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Apple Fans are Racists and Rapists

photo via lakerae on Flickr I have blogged about many topics since the summer of 2004. I've addressed modern racism in America, Jerry Falwell's meddling with Oreo Cookies, and Dave Chappelle's "theft" of my joke. None of these, however, got as massive an immediate reaction as this morning's post "i hate the smugness of apple." Check out the comment section. The Situation I spent nearly two hours last night trying to install a set of software called Final Cut Studio. The process kept getting cut short, though. I'd get these messages that would pop up and say "There were errors installing this software. Please try again." There was no hint of what the problem might be. I was just told to "please try again." I did, and the same useless error message kept appearing. Each attempt to install took about 45 minutes. Anyone can see how this might be frustrating. I searched the apple support forums as the phone lines were closed at that hour. I became frustrated, and all I could think of were those "Get a Mac" ads. You know the ads. They're very popular. They're funny. They're cute. And, moreso than other advertising, they pissed me off. Those ads basically say that Macs never have problems. They never crash. They "just work." Only idiots would use PCs, according to these ads. Now, I'm a fan of technology, computers and Apple. I recommend Macs to friends seeking computer advice. I "got a mac" two years ago and have had a better experience with it than with prior PCs. I know computers well. I paid for college with a combination of software testing and advanced technical support jobs supporting PCs and Macs. I built a TiVo before there was such a thing as TiVo. I am not an idiot. But those damn ads bug me. They bug me in the same way elements of the Republican Party bug me. The Republican Party attempted and succeeded in identifying itself with religion and morality. To hear them tell it, if Jesus were alive, he'd be their party chairman. This attachment to a certain branch of Christian religion has served the party well. They've gotten ministers to promote their candidates and created a litmus test for purity that keeps all but the most sure-minded and thick-skinned of candidates from seeking nominations. But there is a cost. As I mentioned in the wake of the Mark Foley scandal:
When you present yourself as perfect, you are asking to be brought down by your inevitable imperfections. The Republicans made morality a partisan issue, and now they are getting what they deserve.
Apple has become increasingly aggressive in its attacks on Microsoft. That's cool. It's a marketing tactic, but the strategy is dangerously arrogant and, yes, smug. When you tell me your products don't crash, and then my computer crashes, or you say "unlike a pc, it just works" while I'm suffering from your well-documented "random shutdown syndrome," that poses a problem. You have set yourself up for an inevitable fall or at least, frustrated users. Fanboys or Racists and Rapists? I'm a black dude who grew up in Washington, D.C. with its hometown "redskins" football team. That name is horribly racist and derogatory, at least according to many Native American tribes who have protested its use for some time now. I remember bringing this up in high school, and many of my friends would say, "no, it's not racist." Uh, excuse me, but the Native people say it is. "No, it's not." Women are sadly familiar with this routine. If a woman is sexually harassed or even raped, often the first questions challenge what she was wearing or "doing there." The implication is that she either brought it on herself, or it didn't happen. "I got raped." "No, you didn't." This is denying the validity of someone's experience, and I've come across it all too often on lighter issues involving technology. The Palm Treo is a fine example. Search the treocentral.com discussion board for people having problems. If you don't tow the party line, people actually personally attack you and claim that either what you said didn't happen or that it was all your fault. The "redskins" can't be racist, and that woman just misunderstood, and Apple isn't smug at all. The comments I got on that piece were something else. I'll share:
The ads are what David does to Goliath. If you're with Goliath's crew, you'll find the ads annoying. We David's cheer when they come on. As for your install, sorry. Macs are computers and sometimes they do fail and sometimes they do frustrate. If you're coming from the PC world, as I suspect you are, you may not yet understand the Macintosh way, which is to not overthink things. A cross-upgrade? Does this require FCP to recognize the program you're replacing it with? I suggest reinstall the original program, then install FCP. Best wishes, Richard Taylor
Oh, now I get it. I'm with Goliath's crew. That completely explains why my installation didn't work. Clearly my mind is not yet prepared, and I must continue to study "the Macintosh Way" until I figure out how to not "overthink things." I would love for you to explain to me just how I overthought things. Seriously. I've been trying to figure it out, but I'm afraid I may be overthinking how I overthought the situation. Richard Taylor, I respectfully ask you to STFU. Are you kidding me? I follow the instructions, insert the DVDs as told, and the process fails. Somehow this is a reflection of my spiritual unworthiness. Oh please STFU!!
