I’m of the opinion that Apple hasn’t produced a good consumer friendly product since like the Apple II or the original Macintosh (debatable). Hell even the Lisa.
now people will say oh the original imac, ipod, and iphone were revolutionary and sure they were but they were by no means consumer friendly. They broke, and still do, easily. constant cord replacements, and computers you can’t upgrade unless you were on like a G8 or PowerMac and even then your options for upgrades were limited. Add to the fact you’re primarily paying for the name Apple more than anything else.
Add to the fact anything you buy from Apple is guaranteed to be obsolete, per the company, within a year or less. hell at one point they even treated their OS post X the same way.
And they’ve always been like this ever since Jobs was ORIGINALLY running the show. Remember the Macintosh required a special tool just to open it up, a tool only available to certain developers on the Macintosh team. For a guy that lived his life as a hippie he sure did love tossing electronics away willy nilly.
My only Apple computer was a G3 Powermac, which I got used from the resale store at the University I used to work at, which means I got it real cheap.
Compared to the boring and clunky Windows XP machine I had, I loved the design of the hardware and the software. I loved that to access the mobo to upgrade the RAM I just had to lift up a latch on the side of the case (my Modern case isn’t even as easy as that to get into). I liked the colors and the ‘handles’ that made moving the tower around easy if you needed to. I had a very tacky aesthetic back in the day where if something was made of clear blue plastic I would buy it, so that Mac fit right in with my ‘decor’ lol
Compared to XP the UI was a lot more sleek and modern imo, the dock was a game changer because I rarely used more than a handful of programs so having them always available was cool. Plus my simple minded ass was impressed by the animations. The “hot corners” were super useful. as was resizing the windows by dragging them to the edges of the screen. The overall look was just much more nice to look at. I think it was 10.3 Panther if I recall correctly.
At the time I was just starting to learn about Free and Open Source software, so I thought the fact that they based OS X on Unix was pretty cool. The first DE I ever installed was on that Mac (LXDE?) and the first FOSS programs I installed was on there, VLC and The GIMP I believe. I also loved how easy it was to install programs. You would just download the file and drag it into a folder called ‘Apps’, and to uninstall you just deleted or moved the file out of there. Compared to the ‘install wizards’ and the ‘add/remove’ control panel on Windows, it felt like actual wizardry.
I think more than anything the geek in me just liked learning a new set of skills and a different way of doing things, but overall I loved the experience. When they announced the iPhone I was excited. I was actually one of those people who carried around a mobile phone, MP3 player and Digital Camera at the same time. So the thought of just having to carry around 1 device to do all those things was like a dream come true. Then I heard about the price and was less excited (it was almost $1000 in today’s money adjusted for inflation). I was a working class stiff after all. Then I found out about the lack of apps and thought that was weird. But still I was pretty much on board.
I got a iPod Touch to replace my Nano and kept my flip phone. That’s when I realized that I had to jailbreak it to fully unlock the functionality. That’s where they finally lost me. I had been planning on buying another Mac but I figured if they were willing to lock down their phones like that- it was only a matter of time before they did the same thing with their computers.
It ended up being a good decision because on my next (Windows Vista) PC I learned to install Linux and I could do some really tacky things with the UI then! lol. Compiz anyone :D
All this to say I think Apple was actually in fairly decent (if still too expensive) place prior to the iPhone, but their whole ‘walled garden’ approach to computing just wasn’t my bag at all.
For most people Apple products are absolutely consumer friendly, what are you talking about? They’re amazingly simple to setup and go, the ecosystem actually works well, and they’re far more reliable than anything Microsoft could dream of putting out. They also don’t go obsolete within in a year, that’s total nonsense, and in fact they have generally had better support than their main competitors as far as I’ve seen. People I know have kept their Apple machines for a very long time without much issue. I myself had my first MacBook for ~11 years, from 2010 to 2021.
For people who to tinker with software there’s still a lot you can do on them but back in the Windows vs. Mac days some ill-informed people decided that because Apple products work well they must be hard to code on, despite the Unix based nature of them. Currently, many people I know in software are issued MacBooks and say they work very well while the Windows machine I got for something as simple as AutoCAD was constantly having issues.
Their consumer unfriendly tactics aren’t directly to connected to the capability of the machines. They 100% do some bad shit on that front, but it’s not enough to push most regular customers away. If you can’t figure out the difference between yourself and a regular customer then this isn’t a conversation you clearly have all the information for. Most of what you’re saying is just the usual parroted garbage that muddies the conversation and frankly makes it harder to deal with the companies actual failings because it just shows a grotesque inability to understand why people like their products.
I will be very clear: This overt move beyond the usual corpo nightmare has soured me a lot on their products, which sucks because they are objectively very good. I also don’t entirely know what to do about it as making a switch to Google products is just as bad a move. I’ve heard of a couple alternatives, we’ll see what the landscape will look like in a couple years when I need a phone and several years after that when a new laptop is required.
This almost makes me wish I still used Apple products so that I could boycott them.
