November 10, 2008...3:02 am

The Real Reason I Hate Macs

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If you know me, you know I do. They’re a lesser computer that facilitates a layer of lies to the customer about how a computer really works; they also encourage no thinking. But that’s not the point. While talking to Sam Lee, I think I finally realized why, beyond being an inferior computer, it elicits so much anger in me:

Irrational consumerism. People buy what they don’t need, at prices that they should know they don’t need to pay, for a product that doesn’t really actually perform with hardware that’s up to date.

I mean, look at the first-gen iPhone (there are plenty of examples, but this is an easy one). 3G had been around since 2001 and was becoming less of a novelty in 2005, and they weren’t able to put it in the iPhone. But because of his holiness Steve Jobs, people bought them anyway. Then, when the second-gen iPhone came out and had something that should have been in the first, people upgraded the Mac way: throw away a product that costs too much and does too little to buy, at full price, an almost identical inferior one. Yay for frivolous gimmicky features.

Oh, and I seem to dislike people with a messiah complex as well.

3 Comments

  • Is this a problem with shininess or people going after shininess? Should companies eliminate all shininess, or should they urge customers not to be distracted by it?

  • If shininess is the reason people are buying things, then that’s a problem.

    If you look at the reason, then it accounts for shiny things that have minimal usefulness but are really there for the shininess (macs).

  • So what do you go after? Do you get people to sit down rationally and hopefully avoid a hasty purchase, or do you try to get the company to either sink or change its products and its marketing?


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