I love the smugness of Apple. I'll go further, I love the ARROGANCE of Apple - that's what it is most of the time. When things don't work - you're fairly certain it's your own fault, and it's up to you to figure out the solution - rather than screaming to the heavens that the people who sold you the machine screwed it all up. So much of my ego is wrapped up in the elite cloud of Mac Zealotry that surrounds me that I REFUSE to let something not work on my Mac. I will make it work (or just declare that it isn't worth doing). With Windows, I'm usually convinced it's a bug right away and give up because I don't have the slightest bit of my self-image wrapped up in whether or not Windows "just works". - Steve
Steve. It sounds like they got to you, buddy. Because you use a Mac, you assume that all problems are your own fault? That sounds like an abusive, unhealthy relationship. Is this the mysterious "Macintosh Way" Richard espouses? I'll let you in on something, Steve. Sometimes daddy makes mistakes. Sometimes the teacher is wrong. Get some self-esteem and take control of your life man.
Only nerds, professional IT workers (and only the ones that use MS software exclusively), and people who work for MS-centric publications are offended by these commercials. - Tedious
Ok, so first. STFU. How did you even find my blog? Why did you comment? What are you? Some kind of nerd or something?
Do you mean upgrade? Final cut anything is an Apple only product. How do you cross-grade? - Joe S.
No. I mean "crossgrade" just like I said. Joe is the second commenter to question the crossgrade. For other uninformed haters who come along and question my understanding of technology. Check your beloved Apple website for an explanation.
One thing you can do is take a look at the various logs including your console.log and the system.log. Many times there is more information than is presented to the average user. You can find the console application in: /Applications/Utilities/Console.app There might also be a specific installation log for the application you are trying to install. The mere existence of these log files shows that Apple in no way believes that their system and application software never has problems. Don't confuse marketing with engineering. - James Bailey
Thank you James. Really. You make a great point, and you actually tried to help. As for confusing marketing with engineering. Clearly I have done no such thing because the engineering doesn't always work. If I had confused marketing with engineering, I'd be engaged in self-flagellation, blaming myself just like Steve. As mentioned above, I just think Apple is playing a dangerous game with these claims of moral superiority. But really, you're the only one who offered something useful. So thanks.
I hate the smugness of your post I mean, seriously, who the hell are you? What makes you qualified to criticize Apple? Who cares what you think? Sounds like you're dealing out a fair bit of smugness yourself. So, ya, those Apple ads are ADS. Just like Microsoft never mentions the constant crashing and continuous onslaught of viruses in any of their ads, Apple doesn't mention that perhaps you might get in a situation you don't understand in their ads. What a surprise. At least Apple has a basis for their smugness, you on the other hand, I'm not so sure about. - nope
Who the hell am I? Who the hell am I??? I'm Baratunde Rafiq Thurston!!! This is my blog, fool! The real question is, who the hell are you?!?!? What makes me qualified to criticize Apple? I'm a damn customer. I've spent thousands of dollars with them. I'm a human being! What is with you people? Why would you say something so retardedly retarded? Are you serious? Do I need to be a certain type of person to share my thoughts? What makes you qualified to criticize my criticism of Apple? Ooooh. Think about that. But please, don't overthink it. Then you'd be violating the Macintosh way. As for who cares what I think. Clearly you do. You have no concept of the depth of your own irony. Damn. The Solution Today I called Apple's phone support and worked with a very nice guy named Shawn. He helped me figure out where the installation went wrong by looking into a "Receipts" folder for necessary packages. While a test was running in the background, I told him about my frustration with the Mac ads, and with the response to my post last night. "Yeah, those commercials can be really frustrating when things are going wrong." I couldn't believe he said that. I told him about the flamers and haters who assume I'm some sort of idiot. He went on. "No, I could tell from the start you knew what you were talking about. We love customers like you." And I love people like him. He validated my experience!! Thank you Shawn, for not being a racist or a rapist. Update 2/28/07 @ 14:52: a reader emailed me a link to this Rolling Stone article: Is Apple the New Evil Empire? Update 3/1/07 @ 16:25: The Wall Street Journal ran a story today about the Mac v PC ad campaign overseas and how Apple had to work to adjust the humor for Japanese and British audiences. I loved this part of the article, proving that the Brits get it :)
Even with the use of local comedians, the ads haven't received a completely warm reception in Britain. One newspaper columnist, Charlie Brooker of the Guardian, mocked Apple for trying to be too cool and delivering a "series of brutal coordinated attacks." "When you see the ads you think 'PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately loveable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers'," he wrote on February 5. (A tosser is a pretentious person.) A polling firm, YouGov PLC, found respect for Apple fell in Britain after the ads started appearing in cinemas and Web sites January 29. According to a YouGov daily survey of 2,000 people, perceptions of the Apple brand, measured on a scale of 1 to 100, fell to 8 from 14 in the five days after the ads first appeared. "There was nothing else happening that we know of that would have moved the figure," says Sundip Chahal, brand index director at YouGov.

