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.
I have major issue with this article and that is this: One user’s experience does not an industry make!
At the height of windows 98 I had 2-3 crashes a day (keeping in mind that I use intensely).
I used to do support for PCs over the phone for a living and I if i ever have to see windows 98 again in my life i will vomit all over it. It was horrible, and it was the only option until 2001. Even then… XP was awful till SP 2
and everyone admits it.
I had G3s that ran great.. .never had a single problem.
sigh… alas I can’t lie MAC missed the boat in the OS world and hardware world for many years. It was not until Apple finally and regrettably surrendered to the WINTEL architecture that they even began to re-think the OS. If the OS they have now was running on non-intel garbage it would be 10 times the OS. Intel is a great company… but let’s face it… the best product didn’t win. The product that was rammed down everyone’s throat won. And, RIGHT NOW…like it or not… Microsoft is to the IT industry what IBM was to the world in the 80s… they are behind the times, but simply the biggest monster.
But, the IBM of then is not the IBM of today. And if Apple, Google, the Linux community, Mozilla and the like have anything to say about it… Microsoft will not be what it is today to the industry in the next decade. Everything is changing… and you and I, as connected as we are, don’t even see it. The kids that are growing up and going through high school right now aren’t interested in communicating/learning/working/et the way we do. You have to be small/dynamic/willing to change to keep up. Microsoft is not those things.
Google for example is. The Google OS when it finally hits will change the world… even if it is total crap. Because it won’t be based around PCs. It will be based around connecting everything in a seemless way…
Comment by Josh Loveless — January 30, 2009 @ 5:07 pm