Thoughts on Apple

For those who are wondering, I am still sick. Thanks to all who inquired.

Time to talk about Apple. For those who don't know, I'm a general open source champion who makes an exception for Apple and uses their products (I'll make the plunge back to Kubuntu when World of Warcraft will run well on it), and I generally like everything that Apple puts out.

That said, I think that everyone in Apple's marketing department can go to hell. I'm sorry, but the muckraking that is knee-deep in everything Apple puts out is just ridiculous sometimes. The best was Apple's jab at Microsoft, effectively partially blaming Windows for a virus' getting into their products. Last time I checked, quality control on Video iPods is 100% Apple's responsibility.

Their ads are the same way. I don't know how many of Apple's video ads people have seen (they're available for free on Apple's website). While I understand that some comparison between Mac OS X and Windows is necessary to effectively explain and advertise, some of these are out of control. Also, incidentally, some are outright false. It is necessary, for instance, to reboot a Mac on basically every one of Apple's automatic software updates (about once every two weeks). While I'll grant that this is nowhere close to the amount of rebooting done when installing and reconfiguring on Windows, it's still there (and arguably more frequent than it ought to be).

Our sales guy at Live Oak, while I was talking about this, stated, "Well, that's marketing. What do you expect?" My response is that I expect more honorable behavior and I expect honesty...from everyone. And the fact that Microsoft engages in muckraking and subversive behavior also doesn't excuse anything that Apple does. That excuse never worked with mom when you got in trouble in elementary school, after all.