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i hate the smugness of apple

this is what bugs the hell out of me about those damn "get a mac" ads and generally makes me want to punch a baby over apple products in general.

this company is the most self-absorbed, arrogant and smug organization on the planet. it has created an image of "it just works -- tee hee" and "we never have problems."

that's not goddamned true!! i'll let you in on a little secret: macs crash. oh yeah. and sometimes, software doesn't work right. yep. and get this: upgrading isn't fool-proof either. what a bunch of lying biatches.

I just spent two hours trying to cross-grade to final cut studio and keep getting booted out of the process with no explanation. I just get

There were errors installing the software. Please try again.

I try again, and guess what?

There were errors installing the software. Please try again.

How about you explain the error, huh? This is bullshit. I hope Steve Jobs goes to jail over the stock option scandal and hackers develop badass Mac viruses to humble these bastards. And for the love of God, kill those f---ing commercials!!#@$!@#$@! You should not be allowed to run those motherf---ing commercials while I suffer over your shitty product!!!!!!!!!@#$@#$@!#$!@#$%

damn i'm frustrated.

Update: my response to the various responses is in this new post. and welcome to all the readers of macsurfer.com

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if anybody runs into sprintpcs, can you please shoot them in the face?


DSC_3418, originally uploaded by dogseat.

I don't even have time to get into the whole thing, but I've spent 45 minutes being told by sprint, essentially, that they screwed me big time and aren't going to do anything about it.

here's the short advice

DO NOT get the Treo700p. It is a pile of poo. I hate this phone so much it hurts my head. Both phones on my account are the buggiest POS's I've ever owned, and apparently, Sprint won't do anything about it. There's no firmware update, and I can't get them to replace the phones.

when you buy a phone from a cell company, and you ask for "total equipment replacement" on the phone, make sure 1) that they actually add it to both phones and 2) that it's a useful equipment replacement. Don't be fooled by the fact that the word "total" is in the title. It turns out in my case that "total" meant "we will totally NOT replace your ish if anything bad happens to it, but we'll still charge you a monthly fee for the meaningless coverage anyway."

the only solution is to have infinite problem solving time and be ridiculously wealthy.

I'm told it will cost $200 per phone to terminate my account with Sprint

any techie, telecom-y people out there with time want to help out? Here's what I need.

monthly budget = $175
two phones
smartphones preferably
unlimited data/web access
unlimited text messaging
unlimited in network calling
nights and weekends at 7pm
obviously i'll pay for the phones

if you can swing this, I will give you one month's bill as a fee. if you can get the contract termination fee covered, I'll give you 50%. that's $200. I'm serious. this is some bullshit, and I don't have time to go to law school and take the friggin bar exam just to deal with a shitty cell phone company.

finally, if you manage to stab sprintpcs in the eye, I will kiss you, and I'm a good kisser.

holla. pass along. whatever.

