say "but you get 4K on other laptops, and apple is overcharging you, sheep" completely ignoring the color accuracy (which is very expensive -- go look up what a 99% DCI P3 display costs if you were to get a monitor) Link for the lazy.
People love comparing specs... until apple is ahead in specs...then those specs curiously disappear from their spec sheets and they never mention it.
Apple, for their part, tends to choose specs that matter to creators and professionals. No gamer cares about color accuracy. No casual user is going to care about NVME storage. Apple devices cost more because you're paying for those features.
If you're not going to use them, apple devices are a terrible value
I think it's easy to minimize what apple does because "oh it's just software" but everything is optimized to a T. Yes, Apple uses the same x86/64 hardware and very much the same chips and VRMs and ram and other stuff that PC's use. But they carefully select components they can extract performance out of. MacOS has excellent color management but it would be wasted on a shitty VA or TN panel... so Apple goes with IPS. They calibrate displays perfectly so that a photographer can immediately begin editing when they unbox their MacBook... and so on.
And yes, they charge you for that.
Then I believe that we are definitely in agreement here.
I would argue that most "average" users buy Apple for the dead simple appliance-like devices. That they like Apple for this doesn't detract from the appeal of this hardware to professionals who also use the brand.
On what are you basing this? Are you using some other definition of "smaller devices"? Wear OS is in atrocious shape precisely because Qualcomm (evidently) doesn't give a shit about providing a smartwatch SoC that can compete with Apple. As Ars Technica (their Android specialist, no less) put it, "Today, no component vendor sells a good smartwatch SoC that a company like Google can buy. Qualcomm is really the only game in town, and it doesn't seem to care about the smartwatch market. [...] I don't think it's possible to build a viable, competitive smartwatch using a Qualcomm chip."
Hardware allows the Apple Watch, and to a lesser extent Samsung's Exynos-based smartwatches, to succeed where those using commodity SoCs are failing. To argue that the hardware is irrelevant seems wild. Google'd be happy to get the news, though.
Actually, @WinterCharm's epic breakdown there helped me see the difference. My opinions of Apple's products have been formed mostly in the 80s/90s. I stand by what I said for that time period, but it seems pretty clear they've evolved from that considerably in the present.
Wow. I did not expect that... thank you for the kind words.
I like to admit when I'm full of shit, which is often. It's good for the soul, and I learned something from your post. I wasn't at all aware Apple had gone that deeply into the synergy between hardware and software, and that's a rather cool way to build a tech company. I get why it's used in hospitals now.
Funny thing, the reason I didn't know these things is because Apple's products aren't present in my prior work experience so I have no professional reason to learn that tech, and I avoid Apple-centric forums precisely because of the flamewars so common in those places. There was simply no opportunity for me to come across this knowledge until it showed up here and you took the time to explain it. :D
Also, your description of Apple in the 80’s and 90’s is quite accurate. I didn’t become a serious Apple user until they moved to Intel CPUs because there were too many issues with their older stuff.
I’m one of the iPod users who got pulled into Apple by a single amazing product...
Another objection to this. The reason I use Apple kit so much is the software more than anything else (emdash also forgot to mention a few other devices like their set top boxes and their HomePods). I have a bunch of devices that work wonderfully together, better than any other company's products can. On top of that (both literally in the software architectural sense and figuratively in the "but there's more!" sense), I have a real Unix OS that I can access in all the standard ways: shell, API, C library, etc. My personal and professional lives both see me leverage the power of Unix I learned on Linux and fell in love with on FreeBSD before getting my first Mac 10 years ago. There's a lot of very good reasons you see so many Macs at tech conferences, and it's not just "I got money" or any sense of elitism. There are genuinely good technical reasons. And I haven't even mentioned DTrace yet.
This whole falacy about people buying Apple because they want to feel superior is well past its best by date. There may have been a brief moment in time when that could have been the case but it's a ridiculous claim now.
People from every walk of life have iPhones and iMacs and Macbooks. They're not beyond the reach of the average person and, certainly in the smartphone market, the cost of an iPhone is hardly greater or less than a top flight Samsung, Google or Sony phone.
I own two Apple products, a Macbook Pro (from 2013) and an iPad Pro. I have been using Apple products since around 2005 and have continued to do so because they suit my requirements more than any other manufacturer, mostly because OSX is my OS of choice. If I could legitimately use OSX on another manufacturers hardware, I probably would if that hardware was as well built and reliable as my Macbook. But that isn't an option for me so I continue to use my Macbook. And I'll get another one once my current one gives up the ghost entirely. I have no interest in Hackintoshes because I use my Macbook for professional purposes and have no interest in having to diagnose hardware compatibility issues.
As far as Apple's hardware being the same as everyone else - the chips and components may well be but beyond that they certainly are not.
They are well beyond reach here in Brazil. And the majority of people who have them is for status.
