I hate Macs - Computerworld Blogs

It’s been awhile since I read anything so asinine it got me riled up enough to write about it. I couldn’t believe the guy ranted on for a whole column without offering one shred of evidence or fact for his apparently deep-seated hatred of Apple, Steve Jobs, and all things Mac. This, my friends, is prejudice, pure and simple. How is “prejudice” defined?

PREJUDICE:
preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience.

Precisely. How such a rant ends up in a technology journal that wants to be taken seriously is beyond me. As a Martian, it’s just one more piece of evidence that you humans are not evolving as we’d hoped you would.

I wrote to Computerworld and to the author’s editor suggesting the writer be canned, and they defended him by saying they wanted to offer an “opposing view” about Apple. Huh? What opposing view? Aren’t “views” published by journalists in national magazines supposed to have some–I don’t know–factual weight behind them? Aren’t “journalists” like this supposed to be “experts” at the things they write about?

Yet how can someone be an expert yet have opinions “not based on reason or actual experience”? If you can stomach it, read the piece for yourself. Here’s a typical sample:

And I hate the products themselves. Overpriced, overhyped and underwhelming. Oh, I forgot, they have such “elegant” design. They just “feel right.” All the stubble-cheeked, pony-tailed, black-clad hipsters in the design department get it, but us dweeby drones doing the real work are just out of touch.

Gag me. I’ve always been a function-over-form guy. I don’t give a rat’s, uh, tail, if my computer is smooth and white and shiny. I just want to crank out the next project.

And don’t give me those phony cost comparisons that try to make the case that, all things considered, Macs are cheaper than PCs in the long run. Just look at the damn price tags. Spin it any way you want, Macs and the other iCrap cost more.

And innovation? My god, take the blinders off. I remember sitting right here several years ago when Apple came out with the great new feature on their iPods called “shuffle.” I couldn’t believe it. Before then, you couldn’t play your songs in random order? I had been doing that for years, literally. But then, I was into MP3s early on — my first music player was a Rio PMP300, one of the very first on the market. I didn’t have to wait for Apple to tell me they were cool. It took them a few years to catch on. Gee, where was the bleeding-edge innovation there?

This guy is so pathetic. Even on my non-professional website here, I fact-check like you wouldn’t believe. It’s one reason why it takes me so long to write an article. I happen to have a working copy of every version of iTunes back to 1.1 for Mac OS X, which came out in 2001. Guess what? It’s got shuffle mode. Of course it’s got shuffle! Only someone trying to find something to criticize would claim that Apple ever considered “shuffle mode” to be its innovative idea. Good grief. He’s probably confusing Apple’s marketing for the iPod Shuffle with the “shuffle” concept. In fact, nearly all of his opinions seem to be in reaction to advertising rather than to careful study of the actual products in question.

But enough of this… It was just so wrong I had to point it out. And I do hope Computerworld puts him back in the mailroom where he clearly belongs.