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The NYTimes online irritates me

They seem to have this huge fear of linking offsite. That's dumb. See this article about the new Amazon.com video download service. Now tell me, why doesn't the article contain a link to the Amazon.com movie download service? Idiots.

BTW, that Amazon service is the worst looking thing I've seen online in a while. Just fugly.

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One more reason MySpace sucks: the government is using it!

Not so "kewl" anymore now is it kiddos?? From this article at New Scientist magazine:

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

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Why I want to stab MySpace with a rusty knife in the ear canal

photo by Paul J Whaley via Flickr
To think, I had somewhat gotten over my insane hatred of MySpace. Well, that is over. Look, I understand that MySpace is "cool" and it's "social networking" and, no offense to my girl danah boyd, but yes, it's a relatively safe place for kids to have their own, well, space. I get that the design is somewhat intentionally ghetto. But my current frustration goes beyond web design snobbery. Answer me this simple question: how can a site that's all about social networking and communication make it impossible to send messages to people????? GOOODAAMMIT I HATE MYSPACE SO MUCH RIGHT NOW!@#!@#!@# I cannot find a simple way to COMPOSE an email message within the system. Sure, I can look at someone's profile and "send a message," but how do I find their profile?! especially if they have a common name, like John. Oh my god, I can't even explain how asinine the system is, it's gotten me so upset. To all those people who say MySpace is superior to good old email, you can suck my postage stamps! Let me try again from the beginning. I want to send a message to a MySpace friend of mine. How do I do this? Here's what I tried. I went to the "Mail" tab, which showed me my inbox. I looked for an option to "create" or "compose" or "send" a message. I clearly ask too much of a messaging system. There is no such option. I click on something promising called "Address Book." I think, "this must be where all my happy socially-networked MySpace friends are!" I am wrong. According to MySpace, my address book is empty. I have 417 MySpace friends, but my address book shows zero. Please explain to me how this is "cool" or "hip" or "Web 2.0" or "indie." It's neither of those things. It's pure crapola. So then I think, "well, I've sent this person a message recently. I'll just check my 'sent' folder till I find that, click on the profile and send a message that way." Wrong. According to the rotten placentas at MySpace, "Sent mail is automatically deleted after it is 14 days old." Wha??? Why would they do that? There is no good reason for this. This is not cool. This is dumb, and don't tell me it's about saving space on their hard drives. We're talking about simple text-based messages. Meanwhile the company is hosting, probably MILLIONS of hours of audio and video files. I go back to the Home page and look for other possibilities. There's a section that's all about my friends. I choose "Edit Friends." This takes me to a page showing my first 20 of 417 friends. There is no apparent order to the listing (though I've been told they're ordered by their sign-up date with MySpace). There's no way to sort by name or even search. So I'm supposed to manually flip through my friend list, 20 at a time, for all 417??? So, the more friends I have, the HARDER it is to communicate with them?? It's way too late for this bullshit. I swear, all these statistics about how much time people spend in MySpace is not a positive thing. It's an indictment against the whole structure of the service. I mean, people spend MAD time in line at the DMV. That doesn't mean the DMV is the hot new place to kick it. That means they suck at what they do. My short term love affair with MySpace is over. I want them to die a horrible death. Now.

