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."

Confusion in Marketing: Episode #34,302

Ok, I know, every time I go off on the French efforts to do something you all sigh and say: "But Kris, it's the French. You aren't meant to understand."

Anyway, this has been nagging me for weeks now and I can't get it out of my head. Ok, quiz time, hotshots: When you have two packages of one product, one is smaller and one is bigger, logic says that the unit price of which product should be cheaper? If you're French, you undoubtedly are saying to your monitor, but theeze-ees a stupeed kesteeown. Obviously the smaller package should be cheaper. Yeah, yeah, but the unit price: You know the price per kilo? Aahhh oui, yes, that too should be cheaper for the smaller portion.

????

No kidding folks. I think it's the government. Jacky Chirac spent his formidable years (at least some of them) in St. Louis working for the great American piss factory, Anheuser Busch. He no doubt ran across those 35-gallon bags of Doritos and the 50-gallon drums of Coke in his local Stop-n-Shop, or whatever the red state equivalent is. He always remembered this and as a forward thinker, quickly made the link between the 93% American obesity rate and this phenomenon. As he rose through the ranks from corrupt city official to corrupt regional official to corrupt leader of his party to the corrupt head of one of the top 10 or 15 economies in...well, in Europe at least, he decided his most important policy would be to go against every first-semester Economics 101 book and quell the economies of scale before they even got started. Yep, that's right, on a micro economic level France doesn't make any sense...wait 'till you get to the macro stuff.

I'm being honest here: I eat this cereal called Nestle Lion®. It's got enough sugar to keep me going until 11:30 am or so. They sell a 400-gram box and a 650-gram box. The 400-gram box is about 30 cents cheaper per kilo than the 650 gram box. Beer, same thing. Heineken in 25 cl bottles is cheaper per litre than the same in 33 cl bottles. 33 cl cans are more expensive than 33 cl bottles.

If anyone has a differing theory then the one I put forth, please feel free to chip in in the comments segment.

Steve Irwin (1962-2006)

Steve Irwin, better known to millions as the "Crocodile Hunter" was killed today by a stingray! I would've put money on crocodile (as "Hollywood" as that ending would have been) or poisonous snake, but this just sounds like the freakiest of accidents. Different media reports say that there are only between 2 and 4 recorded deaths in Australia from stingrays and only 15 or so in the world. Apparently, he was swimming over the stingray, while his cameraman was in front of it. The stingray became frightened and swung its tail up (which can measure up to 1+ feet) puncturing the left-side of Irwin's body, and most likely his heart. Death was reportedly instantaneous.

While I always found his crazy like a fox, he provided many hours of educational entertainment (if you can call wrestling wild animals such) that would have instead been wasted [by me] on much more trivial pursuits on Sunday afternoons (The Patriot with Steve Seagal on TNT anyone?). Although very few people have compared the two, I do think that Jacques Cousteau and Steve Irwin were cut from the same cloth. Nature lovers who shared their passion with the world.