Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
Much of the 'fire hate' seems to be coming from Android supporters rather than Apple ones  |
People need to draw a distinction between Fire hate and Fire dissatisfaction. Haters are irrational. The dissatisfied have actual reasons.
I'm very happy about the IPS panel; not so the processor and not so the electric fence around much of Amazon's apps and content (their music store being a notable exception). And I know these things before actually using a Fire because I know what I need my tablet to be able to do.
About so-called lovers and haters: We all might want to think in less Boolean terms.
I've actually been referred to as an Apple-hater a few times on MR, but the interesting thing is that I've been a professional Apple user for most of my life. The music sessions, projects and performances that were my sole source of income for decades would have been impossible in the United States without the Mac (other computers were accepted in the industry elsewhere). I use Apple computers despite having a personal preference for non-Apple flexibility, which is why I also own a PC laptop at any given time and own fewer Apple smart devices than non-. Yet this doesn't stop Apple-lovers from assuming I must be a hater.
Nor is the Boolean Switch pulled exclusively by Apple users.
In another thread about Jobs, I was actually called an Apple fanboy, and in
this superficially polite post by RalphSirEdwards, he implied that my having said that the Atari ST wasn't common enough in the late 80s for me to use to make a living with music professionally in the States (meaning I couldn't have gotten booked to do recording sessions with it for the U.S. market 95% of the time) meant that
no one ever used it for music in the States. My point -- that the survival of a musician depends on conformity of software and hardware with that of their clients or clients' producers and engineers -- was completely dismissed by RSE and the conext erased, all to imply I hadn't been paying attention to my own life.
In fact, I have been a studio musician for decades and all I did was to pay attention. If any of my major clients had moved to a different OS, I'd have moved right with them. And if other musicians' clients had moved, I'd have known about it. New York, LA and, to a lesser extent, Nashville were centers of the industry back then, and every professional I knew in those places used ProTools and a Mac tower.
RSE did this because he was trying to say that anyone who acknowledged Jobs's contribution in any way was an Apple fanboy. His same post, which seems so reasonable in tone, closed with the idea that he must stop posting or be "burned by the mob" of Apple users (including me) for not confessing that "Steve Jobs is God."
He had already declared his view of Jobs to be superior to mine and everyone else's (including other programmers!) through reasoning generally classified as argument by authority:
He claimed he was right because he was a "tool builder" and I must surely be a mere "tool user." When I mentioned that I had not only done but been hired to do programming myself, he insisted his view was the correct one because
he was a more legitimate tool builder than I.
This toward me, someone who respects Jobs's accomplishments and feels compelled morally to give him his due but doesn't actually like his personality or his business ethics. Like so many other threads on Mobileread, that one got more and more derailed by ad hominem and was closed before I could respond.
Here's what would be nice on this and future threads:
If, instead of talking about Apple haters and lovers, instead of talking about how Linux, PC and pure Android users are hateful elitists and Amazon and Apple users are morons, we could instead talk about
the importance of specs without dismissing one another as either too intolerant or too oblivious.
The argument that, because Apple products "just work," specs are unimportant is Orwellian in its implications -- not because it is advanced by Apple users but because it is substituting marketing masquerading as instinct for rational analysis.
By all means, buy an Apple product if it proves to work the best for you, but think very clearly about your reasons for buying it as opposed to some other company's product. Otherwise, on the day an Apple product doesn't work for you, you'll have had no prior warning and no idea what to do about it.
Certain (by no means all) Apple users on this thread might want to think about this:
If specs are unimportant to you but very important to others, then why is it necessary to make some dismissive fashion designer decision that specs are now unnecessary instead of respecting other users who want that information? Your experience as a reader isn't harmed by the specs section of a review. You can skip that part, but other readers can't insert it. You talk of discrimination against Apple users -- what about your discrimination against people who want technical information? You can't simply say
ego ergo sic and declare that, because Apple's slogans and your instincts seem to have merged into a single pre-rational preference for "not wanting to know" (as someone above put it), reviewers should then build your personal habits into their reviews because simplicity is best. In the purely democratic sense, optional diversity beats imposed simplicity.