Everything in Particular

Apple enjoys the most loyal, forgiving (and forgetting) customer base in any industry in the history of the world…

At least that’s the explanation that I have come to. Who was it that said when you have eliminated all other possibilities, that which remains, however unlikely, is the answer? Sherlock Holmes? And when did we start quoting fictional characters giving them credit for coining phrases? Maybe it started with me, here, now?

I for one cannot understand this loyalty. I have to write this article assuming that the latest versions of OSX (within the last 5 years) are absolutely perfect (100% bug free) and have every feature anyone could ever want. This is simply because I haven’t used OSX for about 5 years and it’s only fair to give Apple the benefit of the doubt for products with which I have no experience. So it is entirely possible that loyal fans of Apple may have very good reason to be loyal right now; I really don’t know. What this article is about is how?!?!?! did Apple survive through the end of the 20th century?

My wife who is a PC convert has a degree in Graphical Arts. As everyone knows you can’t learn Graphical Arts in a public school without using a macintosh computer, it’s just not possible. I don’t know what the numbers are, but my impression is that any school that ever teaches this degree does it exclusively with Apple machines. I don’t know why for sure, maybe it’s cheaper for the school that way. I don’t know what kind of deals Apple gives schools on computers. Not really important for the sake of this article.

When I met my wife it was at a time in my life when I had still yet to form an opinion about Apple or Apple-branded hardware and software. It was a simpler time when things made sense. Ignorance was very bliss.

Shortly after I met my wife she got a job working at Smith’s corporate (Smith’s is a grocery store in some mid-western states). Her main function was to use Quark Xpress, Illustrator and Photoshop to create the ads Smith’s would send out in newspapers, etc. There were about half a dozen people in her department. They all used G3 powermacs as their primary machines. I cannot count the number of times the discussion of her day included the number of times her and her coworker’s machines crashed. To this day when asked on an average day how often her work-provided macintosh would crash the number she gives is 2-3. These G3s used the latest and greatest version of Mac OS at the time (OS 9.x, OSX for desktops was released in March of 2001). The time period in which my wife was at this job using these particular computers was 2000 - 2003. This means this was happening when the two prominent Microsoft operating systems on the market were Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Windows ME was hardly prominent as it was released with a bad reputation and was not widely used.

Having your OS crashing 2-3 times per day on average is astronomical! No, this is not an overreaction or sarcasm. It is literally “relating to astronomy” wait… no that’s not it. Oh, here it is “immeasurably numerous, high, or great“. Wow, that’s actually the definition of sarcasm. Ok, this time it’s astronomical and measurable. Trust me 15 years experience working on, fixing, restoring, installing, recovering and just plain old using an operating system says this is a beta-quality software product at best!

I have used some form of Windows OS in a professional work environment since Nov of 1996. I have used Windows 95 (OSR2.1), 98 SE, 2000, XP and Server 2003 as the operating system for my desktop PC over the years. None of these operating systems crashed even once daily on average. In fact I would be compelled to discontinue use of an operating system that crashes that often even if it were a Windows operating system which have had great features that Apple has never had. A few examples of these features are things like compatibility and affordable pricing.

This is the source of my confusion over the loyalty just gushing from the Apple fan base. I have a lot of points to make on this topic and so I am making them in parts.

Stay tuned…

Here’s that quote from above “… when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”

wikipedia.org. Sherlock Holmes. Retrieved on 2007-07-03.