Unwanted Commentary

I try to like Apple, I really do. OS 10 is a great operating system, it’s easy to use, it looks nice and it’s extremely stable. Apple as a company has always been very innovative, creative and tenacious, always going that extra mile for a quality product and good user experience. What pisses me off about Apple is that for a company that holds such a small amount of the overall user base world wide they are annoyingly egotistical.

My Macbook Pro, for work, came in today and I’ve been busily setting it up. Since it is one of the new Intel based offerings I eagerly jumped into setting up a dual boot with Windows XP, this laptop will replace both my work PC desktop and my old eMac. So I search Boot Camp, the program that someone created to allow Windows to run on an Intel based Mac, and find out that the program has been scooped up by Apple. Goodie, I think, this lends a little bit more credibility to the whole thing, and as I go about downloading the stuff I’ll need I start noticing things like this:

Word to the Wise

Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it’ll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes.

And I find that amusing. Yeah, gotta be careful with Windows. When your operating system is used to operate over 80% of the world’s computers you tend to become a target for those who want to make a splash in the hacker community. I mean why waste writing code for something only a handful of people are going to see. Though I think it’s worth pointing out that Apple comes out with security patches pretty frequently.

It was this little gem that really rubbed me the wrong way:

EFI and BIOS

Macs use an ultra-modern industry standard technology called EFI to handle booting. Sadly, Windows XP, and even the upcoming Vista, are stuck in the 1980s with old-fashioned BIOS. But with Boot Camp, the Mac can operate smoothly in both centuries.

Actually it seems a little sad, because it’s like they don’t even really realize that their still essentially a niche product. I think if you take a long hard look at Apple you’ll find that without the success of the iPod and, I guess, iTunes they aren’t much more than they ever have been. And I’m sorry, but when you are a niche product and you control your own hardware development you can afford to take risks and make rapid hardware shifts. But when you develop a product that has to be run on an almost infinite number of hardware configurations you have to be a little more careful. And Apple has never been shy about shifting platforms and leaving their rabid user base out to dry, and I’m not just talking about the shift from OS 9 to OS 10, they did it way back when they went from OS 6 to 7. Essentially they can afford to do these things, MS can’t.

I do like Apple’s products and I’m so very excited to get to use one of their laptops in a more mainstream fashion, but for the love of god they drive me crazy. I just want to grab them by their shirt collars and yell at them to stop being so goddamned pretentious and get over yourself. But I guess humility doesn’t move product.