Sometimes, hubris comes back to bite you

Fanboys Are Stupid, But You Are Not

Anil Dash — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 08:00:29 GMT

Phew! A warm welcome to my regular readers, now that I've had the misfortune of being visited by the worst of the rest of the web's audience. I should have known that writing anything even mildly critical of Apple, or anything that appeared to be a Mac

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Literally, “Fresh” » Apple takes a cheap shot at Microsoft

Literally, “Fresh” » Apple takes a cheap shot at Microsoft — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 21:02:26 GMT

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re: Sometimes, hubris comes back to bite you

lotsamystuff — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 16:31:20 GMT

"I was about to dive all-in and buy a Mac, but this just confirms my suspicions and I will never buy another Apple product again."

Riiiiight...you were about to buy a Mac, but a blog post about Apple's use of a BSOD in an icon made you swear off Apple products for life.

You'll pardon me if I take that comment with a very large grain of salt.

re: Sometimes, hubris comes back to bite you

Dipsh t Admin — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 14:40:19 GMT

"All you windows advocate over here will never use a Mac anyway so what's the point of continuing that discussion ???"

Should ask yourself the same question. If you are die-hard Mac user, why are you on a site that is called the SuperSite for Windows?

And a personality? Since when was arrogance a suddenly acceptable personality trait? And in all honesty, why should, or really how can a personality be bestowed upon a lifeless object/concept? Last I checked only humans and certain animals are capable of having a personality. And yes, I know I'm picking a nit here, and I understand what you are saying in essence. However, as a long time Windows and previously, an Amiga/C64 user (which shares some parallels with the Mac user base), I have never assigned human traits to a computer.

re: Sometimes, hubris comes back to bite you

daveinla — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 14:22:45 GMT

Wow I actually can't believe that such a stupid post on something that is on top of that erroneous triggered that many comments.

Obviously it just irritated the Die-hard Windows user and only because Mr Paul pointed it, otherwise as said above, none of these guy would have run OSX and be offended. The avarage lambda windows switcher (who is rarely a windows die-hard) would have never noticed the icon and never bothered to this level of futility. Granted that is cheap humor from Cupertino, but it is one of these many easter-egg that gives a personnality to the OS and pleases the long-time Mac fan user.

Now cut the crap, windows and mac zealots are both as stupid, and there is no doubt that the most vociferous one hurts the image of the global mac community, but will only irritate the windows geek. I doubt that these guys prevented many people who wanted to switch to the mac to do so. All you windows advocate over here will never use a Mac anyway so what's the point of continuing that discussion ???

re: Sometimes, hubris comes back to bite you

Dipsh t Admin — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 11:53:54 GMT

"Obviously, in order to see these icons you'd have to be using OS X."

True, but it is a jab. For an increasing market share OS, it means that more and more Mac users were previously on Windows, and have moved to the Mac. Their interactions with the OS will drive their perceptions. This little jab will be missed on many people. To others, it will be a slap in the face, a totally unnecessary jab. For a company that wants to increase sales and market share, alienating the largest user base is not the way to do it. Any time that I have ever been even casually interested in an Apple product, it is the blatant fanboyism that turns me away.

And like I mentioned before, if MS had done something like this, outrage would be widespread through the Apple friendly blogosphere and MSM.

"Then he had the gall to pull out a white ear bud and share it with her."

Wow, all this time I've been using pure personality.

"I mean 'cmon, the best that you can do is iTurd, iLobotomy?"

Hmm, and the best that most people can do is the tired and well used "M$".

I think both camps are capable of more than their fair share of pomp, hubris, lies, and double-standards.

re: Sometimes, hubris comes back to bite you

heran — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 11:49:11 GMT

chole:

"This is not a jab at Windows users, it's an inside joke for Mac users. Obviously, in order to see these icons you'd have to be using OS X."

----

Again, if MS put such an icon in Windows, can you say that this is a "inside" joke because you have to be using Windows...? I would assume you'll be happy to accept that. Interesting. Oh, sb may want to tell me Macs are not widely/publicly used as Windows so this is indeed a "inside" joke, maybe I was wrong, isn't that Jobs and his fans want to sell more Macs? And this is how they show us?

