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Apple Hater

iGary

iGary

Guest
Original poster
May 26, 2004
19,580
7
Randy's House
iPod, Cut and Run, English And Ford 500

By Orson Scott Card

I don’t know about you, but I’m about fed up with all the free – and ridiculous – advertising and publicity Apple Computers gets. If they decided to bottle air and sell it, calling it, no doubt, “PowerAir” or “AirMac” or “AirPod,” they’d claim that they had invented air. Then all the articles about the new MacAir would treat that claim as if it were true and suddenly start treating other air-packagers as mere imitators, playing “catch-up” with Apple.

I remember years ago, when Apple came out with their PowerBook notebook computer. I was at a meeting with an extraordinarily dumb young movie producer who kept going on and on about all the cool things his PowerBook could do. “It can sign on the internet and get email! I can carry it with me on planes and it runs on batteries!”

Finally I got fed up and just showed him my Toshiba laptop. “I can do all those things, and this computer cost me a thousand dollars less than yours.”

It was a cruel thing to do, I thought, to take the wind out of his sails like that. But no, I had forgotten: He was an Apple user! He gave me a withering look and said, “Yes, but mine is an Apple.”

Well, yes, but he said it as if that were a good thing.

Think about it. All the rigid, corporate-determined uniformity and buy-it-from-us-or-drop-dead attitude of Microsoft, but you have to buy your hardware from them, too. I watch Apple users attempt to manipulate their clunky operating system – click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, just to get where I can go with a single action on my keyboard – and I hear them raving on and on about what wonderful things Apple is finally deigning to make available to them, but which PC users have had for years, and it all makes me vaguely sad.

“Windows crashes all the time,” they say with a smirk. Then, when they’re talking among themselves and they don’t think you’re listening, they reveal the evil truth: Macs crash too. And Mac software has bugs and flaws and security gaps and stupidity built in, just like Windows.

What Macs don’t have is any competition. Once you’ve bought into the hype and forked over your money, they’ve got you and you can’t get free without completely replacing everything.

The same thing has happened now with the iPod. I had been using wonderful MP3 players for years. My Rio Riot held 20 gigs of music. My little Panasonic E-Wear, and later my Rio Cali, let me take incredible amounts of music with me when I exercised or took long flights.

Then the iPod comes out and it doesn’t do anything that I needed and didn’t already have. Not only that, but it was deeply ugly, a plain ivory-colored box with pathetic controls that looked like it should hold generic earswabs. Compared to my Rio Riot, it was a piece of junk and looked like a piece of junk.

And now it seems to have taken over the world. Everything is geared toward iPods. I still have MP3 players with more capacity and better interface than the iPod, and people talk and write as if the iPod had invented the whole class of machine, and all the others were just imitations.

Even the current PC World magazine has been suckered into this Apple mystique. They had a “brave and daring” front-of-book essay about how PC makers ought to learn to do things more like Apple. And do you know what it came down to? The colors and shape of the cheap plastic they wrap their products in.

Yeah, that’s right. They make the ugliest, silliest, most embarrassing-looking cheap plastic products in the industry, charge half again as much as you’d pay for a cleanly designed, functional looking product, and they are given credit for design!

I know what will happen, of course. A lot of smug Apple owners will write me taunting letters about how Windows crashes all the time. Old news, kiddies. My XP doesn’t crash at all. And I have about a hundred times as much software to choose from, and can customize my own machine (despite the best efforts of Microsoft) a thousand times more than you can, and I’m paying less for it, and it looks like I actually intend to do serious work with it.

As for your iPod, I just have to shake my head and laugh. There are much better – and better-looking – products out there, and I already own some of them. But you go on believing that yours is the best in the world. That’s what Apple depends on. You’ll get into the harness, they’ll put the blinders on you, and you’ll think you’re pulling the queen’s carriage instead of the old farm wagon you’re dragging along.
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Editor in Chief: johnhammer@rhinotimes.com :D
 
As for your iPod, I just have to shake my head and laugh. There are much better – and better-looking – products out there, and I already own some of them. But you go on believing that yours is the best in the world. That’s what Apple depends on. You’ll get into the harness, they’ll put the blinders on you, and you’ll think you’re pulling the queen’s carriage instead of the old farm wagon you’re dragging along.
Click to expand...

