iSuck

Recently, I’ve been more flustered by Apple products than usual. Thinking back, it seems that Apple has just about always been a thorn in my side with regards to my professional career. Even before I started getting paid to be a geek I would get questions from the occasional Apple / Mac user that I couldn’t answer since they were “strange” and did things differently. You say your floppy is stuck in your Mac and won’t respond to dragging it onto the eject button? Sorry, your fooked. My PC’s floppy drive has a hardware eject button so I don’t worry about that shit.

I even owned an Apple ][c for a brief period of time before Apple pulled the rug out from under its user base and went to the Macintosh. I also still worked on dos-based PCs and found them to be more useful than the Apple series.

Later in life, once I got was working professionally in the industry, the Macintosh would pop up from time to time particularly in media-related fields. Everyone else would have a PC or be on the mainframe except for the Mac user….and of course their shit didn’t work like everyone else. Apple thought it would be a great idea to network Mac’s together just like PCs, and mainframes. Only they thought they would do it differently, just like they did everything else so they invented a piece of crap protocol called AppleTalk that was incompatible with everything else.

So now not only did we have Macs in the offices that were incompatible with anything else we also had to start supporting their crappy networking protocol – even though IPX (Novell), SNA (IBM), and IP (open source) was available.

Oh! You are still having problem with your proprietary application and hardware doing something so someone else can see it? Fuck off. Not my problem.

Then it seemed like for a while Apple faded from the corporate world a bit and at the same time began to adopt universal standards like the IP protocol, and other formats that everyone else on the planet except Mac users were using. So even if they were around, they seemed to get along better with everyone else.

Enter the iPod – This is the little guy that really put Apple back on the map in my opinion. I was very resistant to the initial iPod. I was just getting into MP3 players and I had already had a bout with Sony and their proprietary format. I also didn’t like the idea of having a real hard drive and moving parts inside of a portable device. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the first gen iPods were pieces of crap, but I was skeptical.

By the 3rd, 4th, and 5th generation iPods I think they really had it down. Simple to use, fairly consistently reliable, and it supports open standards like MP3. But it’s the interface that really made the iPod so great. The form factor is a bit of a bonus but the interface makes owning one worth it. Apple got this one right.

And then the iPhone landed…and the iDiots came running. Not that the iPhone is a particularly bad product. In fact, it’s actually fairly nice. Other companies were doing similar things, but Apple released a product that did it with style even if it is a bit of an alien product to me. Why iDiots? Because, like I just said there were other products and still are other products that do it better. But…and it’s a bit but…they locked their product into the AT&T market place. So not only was it very expensive, but it could only be used with the AT&T network. Sure, you could jailbreak it (hack it) and use it with someone else’s network but you just voided your warranty and all support for it.

Is the AT&T network that bad? Perhaps not, but as far as I can tell the Verizon commercials are very appropriate. They have more coverage and for someone like me that travels all over the place this is very important. I’d rather have some coverage, even if at a slower speed, than no coverage at all.

And for me? Personaly? I just didn’t want something else that tethered me even more securely to work, the internet and other online “social” things like Facebook.

And of course, the whole time you have the iThin notebook and all of the iLaptop notebooks on the market. Never mind that they cost almost twice as much as comparable priced laptops that run PC / Linux, etc. And maybe that’s one of my big complaints with Apple products – they are marketing geniuses. They get iSuckers to pay a significant premium for Apple products that are no better than other competing products.

And so people are still buying them… And I’m still fighting issues with them. Oh, some Dr. buys a MacBookPro and we fight all kinds of issues with it. It won’t connect to the wireless network appropriately, then when it does his VMWareFusion doesn’t work right. And why is he running that in the first place? Because the application that he MUST use isn’t supported on a Mac. Yes, I see that all the time – iDiots that buy a Mac product knowing that the application they have to have for work doesn’t work on their stupid iLaptop unless they emulate a PC. Great, so now we have to fuck with that, too. And they do it in freaking droves.

And then BAM – the iPad comes out. I gotta tell ya, I have no idea why you iSuckers buy ‘em. They start at a price tag of about $450 for the lowest end model they sell all the way to about $1000 for the top-of-the-line with WiFi and 3G. And what do you really get? A glorified, portable web browser, or book reader, and…well that’s about it now isn’t it? Yeah, I know you can d/l an app to do something just like your iPhone but are you really going to be creating presentations and documents on the iPad without some external device? I mean, can you imagine typing this blog entry with the on-screen keypad? Yeah, that’s sweet.
And of course – the wireless sucks. Just like the goddamned iLaptops and everything else. We constantly fight iLaptops, iPhones, and now the iPad because they have typically have more problems that other non-Apple products.

And here is really what kills me – I still hear from the iSuckers how great Apple is and how intuitive it is and how it “just works.” And then they are upset and dumbfounded when you are trying to tell them it’s their fucking iWhatever that is the problem. Really? You think it’s the network when I have 600 other devices connected to it both hard-wired and wirelessly but all 8 of your iPads have the exact same problem so it’s the network? Did I tell you that ALL of my clients have same problems with Apple products? My phone is on Verizon and I get a great signal, but it must be something else because your iPad, and iPhone both can’t get an AT&T 3G signal. Aliens perhaps?

These are otherwise fairly intelligent people but they cannot seem to accept the glaringly obvious answer that Apple products don’t always “just work” and that sometimes, every now and then, they are they problem…. So when I see an iWhatever, I cringe. I hate them.