Yeah it does depend very much on your view of functionality. I tend to expect my general purpose computers to be just that, general purpose. But then I have the ability to get the most out of a general purpose computer. I don't deny that for people that don't, a limited purpose computer may be better.
But I do get very annoyed by people that claim that Apple products "just work". They only "just work" if used only with other apple products. I had a part time job as a sysadmin while doing my Ph.D. and unfortunately this was around the time an Apple craze was sweeping campuses and boy were those Macs a pain and a half to integrate into existing networks.
What really used to irritate me was how apple would happily use open source technology and then change it subtly so that it no longer interoperated with unchanged versions of itself. Just one example being CUPS (the printing stack) which they used largely unchanged from the open source world, expect that they changed the default path for printers which meant that users would have to jump through countless hoops to get their pre-Tiger Macs to recognize the cups exported printers on the network.
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Originally Posted by petermillard
With respect, that depends very much on your view of 'functionality' doesn't it? For example, my elderly (mid-80s) father loves the fact that his iPod synchronises automatically with iTunes (running on Windows Vista, btw, which he set up on his own without any problem) when he plugs it in, but hates the way his Sony Reader needs some user intervention to transfer his latest books across. Interestingly, my teenage children feel exactly the same, and like, I suspect, the vast majority of people, that's all the functionality they need, and exactly what Apple provides.
And as an aside, have you noticed that it always seems to be the techies that get most upset with Apple - possibly because they're trying to do the very things that Apple don't want done? Or perhaps because they can see that it could be so much better if only.... - you know, part of the whole "push the door marked pull" thing??
So yes, on that level of 'functionality' Apple generally produces 'closed' systems (the original iPhone didn't even have a third-party App store at launch, remember) - but I'm a little bewildered as to why this seems to come as such a surprise to you...
Cheers, Pete.
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