Why apple is so popular

[Samuel Thurston, III]

On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 11:52 AM, Erik Pomerantz <epomerantz at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have a 15 inch laptop about 5 years old now running on Ubuntu which is
> running very smoothly apart from some blocks that burned out on the hard
> drive. The Apple lasted about a year and a half before I got so frustrated
> with the thing that I scrapped OS X and attempt linux- CD drive was failing,
> could barely go in live mode with a healthy cd the first time, second time
> it would fail before even seeking devices. I could have made it live just a
> little whle longer but  I was already disgusted with it and left it to
> collect some dust.

Let me say that macs have really nice hardware in terms of user
interface design and simplicity. They are not designed with
ruggedness, children or klutzes in mind.  They are not well designed
to wear dirt well.  When they are new, however, the experience is very
seamless and effortless, and after all isn't that what computers are
for?

>
> Macs are nice for the computer illiterate escpecially in the User Interface,
> but IMHO they are more like Sony laptops with their own crippled version of
> linux (oops did I say that? :),that is of course if your idea of "fun" is
> thrashing code or GUI commands to fix your own problems or fixing problems
> for free rather than go spending a hundred dollars (or whatever currency) on
> Tech Support.
>
> I apologize if this sounds too much like flame(bait or war). I just wanted
> to put in my 2 cents in the matter as i have some strong feelings about both
> Microsoft and Apple in this matter. No offense is intended, take it or leave
> it.

If your strong feelings about apple have to do with their proprietary
lock-in and anti-competitive behavior, I'm with you 100% there.

However, when you say "macs are nice for the computer illiterate" I
can only assume that you are either not very experienced with macs and
simply unfamiliar with the extremely powerful design features and
complete gnu toolset compatibility, the ports system, or any of the
dozens of other poweruser features, many of which even linux struggles
to keep up with; or (and I honestly mean no disrespect) you are
yourself not as literate as some of us who enjoy things like native
ZFS, seamless network automounting, integrated filesystem level
encryption, and so on.

The notion that macs are for "the computer illiterate" is one that has
been allowed to persist for too long. Please actually be troubled to
find out in what substantive ways it differs from Linux before
promoting it.