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re: Sometimes, hubris comes back to bite you

weedmonk — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 04:51:54 GMT

"Yes, us fanboi's are all just like a fart in a space suit. If that were so true, a gentle comment would be far more powerful. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, Weedmonk, you just don't have any style. I mean 'cmon, the best that you can do is iTurd, iLobotomy? Listen I know that you are really upset that you went out and bought a Zune with the hopes of squirting a song to some hottie down at the coffee shop where you download porn from their free WiFi setup, but were dismayed to find some guy in a pair of black jeans saddle up to the girl and actually speak to her. Then he had the gall to pull out a white ear bud and share it with her. ""

Repressed much? Lay of the degrassi junior high re-runs.

re: Sometimes, hubris comes back to bite you

chole — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 03:55:37 GMT

This is not a jab at Windows users, it's an inside joke for Mac users. Obviously, in order to see these icons you'd have to be using OS X.

re: Sometimes, hubris comes back to bite you

rickhuizinga — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 02:18:32 GMT

Over the past year I have been mulling over buying my first Mac based on my thoroughly positive experience with my many iPods over the past many years.

The entire iPod phenomenon, and recent Mac success is due to good products but the real trigger point was releasing iTunes for Windows which opened a huge market for the iPod.

I recently purchased an iPhone, and although I have generally liked the product, it has been a real eye opener into the world of Apple. First, I have found the software quality to be very poor. The iPhone frequently crashes from Safari, the iPod app, etc. With recent firmware releases, improvements have been made. However, as a software engineer, I would be embarrassed by releasing code with such poor quality and putting my name behind it. Furthermore, the syncing situation on Windows is very poor. The only calendar app that the iPhone will synchronize to is MS Outlook. I have recently tried to switch to Gmail w/IMAP and ditching my MS Exchange account but doing so requires me to give up my MS Outlook license. Why can't the iPhone sync with something freely available such as Google Calendar or Windows Calender (in Vista)?

I have just recently begun to believe that there is a certain arrogance inside the Apple organization where they are not paying appropriate attention to supporting Windows users of its iPhone product line. Seeing this blog entry just confirms my suspicions and I have very little confidence that Apple will properly support and develop the iPhone platform for its Windows users.

I was about to dive all-in and buy a Mac, but this just confirms my suspicions and I will never buy another Apple product again.

re: Sometimes, hubris comes back to bite you

johnpapola — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:29:46 GMT

In Paul's defense (sorta),

I've had numerous reasonable exchanges with Paul via email and he handles himself well in the Windows Weekly podcasts. He comes across level headed in those two environments and so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that Paul is by-and-large a reasonable guy.

But his blog posts often portray an anti-apple bias that's simply impossible to deny. This post is a shining example of Paul's lesser qualities in full display.

I think the reality is, Paul knows many MANY people inside Microsoft on a personal level and so he has a very humanized outlook on Redmond. But with Apple, Paul resents the style of Steve Jobs and his reputation.

The unfortunate thing for Paul, is that I think his priorities are simply DEAD WRONG. He lambasts Apple as arrogant for putting in a funny little jab in their Windows file share icon... yet he seems to be far less irate about Microsoft's more arrogant and globally destructive behavior, like their complete corruption and abuse of the ISO in their effort to fast track Office Open XML format.

Maybe I missed his outrage over that particular bit of MS bullying, but you get the idea.

He simply holds Apple to some bizarre standard where reasonable, often effective marketing is considered some kind of affront to all computer users around the world. I chat with him a few times a month and I still don't get it.

I think he just doesn't trust Apple because he doesn't know anyone there. Pretty silly.

re: Sometimes, hubris comes back to bite you

cesjr — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 23:34:46 GMT

"think Paul gives Leopard and Apple plenty of credit... he always is complimentary of many of the things Apple does. What is it with you guys? Do you just gloss over those parts and just zero in on the criticism, then go on to bash something vaguely related in Windows? You can't see why people make the "inferiority complex" comments?"

Criticism is OK - as long as it's factually correct and well-supported. Paul has no support for his assertion that the APE thing is affecting an "alarming number of users."

Is it OK to criticize baseless claims, or are we not allowed to do that?

So Paul can say two or three nice things and then he goes off on something that's incorrect, and we can't criticize him because he said those two or three nice things.

I though criticism is OK? Or, wait, no, if you criticize then you have an inferiority complex?!

Here's your problem - you're too focused on what mac users are doing. We're too critical, or we're liars, or we're hypocritical, or {add another sweeping, insulting generalization}.

Why not stick to the substance - if somebody's being hypocritical or inconsistent in their posts, point it out in terms of the substance of the debate.

Instead of going on this rampage where you take these broad potshots at some nebulous class of people, 99 percent of whom you've never even met.