But this is the reality of a lot of things here. Cars being the biggest one.
Yeah, I have heard from folks in .br that it'd actually be cheaper for them to fly to the US or Europe and purchase Apple hardware here than to buy it at home. Pretty ridiculous.
Make sure you test the keyboard first. Apple has really ruined the keyboards in their laptops in their near fashion model-esque pursuit of being thin
It's amazing that a company that apparently does a lot of testing for their hardware released either of their last two laptop keyboards. I heard about the "new" keyboards in the new MacBooks last year, and figured I might get one because I've always wanted one but hated they keyboards on the prior model. Took a trip to Best Buy and tried it out, and decided I cannot spend that kind of money to be stuck with a keyboard like that. It's really a shame, because I even like the touch bar that some people find ridiculous. Maybe the next model...
Yeah, there is that although i have a "magic keyboard" which I use with my ipad pro and I assume it's a similar keyboard. I don't mind it and can type pretty quickly on it but I do miss the mechanical keyboards of old.
The keyboards on the new MacBooks is not similar to the Magic Keyboard. If you miss mechanical keyboards, you will likely loathe the new MacBook keyboards. They have practically zero travel and almost feel like typing on glass. It is not a good time. I said elsethread that I switched to iOS instead of keeping up with the MacBook line. Guess where I'm typing this? Certainly not on a MacBook.
Comments like yours are being ignored or minimized while the most positive ones are being really successful. I guess Apple is very popular in some internet websites.
When someone whom is not a tech-head spends $1,000 on their piece of tech, you will not be able to convince them that their tech isn't the best. Their only metric for knowing quality is cost.
This is not all Apple fans, but it is a significant bunch of them.
There are legit fans that keep themselves up-to-date and informed about the cutting edge of tech and what future tech will look like. They're interested in getting to the new tech they envision, and Apple is excellent at marketing their brand, which suits that "bring the future now" idea to a T.
I think it's just the crazy echo chamber. I used to lurk on there, too. But you can actually see it in every community, on reddit or other websites. It's just that posts that people disagree with will get downvoted, just because they don't want them to be true. And if you only keep things visible that affirm your position and belief - well I guess that's the truth then.
On the switch subreddit for example, when Mario odyssey released anyone saying anything other than 'this is the best game ever' got downvoted.
There's just this sort of communal opinion, that just gets reaffirmed over and over.
Video games are a great comparison here because the hivemind is so singular and there are some scary elements of it. If I said that I hate Breath of the Wild, for example, I'd get a lot of hate. One reviewer in particular, Jim Sterling, gave the game a 7/10 (his 7/10 is actually meaningful, he used the whole scale when he was doing reviews), said he liked it, but criticized a few things about it. He received death threads for that. Death threats for saying he liked a game but had a few problems with it.
r/apple is pretty terrible, yes. I don't think there are as many shills as random comments on the internet would have you believe. Some folks just have a lot of brand loyalty. /u/ali made a very apt and astute comparison to video games, where people are even more rabid than they are with Apple. I don't think anyone's ever received a death threat for saying they don't like AirPods, for example, whereas many people have received death threats for criticizing a video game. I gave one example in my reply to ali.
Ultimately, it's tribalism. You'll see the same tribalism everywhere in tech: you'll see it with Linux distros, programming languages, text editors, video game taste, everything. I'm pretty much over that kind of nonsense which is why I don't participate in any kind of community like that.
I used to read r/apple but I find it to not be useful. I have my source of Apple news. They curate all the sources emdash mentioned (so I don't have to read John Gruber writing about politics, for example). I disagree with them a lot (their taste in video games is absolute garbage, for example), but there's no tribalism, just reporting.
I have grown really skeptical of everything and I tend to believe that there is a lot of people trying to manipulate our perceptions, specially in big popular websites.
A big company as Apple have both of the most loyal fans to the biggest haters of anything about Apple, /r/Apple is a melting pot of both and add shill to other company shill.
I think it is in part because of a (not entirely unwarranted) persecution complex. Apple hate has been a thing on the internet since I found my first online messageboard back in the days of Earthlink, and often that hate is unwarranted or misdirected.
A recent good example of this is the battery debacle. For those not aware, it came to light recently that iPhones throttle the CPU to preserve their batteries when the cells have lost most of their capacity. This has lead to Apple becoming the poster child for planned obsolescence in smartphones, which frankly is just not fair at all to Apple. Their mistake was not communicating the battery's health condition to the user. The purpose of the functionality was to keep the phone in a somewhat usable state despite the depleted battery, not trick users into buying a new phone.
If you want a real example of planned obsolescence, just look at any "premium" Google or Samsung Android phone. Samsung stops putting out software updates for their phones less than two years after they launch, to push users on to new devices. Meanwhile, the iPhone 5S, a phone from 2013, is still getting regular feature updates.