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iPods are the opposite of Dick Cheney. They just keep dying

photo by Admit One via Flickr
update 12:02pm ET: clarification. the "dying for no reason" is shorthand for an inexplicable hard drive failure which results in the loss of ALL music on the iPod. For the FIFTH time, my girlfriend's iPod has failed. Five. Different. iPods. This last one we connected to a different computer and used a different FM transmitter in the car to try and isolate the problem. This product sucks. I'm a big fan of Apple. The machines are pretty. They're like the Priuses of the computer world. Having one of their products makes me feel better than other people. But there is something seriously wrong when you can have FIVE different pieces of hardware all suffer the same fate. That's the sign of a company getting by on undeserved reputation and not investing enough in quality. We all need to get this through our heads: Apple is no more noble, ethical or "good" than any other major company in existence. They are around to make money. Period. It's about shareholders and value and other buzzwords. If a good product comes out in the process, great. But, apparently, they are willing to sacrifice truly good products in order to maintain profits and an image. I've watched with interest as several product issues and bugs pop up on the blogosphere, from overheating MacBook Pros, to dead pixels to battery problems and more. The consistent response from Apple is usually no response at all -- no acknowledgement that the all-white, clean room, perfect company might have a smudge or crack. Instead, they may quietly release a patch or, worse, ignore the situation and let their fanatical base rip apart anyone who dare question the infallibility of His Majesty, Steve Jobs. The Catholic Church claimed infallibility forever, and we know how that turned out right? I'm not saying Apple is out to rape little boys, but I am saying that for too long, I know I've been blinded by the white. I've endured frustration at the hands of Windows for so long, that I assumed the enemy of my enemy was my friend. Well, Apple, friendship isn't that simple. It needs to be earned. Where does that leave me? Hopefully, I'm in a more honest situation, at least with myself. I still like Apple products, but they're made by imperfect people with imperfect motives. My own fervor has been severely dampened by this iPod situation. As much as I love to dis Microsoft's efforts or Real Networks or Creative, I actually want them to do well. Because if they do well, it will force Apple out of its clearly complacent, dominant, untouchable realm. Look at how lax Microsoft got in the browser world when it dominated. Look at the history of the telcos or any other monopoly. Only when forced to compete, do they start to improve. I'm officially in an abusive relationship with this company. I keep coming back, and they keep failing me. After five times, Apple, you need to seriously rock my world, or I might just leave you for real this time. afterword. I don't know what to do about my girlfriend's iPod. I hate to reward the company by purchasing a newer model. I have obsolutely no confidence in the replacement units. And I don't want to switch around the entire music management situation. I'm kind of invested in Audible and iTunes and more Mac computers in the house. What would you guys do? Leave em in the comments! Technorati Tags: ,

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my Blacbook arrived... and it showed up BROKEN!!

IMG_4924.JPG
photo via Flickr
UPDATE 3:46pm My friend Uche works at the Apple store and told me it would be better to ship back for a replacement rather than take it to the store. I just got off the phone with Apple, and they're emailing me the shipping labels. Once they see that it's been picked up by FedEx, they'll send my new unit out. I asked him, what's the wait like for these Black MacBooks now? He said, replacements are prioritized above all other orders. My man! That's tight. Will keep yall posted. peep the shitty screen. not only do they need to replace this, but they need to COMPENSATE ME for the time out of my life this is taking. why do companies hide their damn PHONE numbers on their websites??? anyway, not sure i can take this to the Apple Store since it was a mail order machine with a 120GB drive with 2GB of RAM. the tech gods continue to hate me. i don't have time for this. if anyone knows of an intern that's free, holla. Technorati Tags: ,

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BEA 2006: Web 2.0 session

photo by gabes via Flickr
I'll be blogging about BookExpo America (BEA) throughout my visit to DC, but won't have any updates during the day because of the WHORISHLY EXPENSIVE WI-FI this panel: Premium Publishing in a Web 2.0 World: Finding Paths to Profitability via Merging Media Channels presented by Shore Communications, I think. verdict: booooring, mostly main points:
  • discussion of various web 2.0 technologies like wikis, blogs, RSS, mashups, been there and done that
  • customers are willing to spend more for edge or niche content than mainstream stuff
  • evolution of the publishing industry
How to make money
  • concentrate on contextualization, not content
  • develop talent and help it grow. use web as a "farm" system
What is a web 2.0 book
  • original works of authorship that gain value over time
  • packages as specific users demand it
  • sourced from one or more multiple contributors and media
  • easily transferred from one personal device to another
  • easily upgraded and archived
I can't even remember the rest. I used this session to plan the rest of my day

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