Why do people like Apple computers?

Post Reply New Topic

I've never owned or used an Apple machine and all I've heard about them are criticisms about how expensive they are, how incompatible they are with mainstream PCs and how non-customisable they are, yet Apple still has 15% of the market. Why? What advantages do these machines have that enable them to compete with machines that are cheaper, better supported and can be designed, built and configured exactly the way the user wants them?

People buy them either because they believe Steve Jobs' was the last word in user friendliness and buttons with apps should be circular, or creatives/coders buy them because they don't care to learn how to initialize the same basic bunch of code themselves.

People buy Macs because children breathing ore dust & Sulphur Dioxide in Shenzhen shrouded the true computing in aluminum & glass.

People mainly like Macs for the following reasons:

- They look cool.
- They're less mainstream than normal PCs, so people think that they're "elite" for using them.
- Apple products tend to be seen as status symbols. You almost never see people on TV using Android phones or PC laptops. They're almost always using Macbooks and iPhones.
- The hardware and software are designed to be "easy" for non-technical users to use. (In other words, they're incredibly locked down and hard to configure for technical users)
- They look cool.
- Did I mention they look cool?

Apple products tend to be more like fashion accessories than serious computing implements. I will admit, they do have their niche for audio and video editing, as well as graphic design, as the OS is actually better designed for those particular things, but for everything else, I would stick with a PC. Even for the things I mentioned though, you can still get a PC with similar or better specs for a lower price, AND run the same OS, although Apple doesn't like this much.

Bah to all of you ! !!

I used to use a Dell computer with Win Vista. Bleeecch ! !! It stuttered and had all kinds of issues. Using Photoshop meant making a sandwich while it did the processing. I got a bonus at work and splurged on a MacBook pro. It is still running smoothly 5 years later. I can use Photoshop and it zips through processing the image. Once I got that dreaded "We have locked you Computer" virus. I shut it down, rebooted and the virus disappeared.

Still think Macs are fashion accessories ????

Vista sucks, everyone knows this. And like I said earlier, OS X itself does have a niche for graphic design and a/v editing, but you can still run it on a PC.

Also, I've never encountered the "we have locked your computer" malware. I once got a rogue fake antivirus from a drive-by download back when I wasn't running a firewall or an adblocker, but I got rid of it quickly and immediately tightened up my security afterwards. Since then, I have not had any problems with that sort of stuff.

Macs typically have a longer battery life than other computers, and tend to last longer before caving in. This is why the price tag is 20% higher than that of other laptops. Owning a Mac, also gives you the right to use the OS X operating system, which is superior to the vast majorityy of UNIX-like systems (including Linux) for homecomputer usage.

Having said that, computer hardware is outdated after 2-3 years, so the longevity of the computer is not that important to me. Apple haven't really invented or innovated much either; they like to take credit for stuff invented by Xerox PARC.

Apple has always been a more expensive less useful computer in my opinion. They may look nice but there is nowhere near as much software out there for them as for Microsoft PCs (certainly in the past anyway). I'm not fan of Microsoft but they pretty much (had) the monopoly on PCs. I've developed and sold software for Microsoft PCs for many years (some of it via my website) and I've lost count of how many people have asked me if I do a version of the same software for Apples. Nope sorry.

You can code software that works with both Wine and Windows. ID Software have made complete game engines that do. That way, you do not have to make an OS X version.

The main reason why Apple machines are so popular is their ease of use. When the first Apple Mac was released Apple ran a TV advert that first showed the IBM PC manuals (which landed on the desk with an almighty thud) and then the very thin Mac manual which just floated down.

The interface is supposed to be intuitive and although I've never owned an Apple PC I do own an iPod and I've never had to look at the manual, not once. I've downloaded stuff, sorted out my music collection, and the machine just works on and on.

This is something I've never bragged about. The software is just different, not all that much easier. I recently started using iMovie for making videos and had to get the manual off the shelf to figure it out. Having said that, I still believe the Mac software is more robust than Microsquish. As for being out of date after 2 years, the only thing I've updated is the amount of RAM. Really.