Ive been Apple free for 20 years though.
I’m of the opinion that Apple hasn’t produced a good consumer friendly product since like the Apple II or the original Macintosh (debatable). Hell even the Lisa.
now people will say oh the original imac, ipod, and iphone were revolutionary and sure they were but they were by no means consumer friendly. They broke, and still do, easily. constant cord replacements, and computers you can’t upgrade unless you were on like a G8 or PowerMac and even then your options for upgrades were limited. Add to the fact you’re primarily paying for the name Apple more than anything else.
Add to the fact anything you buy from Apple is guaranteed to be obsolete, per the company, within a year or less. hell at one point they even treated their OS post X the same way.
And they’ve always been like this ever since Jobs was ORIGINALLY running the show. Remember the Macintosh required a special tool just to open it up, a tool only available to certain developers on the Macintosh team. For a guy that lived his life as a hippie he sure did love tossing electronics away willy nilly.
My only Apple computer was a G3 Powermac, which I got used from the resale store at the University I used to work at, which means I got it real cheap.
Compared to the boring and clunky Windows XP machine I had, I loved the design of the hardware and the software. I loved that to access the mobo to upgrade the RAM I just had to lift up a latch on the side of the case (my Modern case isn’t even as easy as that to get into). I liked the colors and the ‘handles’ that made moving the tower around easy if you needed to. I had a very tacky aesthetic back in the day where if something was made of clear blue plastic I would buy it, so that Mac fit right in with my ‘decor’ lol
Compared to XP the UI was a lot more sleek and modern imo, the dock was a game changer because I rarely used more than a handful of programs so having them always available was cool. Plus my simple minded ass was impressed by the animations. The “hot corners” were super useful. as was resizing the windows by dragging them to the edges of the screen. The overall look was just much more nice to look at. I think it was 10.3 Panther if I recall correctly.
At the time I was just starting to learn about Free and Open Source software, so I thought the fact that they based OS X on Unix was pretty cool. The first DE I ever installed was on that Mac (LXDE?) and the first FOSS programs I installed was on there, VLC and The GIMP I believe. I also loved how easy it was to install programs. You would just download the file and drag it into a folder called ‘Apps’, and to uninstall you just deleted or moved the file out of there. Compared to the ‘install wizards’ and the ‘add/remove’ control panel on Windows, it felt like actual wizardry.
I think more than anything the geek in me just liked learning a new set of skills and a different way of doing things, but overall I loved the experience. When they announced the iPhone I was excited. I was actually one of those people who carried around a mobile phone, MP3 player and Digital Camera at the same time. So the thought of just having to carry around 1 device to do all those things was like a dream come true. Then I heard about the price and was less excited (it was almost $1000 in today’s money adjusted for inflation). I was a working class stiff after all. Then I found out about the lack of apps and thought that was weird. But still I was pretty much on board.
I got a iPod Touch to replace my Nano and kept my flip phone. That’s when I realized that I had to jailbreak it to fully unlock the functionality. That’s where they finally lost me. I had been planning on buying another Mac but I figured if they were willing to lock down their phones like that- it was only a matter of time before they did the same thing with their computers.
It ended up being a good decision because on my next (Windows Vista) PC I learned to install Linux and I could do some really tacky things with the UI then! lol. Compiz anyone :D
All this to say I think Apple was actually in fairly decent (if still too expensive) place prior to the iPhone, but their whole ‘walled garden’ approach to computing just wasn’t my bag at all.
For most people Apple products are absolutely consumer friendly, what are you talking about? They’re amazingly simple to setup and go, the ecosystem actually works well, and they’re far more reliable than anything Microsoft could dream of putting out. They also don’t go obsolete within in a year, that’s total nonsense, and in fact they have generally had better support than their main competitors as far as I’ve seen. People I know have kept their Apple machines for a very long time without much issue. I myself had my first MacBook for ~11 years, from 2010 to 2021.
For people who to tinker with software there’s still a lot you can do on them but back in the Windows vs. Mac days some ill-informed people decided that because Apple products work well they must be hard to code on, despite the Unix based nature of them. Currently, many people I know in software are issued MacBooks and say they work very well while the Windows machine I got for something as simple as AutoCAD was constantly having issues.
Their consumer unfriendly tactics aren’t directly to connected to the capability of the machines. They 100% do some bad shit on that front, but it’s not enough to push most regular customers away. If you can’t figure out the difference between yourself and a regular customer then this isn’t a conversation you clearly have all the information for. Most of what you’re saying is just the usual parroted garbage that muddies the conversation and frankly makes it harder to deal with the companies actual failings because it just shows a grotesque inability to understand why people like their products.
I will be very clear: This overt move beyond the usual corpo nightmare has soured me a lot on their products, which sucks because they are objectively very good. I also don’t entirely know what to do about it as making a switch to Google products is just as bad a move. I’ve heard of a couple alternatives, we’ll see what the landscape will look like in a couple years when I need a phone and several years after that when a new laptop is required.