Have you used a Mac or iOS device in the last 5 years?

There are plenty of very visible missteps in the Apple history books; the G4 cube for instance (although there are more "Top X things Apple did wrong" articles than you could shake a stick at). Apple appears to have learned from many of these mistakes and moved on. Your accusation that Mac OS X is changing in any material way to resemble iOS is particularly laughable... an App store being made available for Mac OS X doesn't indicate anything remotely on the scale of Microsoft building the next version of Windows around a touchscreen interface.

Then there's the typical "Apple customers are buying brand, not quality" that isn't really worth the time it takes to rebut. I buy Apple products because
1) Apple considers usability to be a priority, so I don't have to fight my computer to do things on it
2) Bang for buck- comparable hardware/software has only been available at comparable prices for the last 10 years (at least)
3) Service- On the rare instances in which I've had hardware issues, I have had parts replaced in and out of warranty with no hassle and often for free. I accidentally took my iPhone into the pool with me (left it in my swim trunk pockets like an idiot...), took it to the Apple store, was honest with them and they gave me a replacement, and all I had to do was sign a form documenting the exchange. Try that with Dell.

How, exactly, has Apple "set back general purpose computing" at all, outside of your personal preference for a phone that you can tinker with? Because it's not as though Android devices aren't available, should you choose to purchase one. By contrast, Microsoft has, in every market in which it has participated in, tried to squelch actual competition rather than actually, you know, competing.

Just because many (most?) users prefer an appliance-style phone rather than a directly user-programmable phone doesn't mean Apple has done a damn thing to 'set back' anything other than the personal pride felt by many elitists on sites like this in having a 'better' device, measured in market penetration.

Seriously. Just because you don't like the iPhone doesn't mean that Apple is doing anything bad for the computer market.

If only I had mod points to mod you down.

You simply have no idea at all what you're talking about with respect to Christianity. If you are of the serious opinion that Christianity is all about 'control' and manipulation of emotions to enforce this control, it simply means that you have done zero research on the Bible itself, as opposed to basing the entirety of your ill-informed opinion on the Catholic church (which is what Christianity looks like when wrapped up in a cult-flavored candy shell).

But then, it's always easier to post baseless religion-bashing drivel in a discussion like this, because it's popular to do so, and provides a venue for the anti-religious to pat each other on the back for being so much 'smarter' (and therefore 'better') than us gullible idiots who have 'succumbed' to the 'control' of a religious philosophy.

Because "Do unto your neighbor as you would have him do unto you" is about 'control'.

>_>
_

Parent = flamebait.

It's well-known that Apple's RAM upgrades and similar stuff is overpriced, but the baseline models are in almost all cases at the same or only slightly higher prices when you're comparing comparably specced machines. Extra goodies people may or may not want to buy are really irrelevant- show me a major manufacturer in ANY industry that doesn't attempt to make it easy to buy extra 'on-brand' items to help their bottom line, and I'll be impressed by a link accusing Apple of gouging their customers.

Fun as it is to flame Apple, their merchandise is a reliably good value within any of the market segments they choose to serve, and the 'lol twice the price noob' myth has been debunked for years. Can we get past it yet?

In short, yes. Relying on drugs as a replacement for a fulfilling life is the refuge of an immature mind, as is the use of a prostitute as a surrogate for sex in the context of a meaningful relationship.

I'm not sure if you were *trying* to give a perfect example of what the GP was talking about, but you did a bang-up job!

Additionally, if one looks at the link posted by Black Sabbath, the entirety of it is nit-picking over different translations of speeches made by the President of Iran, all of which appear to be deliberately vague in the first place!

I mean, Imagine that, translators trying to make sense of deliberately vague wording will attempt to structure their translations in an effort to make the meaning more clear for their audience!

The actual text of the speeches itself is a lot more vague and yet sinister. For example:

Why is the mere existence of Israel a threat to the Islamic world? Aside from the easy-to-google statements of all sorts of supposed (and unsubstantiated) "Zionist conquest plans" by Islamic haters of Israel, is there any reason to believe that Israel cannot coexist with the "Islamic world" aside from the Islamic world's stated interest in destroying Israel?

*whoosh*

Err my 2 cents, the 'cent' character didn't show up properly for some reason.

While I agree that the numbers make the idea of an "iPhone Killer" somewhat silly, can we please put to rest this idea that Apple is driven by marketing? It's so far from the truth it's laughable. Apple makes products that are based on being designed for aesthetics and ease of use. The fact that they use well-designed marketing campaigns to promote their products is (and always has been) secondary to the design that goes into the products themselves. Besides, one would think that the landslide victory of the iPod in the personal music player arena would have driven home the fact that feature laundry lists aren't necessary for good appliance-type products, which is the other point that people who think Apple is all about marketing usually miss.

I'm not even sure what a good example of a marketing-based company is. Usually it seems more like shoddy companies just try to use marketing to shore up their shoddy products. My 2Â, anyway.

1) and 2) are both platform agnostic and accurate. I love how your "evidence" of the "by far the most common" reason is just an anecdote about an idiot. I'm sure we could all dredge up our stories of clueless Windows users and prop them up as evidence that "all Windows users are idiots", but it would be knocked down like the non-proof it is.

Fashionable though it be to bash Macs and those of us who use them, the reality continues to be that Macs tend to be better bang for your buck, and are overall a lot less prone to the issues with which Windows use is rife. Those of us with the familiarity to know that it's not "OS-X" could reference the Unix underpinnings or perhaps the fact that Apple's target population is USERS and not business/vendors like Microsoft, but at the end of the day, Apple generally puts out better stuff than Microsoft.

All this aside, as a fairly devoted Mac user, I have absolutely no interest in seeing a documentary about "MacHeads". At best, such a film could focus on the operating system and the practical benefits of its use, but:
1. Everybody who knows about this already doesn't need to see a film about it.
2. People who don't know about computers are very unlikely to go out of their way to see a documentary about "nerds" and nerdy topics.
At worst, as a previous poster said, this is just a lame attempt to ridicule a nerd subculture group to make a buck through a few cheap shots.

You link to a 13-year-old event, which itself is an outlier when measured by any standard.

When's the last time Hamas fired a rocket into Israel? Smart money is on "in the last 48 hours".

I know it's fashionable to be anti-Christian, but all of the evidence suggests that fundamentalist Muslims are both more common and more dangerous than fundamentalist Christians. Also, anybody else see the irony at anti-Christian comments in the discussion following an article about an anti-muslim overreaction?

I'm not sure how the comment above got modded 'insightful'- It has been the norm for several years now for Apple to offer primarily one-piece, mostly non-upgradable stuff. While you can often add RAM or swap out hard drives, a lot of the other stuff is integrated a lot more tightly, which is necessary to achieve the slim profiles and tiny footprints of, for example, G5 and later iMacs.

If you're a frequent upgrader or tinkerer, then obviously iMacs aren't for you- by all means, go with Linux or something and Do It Yourself, but the 'all-in-one' strategy has strengths as well as the weakness of limited expandability. In any case, none of this is news.

I've seen no evidence that the quality of the hardware has decreased... this looks more like you trying to blame your preferences toward expandability on Apple's decision not to cater to that market on the low end.