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So I have two issues with Apple: the products themselves, and the culture surrounding them. The products are purely a preference thing. A strong preference, but not a big deal. I first used them back in the day where the mice had only one button and that already was a bit inconvenient due to the lessened input functionality. I could hold a key and click for a context menu, so it wasn't that big of an adjustment. As I eventually got into college and had some classes with Macs and others with PCs, doing graphical work on one then going and doing graphical work on the other, I just couldn't see what the difference was to support the "Macs are better" argument. So if I get nothing more out of the function of a Mac vs the $800 PC I was working off of at home, then why are the Macs exponentially more expensive if not for the style and the perception of it being a premium product? iPhones are the same thing. I had to use one at work for a while because the owner's wife believed Apple is just the best everything and so any pictures, texting, any phone-based customer interaction I had to do at work was with an iPhone. I didn't like the GUI, didn't like the single-button thing. I use an Android that I bought for I think $70, and I love it. The way I started to see it is the Apple products (especially Macs) are basically like a Mercedes. It's way more expensive than my Toyota, costs way more to repair than my Toyota, isn't nearly as easy to service myself as my Toyota, and the only benefit I could imagine would be the emotional impact of the plush, luxurious, expensive ride (which actually makes me kinda motionsick), and the way it looks to others who might happen to see me. A lot of people value that (I shit yall not, one of my high school friends posts photos of herself at the Mercedes dealership posing with her brand new car every two years), and I'm just not one of them. I like my rickety, 90s-era Toyota. I feel way more soul and personality in that thing than the high-end "luxury" stuff I've driven. To each their own, though, whatevs.
But the culture surrounding them is what gets me. The borderline worship, especially when Jobs was still alive. The hero worship we see with Musk and Tesla nowadays reminds me of the Apple culture I dealt with in college that turned me so off. And that sounds like me being petty but seriously, as an example I had a teacher who refused to accept homework that wasn't done on a Mac. She literally said in the class that if we had a Mac at home, we could do our homework at home but if we didn't we were to do our work at school after class in the Mac lab. Because she said our work would be sub-par if we didn't do it on a Mac, regardless of whether we had the same damn programs at home. Other students who were Mac people would mock me when I asked questions about how to do something on the Macs at school that I knew how to do on my PC at home. I'm in the habit of saving multiple stages of my art files (in case I need to go way further back than an undo will allow) and I usually sort by date modified for that reason. Well since the context menus I was pulling up didn't offer a sort by date option (and she had literally disabled the 2nd mouse button which was at the time finally present simply because she said "it's better with only one button, that's the way Apple intended it" so whatever context menu that might've pulled up was gone), I asked how to pull the sort by date option up. She said, while literally petting the top of the computer, "Well you see, Apple decided to sort everything alphabetically because it's the best way to sort. So I don't know how PCs do it but on a Mac if you want a file to come up at the top of the list, you need to have the forethought to type a '1' in front of the name when you save it. For the file you want to come up next, type a '2' in front." When I suggested that was a strange waste of effort when there could so easily be options for sorting, she said "You don't need options, because Apple already figured out the best way to do it and they know better." Not to mention the time when as a celebration of.. I forget if it was Jobs' birthday or the anniversary of the company, she took the beginning of class to play the "1984" Apple commercial where the Mac was framed as standing against the conformist "Big Brother" computer culture (the irony of which in hindsight makes me fuckin laugh), and did a little presentation on its meaning and asked us to offer our thoughts about it. Eventually at some point in the class the art project I was working on became a bit ambitious, so I put it on a thumbdrive and started working on it from home (despite her instructions to the contrary). I got pretty proud of it, and asked her if I could go ahead and turn it in, even though I made it at home. She mulled it over and decided she would accept it as long as I printed it at the Mac lab, because the Mac would print better than my PC. So I put my thumbdrive into the Mac, tried to open my adobe file, and it froze the computer. She FREAKED. Started yelling at me and accusing me of putting a virus on the school computer because PCs are all filled with viruses. Should have never let a PC file touch a Mac, she said. We finally unplugged and re-plugged the computer, got it up and running again, and I had a hunch. I checked the filesize on my adobe file, it was a little over 2GB. I found the settings on the Mac, and saw it was equipped with only 2GB of RAM. I pointed out that my file was literally more than the onboard memory these computers have, and that if she'd just let me go into the other computer lab, where they had PCs with literally more than twice the RAM these Macs shipped with, I'd be able to print my damn homework. She finally caved and I crashed an architecture class, printed my file on one of their PCs, and took it back to the art class and got a motherfucking A.
And that's just one example. The other Mac people I dealt with around that time were of similar mindsets, and were similarly pushy toward me needing to come to their side, they just weren't in a position of authority over me nor did I have to deal with them on a regular basis so the teacher sticks out in my mind. I had another teacher once who was a Mac fan (but not a punk about it) and he knew I was not into them, so one day he came up to me with his new iPhone and showed me this nifty thing it could do, where he could read a book and if he swiped his finger across the page it would play an animation of the page turning. I said "cool, mine does that too" pulled a paperback out of my backpack and began tuning the pages. I'm a snarky prick, sorry.
Anyway I like video games and can't wait to see Sonic Frontiers.
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