I hate Apple, but it's pretty often these days that I wish I didn't. It's hard to talk trash when the guys on the other side, my side, put out shit and call it custard. I've been eating it for years and it just keeps getting worse.
It seems that in the rush to get competing products out, Apple's opponents play the hare, blasting through development and skimming through testing to get their product on market to battle the sleek, white gear from the future that has everyone enthralled. Apparently they didn't learn from the response to Vista and just plopped out Windows 7, which I have had a few issues with.
I had an HP running Vista which crashed a year ago, promptly replaced by a Dell running Vista that crashed around Christmas. I replaced that piece of shit with a Gateway loaded with Windows 7, on which one of the keys popped off within 48 hours. I traded that in for a new HP, on which Windows 7 wasn't running properly. I traded that one in for one of the same, and that's the computer from which I am now writing.
If I'm going to argue against Apple, I need something to argue for. I still believe that Apple products widen the gap between technology consumers and a widespread understanding of consumer technology, but not understanding the products you use doesn't seem so bad if they work really, really well. If Microsoft took the amount of time Apple does with testing, maybe there would be an option for proponents of open source.
It's also a matter of marketing. The iPhone wasn't released until Apple was sure that it was the sickest phone to ever come to market that that it would take at least a couple of generations before other cell phones could catch up. Google had an innovation that further improved on the iPhone model (Android) and they released it initially on a piece of hardware that looked like a cheap plastic pharmacy toy cell phone. That was followed by the MyTouch, for which the commercials featuring Phil Jackson and Whoopi Goldberg were far from appealing. Now, they release the Nexus One phone. It's amazing and I want one, but did you see how it was presented? Stammering, stuttering nerds that hardly seem like marketing execs bumbling around a small stage with this amazing piece of gear, making it look less amazing.
In this way, companies like Google and Microsoft are just handing it to Apple. Apple sees that no one else in the fragmented world of groundbreaking new technology is stepping up to take the lead, so they did. For the iPhone, marketing was essential to building a large user community that would then yield a large number of apps. Can Google pull that off with the Nexus One? Sure, there are a lot of Google fans out there, but those folks have been using Google products for free up until now. Will they pay more than 500 dollars for that company's first major piece of hardware?
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