I'm more of a technical tweaker, but not super advanced or anything.

I guess it depends on what kind of computer you have, what you've had before, and what you've used. I've had really bad computers before (*coughcough*VISTA*coughcoughHACK*), and I've had a Mac that I shared with my family. Although the Mac ran a lot better than that clunky Vista PC, it kind of irked me that it was so locked down. Plus it couldn't hold a wifi signal for very long, so I ended up having to plug it directly into the modem. Nice graphics though.

That's really a question of OS rather than hardware. Put a Linux OS on the Vista PC and it'll run a thousand times faster.

My PC has a 2.8 Ghz CPU, 2GB RAM and a SATA I hard drive. With Ubuntu 14.04, I'm able to use Steam and play contemporary first person shooter games like Half-Life and Team Fortress 2 without any problems. If I ran Windows 7 or Vista on those specs, Steam would be laughable.

I actually find that Steam has much higher system requirements on Linux than on Windows. My older Alienware laptop, which can run TF2 at full resolution with most of the settings cranked under Windows 7, had to have pretty much every graphical option set to "low" to get it to play decently under Linux Mint, as well as installing a few low graphics mods and turning the resolution down to near minimum. It even had occasional speed issues with CounterStrike 1.6, a 2002 title! Of course, it's probably because my Alienware happens to have a Radeon, and not a Geforce. Radeon cards as a whole are poorly supported on Linux.

Vista is trash, but a properly configured install of 7 can run decently even on ancient hardware. One of my uncles once gave me this Pentium 4 box with 1GB of ram, onboard graphics (yuck!), and a preinstalled copy of 7, and aside from some hiccups caused by a flaky upgrade from Vista and some malware, once I got it running stable, it ran as smooth as butter.

I've been using a Radeon HD5450 which seems to have something of a cult following as a high-functioning budget graphics card; there are plenty of YouTube videos of the "Look what I can get out of the Radeon HD5450" variety.

Nvidia is notoriously problematic on Linux. The main problem is that they have a closed source proprietary driver which not only isolates them from Linux community support but also hinders Linux developers in creating open source solutions to the problems Nvidia leave behind.

If it's a laptop, the graphics are most likely integrated which is known to cause compatibility problems with Linux. Also, Ubuntu is the only distro that Steam officially supports.

The graphics are on an MXM 3.0 card, which is essentially PCI Express in a different form factor. It's still a mobile graphics chipset though, so that may partially explain it.

My desktop has a Radeon HD 4650, which at one time was a fairly decent budget card, and is still a decent card for day to day use and older/more lightweight games, and back when I first got it in 2009, one of the first things I tried was dual booting Ubuntu and playing Alien Arena. Ran like complete s**t. I was playing TF2 and other high end games from around that time with no problems on XP, but no dice under Linux. I'm thinking of giving Linux another try on here, hopefully the drivers have improved.

Linux is a great operating system, but Windows still has it beat for gaming and pretty much any other tasks that make use of a GPU.

The main reason why Apple is so popular IMO is due to several reasons.

1.) Back in the days when PC's ran DOS and were seen as business machines, Apple had a GUI, and their systems weree used by creative types. --Quark XPress, and all of the Adobe Graphics programs were initially designed for Apple Systems. Also Cubase and some other Audio Recording and editing programs were developed for Mac. Because of the fact that Macs were used by artistic types to produce creative content, Apple has historically been associated with creative types, whereas PC's were seen as business machines suitable for word processing and creating spreadsheets.

2.) Since the late 1990's when Steve Jobs went back to Apple, He has used the above to the advantage of marketing Apple to the masses. PC's are associated office productivity, and WORK, while Macs are associated with art, passion, and PLAY.

3.) At the same time, while marketing computers for creative people, they also invested in innovative industrial design with the original iMac that proved to be quite successful and popular. --To this day, Apple has continued to make computers as high fashion lifesyle items to show that they are creative computers for creative indiviuals.