I [am starting to] Hate Apple

Apple has never really attracted me. They've tried to sell themselves as the "artists" choice and never an artist, I very easily avoided this marketing strategy. When the iPod come out, I thought it was pretty cool - great idea, seems to be very simplistically made. Then the iPod Nano came out and I was more or less hooked. It was this tiny little thing, with Flash memory that could hold a whole bunch of songs. My ex-coworkers and Julie decided to give me one at the beginning of the year, and I have to say, in terms of the actual product, I am very happy. It is very small as advertised, it's very easy to use, the body itself is strong enough to withstand my inattention when I sit down with it in my back pocket. The very cool white headphones were just junk though. They broke about 3 months after I got the thing. No problem. I don't need to advertise that I have an iPod and was thinking about changing them anyway. Now I have very a very decent pair of AKG Acoustics headphones that are just plain black, not that "look at me" white.

The one big gripe I have is iTunes. Theoretically I don't have to use iTunes. I could use Winamp. But I set it up in iTunes and have stuck with it. However, it's a very heavy program that automatically starts every time I plug my iPod into my computer to charge (yeah, I know, I can change this setting). If I were to buy music through iTunes, I could only use it on my iPod; because of Digital Rights Management (DRM) that is proprietary to Apple, any music that I buy and therefore should become "mine" is stuck in iTunes for ever and ever and I could not use it on another MP3 Player. But that's fine, it's good business practice - you want to make "cost" of changing to a competitor is too high to ensure that your current clients do not become ex-clients.

And this is where my big problems with Apple come in. In their new ad campaign features Justin Long, a hip, 20-something kid, as a Mac and John Hodgman, an overweight, 40-something as a PC. The whole campaigns basically consists of Mac making fun of PC for all of the problems that they have, from viruses (viri?) to the fact that it takes "so much time" to set up a PC. Seth Stevenson over at Ad Report Card on Slate wrote about this campaign a while back and my conclusions are more or less in line with what he says. But even beyond that, this makes me not want to buy a Mac. Ok, so Macs are smug and demeaning machines? When I call customer service are they going to talk down to me like the Mac talks down to the PC? You can find the whole series on Apple's site. I dislike almost all of them (as it relates to Mac - I do get a chuckle out of some of the jokes they make), but "Angel/Devil" is quite annoying. It basically says that PCs can't do anything "fun," like create photo albums. Funny thing, I have Photoshop Album Edition and Picasa, both of these has a wide range of photo album making features: And they are both completely PC compatible. "Network" is just plain stupid. I have a bunch of different peripherals hooked up to my computer and amazingly they work fine. Sure I need drivers and whatnot, but there's never any problem with that. This is the problem I think. Apple/Mac is spending so much time saying untrue things (or true things that are not the "norm") about the type of computer that is in 85 or 90% households. Do they actually think that these people aren't going to say, "what the hell are they talking about, my PC works just fine?" And my last critique is for "Accident." This is soooo dumb. PC are made by how many different types of companies? Any one of them could chose to put a magnetic power cable on their computer if they chose to, but beyond that, anytime the power cord has been kicked on my computer, it just fell out like Mac's allegedly does - my computer didn't shoot to the floor and bust.

And don't let Steve Allen once try to convince you that if he has the majority of the market share he would not take advantage of this in any way possible.

I am honestly starting to look poorly upon people with Macs. I see them as silly people who have just bought into the marketing image of Mac. Fine use a Mac if you want, it even does some things better than PCs do. But it's not going to make you "cooler."