Funny, if I take his quote above and simply change the word iPod to "Windows" and change Apple to "Microsoft", then this statement would perfectly describe the writer of this sorry excuse of a story. :D
 
Yeah, that’s right. They make the ugliest, silliest, most embarrassing-looking cheap plastic products in the industry
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thought he was talking about *ELL there for a sec. this guy must desperately want traffic at his site, because one thing I know is that when you post ignorant tripe like that on the web, mac users make u pay!

sic 'em boys
 
Thanks for posting the whole crapload instead of a link: now we won't give his site any traffic...

As far as what he wrote: Windows lovers are like tea-kettles lately... good. Bastards.
 
He must have written this as a result of not getting his finance approved for purchase of a G5, which he had envisaged producing better SciFi strips on.

But alas, he's now stuck with his winbox and the garbage is still flowing.
 
It would be angering if every single thing he said about Apple wasn't so over the top as to make you laugh out loud instead. With 3-4% market share, Apple has somehow managed to "take over the world." Sounds like the kind of statistics we get from our government these days. ;)
 
this guy is an idiot.

why the hell does he even care about apple then if all these other companies make such amazing products. i didnt know plain @$$ black boxes with words on them were better looking than apple products.

stick to your xtra problems and crappy winbox machines. youre not even wanted here. i dont think many people are. too many complain about having to learn a new machine. well how would you like it if everywhere you went, everyone had an apple machine. then you wouldnt feel so unique and cool. haha

my two cents. proud to be an apple kinda guy
 
This HAS to be a joke right?
Aside from anything else, most people I know who are dual-platformers (i.e. use both platforms on a daily basis) say they would take OS X over windows any day.
I initially felt like going through the thread quote by quote, but then decided it's a waste of time!
To think I quite like some of his books!
If anything the quote:
Orson Scott Card said:
But you go on believing that yours is the best in the world. That’s what Apple depends on. You’ll get into the harness, they’ll put the blinders on you,
Click to expand...
Applies to him more than any mac Zealot i've ever heard!
 
wow.

Aside from the Toshiba laptop, I wish he'd provide examples. MP3 players that are better then the iPod? Where? Oh, and he must have a 61GB MP3 player if his has more space then an iPod. Apple computers must be ugly because they aren't big square boxes with no curves.

Show me a computer that is more beautiful then a quicksilver G4 or any other mac after the B&W G3, and I'll eat my shoes.
 
WinterMute said:
This from the man who writes the worst populist trash sci-fi on the shelves.

Douglas Adams is spinning in his grave... :mad:
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I'm sorry, but I and those who chose the Hugo awards disagree that Ender's Game is "trash." That book is a wonderful piece of literature.

But I agree, I wonder where a man as intelligent as OSC is got the guts (and stupidity) up to write something that vain and inflammatory. Oh well, he's clearly hypnotized by the spinning Windows. :rolleyes:
 
one word - denial.

this type of crap shouldn't upset anyone, if you're really that happy being stupid, using silly and stupid products, carry on.

edit: zoinks, just looked at the source of the information, it's not like this person is writing for a "real" publication. maybe i'd value their opinion more if it wasn't written from jerkwater, usa (no disrespect to the real jerkwater, usa) ;)
 
I liked "Ender's Game" too much to allow this article to flavor my opinion of Card.

It seems that, although he has an admitted love of well-crafted English (see the entire column he wrote), he has no ability to discern or admire well-designed physical products. Practicality is his sole basis for decision making, and, in fact, he can write just as efficiently and more cheaply on a Windows box, so, for him, it works.

Later he writes:
After seven years and 140,000 miles of driving around in my dark blue Crown Victoria, I finally decided enough was enough. The trouble was, the car was still running beautifully and the biggest repairs had been to replace the motors that ran the power windows. What can you do when your eminently practical car just won’t die?
Click to expand...
He ended up buying a Ford 500.

Unless he has a gambling or drug problem, Card is not by an means a poor man. He's just cheap and practical.

As someone who works on Win2K/XP during the day and OS X at night, I can't honestly say that Windows systems are horrible. They work fine. They just have no beauty and no soul. Some people don't care. I do.
 
Not to divert this thread too much... but science fiction as literature? Now don't get me wrong, I've read a lot of the stuff, and like it -- but literature? Let's not kid ourselves -- hardly any science fiction reaches that lofty goal.
 
IJ Reilly said:
Not to divert this thread too much... but science fiction as literature? Now don't get me wrong, I've read a lot of the stuff, and like it -- but literature?[i/] Let's not kid ourselves -- hardly any science fiction reaches that lofty goal.
Click to expand...


What you're saying only applies if you can specifically define literature. I myself feel that literature is whatever each individual makes of it, nothing more. It takes effort to write good sci-fi; to write it off as not being literature is incorrect.
 
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