It’s no secret that Apple is often the recipient of as much hate as it is admiration, and as with anything that has even a drop of popularity, it’s become vogue in certain circles to not only avoid Apple products, but to hate the company itself, and to proudly and boldly boast of never planning to buy anything from a company so entrenched in evil.
On that note Stephen Fry has a must read piece discussing the anti-Apple crowd and the curious, yet persistent, online verbal attacks often found between Mac and PC adherents on tech blogs and online forums.
The causes that lead some to hate everything Apple are complicated and various, but they are certainly not rational. Hate never is. Nor indeed is love. We are dealing with emotions here, not thoughts. Apple divides people in tribal, primal and almost frightening ways. Not all people, of course, indeed only a tiny, tiny minority of people, but they (we) are the ones who take up most of the bandwidth in the tech blogosphere and make the most noise and fill up Twitter and Facebook and other forums with our polemical deliberations and bellicose disquisitions. Although it is a minority who are so riven, it is a significant and loud one. I do not think you find such divisions and disputation in many other areas of human life, except religion, politics and sport of course. Some people prefer Ford cars to Honda say, or Parker to Waterman pens, or Sony TVs to Samsungs or Colonel Sanders to Ronald McDonald or Beethoven to Mozart but you don’t find online ideological wars or virulent tradings of insults on the subject. Apple haters cannot wait to tell you how underwhelmed, how (exaggerated yawning gesture) bored they are by the hype, what suckers, what sheep what idiots we are for even discussing the iPad. They know perfectly well how much better the HP Slate is, or the JooJoo or the Notion Ink Adam or any number of Android or Windows 7 netbooks, smartbooks and tablets. Only a susceptible ignoramus would rave about a ‘slick’ (what an insult) over-designed (d’uh?) iCon (hoho) like the Apple iPad.
That’s just a snippet. The entire article is a solid read and well worth checking out.
June 1st, 2010 at 4:11 pm
Very good read, I almost could not control my laughter.
June 1st, 2010 at 5:50 pm
People connect with Apple products emotionally because the devices are more “out of the way” and people then connect with the ACTIVITY they’re involved in, such as something creative. Kinda like “wow, look at the cool thing I can do!”
People connect with other non-Apple products emotionally because of all the time they invested in getting up to speed on it, and they don’t want to hear about anything that would pull the rug out from under all that effort, so they’re protecting that emotional investment, often in the form of frustration and winning over adversity.
My niece verbally bashes all Apple products often and it makes me chuckle. She listed a litany of all the things the iPad can’t do when I brought it over. Then I said “Well, while you are staying away from it and struggling with the laptop issues you’re always needing me to help you with, I’ll be enjoying the hell out of all the things the iPad can’t do.” Oh, snap!
It went in one ear and out the other, and she said “Whatever.” But all the others in the room patiently waited their turn with the iPad.
Mark Hernandez
Information Workshop