Although my day job involves a lot of work with Windows (often working closely with people at Microsoft), I also use a fair amount of open source software (e.g. Sun Solaris, Mozilla Firefox, FileZilla, etc.) so I’m not completely biased towards the company that everybody loves to hate. I’m also writing this post on a PC running Unix and like to think of myself as pretty operating system agnostic – it’s just that Windows is where I have the greatest knowledge and experience.
I think that Apple produce some great products – I love my iPod Mini and I’d seriously consider buying a Mac Mini should they ever go over to Intel and 64-bit – but I do find that people who use Macs tend to be… somewhat fanatical (maybe it’s something to do with being an oppressed minority). When I dared to suggest that OS X icons are big and a waste of space (not exclusively a Mac problem – I also slated the KDE and Vista desktop environments), it didn’t take long for someone with more Mac experience than me to slap me down and tell me to use CMD-J to alter the size and then “come back… and apologise”.
That was good advice, I’m sure, but my point was that the defaults are ugly (a personal view of course, which I’m entitled to). When I was writing about the OS X/Vista videos a few days back, I came across the following comment about Apple fans (it’s slightly out of date because of the Intel references, but I left them in anyway). I think it’s funny – I wish I’d written it myself, but I didn’t:
“I am an Apple user.I have no opinions, needs or desires that are in conflict with Apple. If it’s good for Apple it’s good for me. If it’s good for me, but bad for Apple, then I oppose it. If it’s good for me, but Apple doesn’t offer it yet, I oppose it. When Apple tells me that it is good for them, I will change my mind and support it. I need no choices because choices mean I can choose something other than Apple, which is bad. Therefore choice is bad. Unless Apple gives me a choice, then choice is good.
Apple’s success means I have been successful at making Apple successful. If Jobs is happy I am happy. If Jobs is angry I am angry. I have no opinions other than Jobs’. When something new comes out, Apple will tell me what it is and tell me how much I want it. I can tell if Apple wants me to have it because they will sell it to me if it is good, and not sell it to me if it is bad.
Apple gives me all the choices I need. I can load music on my iPod that I download from Apple, rip from my CDs or pirate. Piracy is good because Apple permits it. If it were bad they would prevent it. Pirated music helps sell more iPods, which is good for Apple. So pirated music is good.
As of today Intels are bad, feh, I hate them. IBM PowerPCs are good. As of whenever Apple switches, IBM PowerPCs will be bad. I will hate them. When Intel CPUs sit in a Mac they will be good. When they sit in a PC they will be bad, crappy Dells. I will hate them.
The Operating System. Ah-oom. The Operating System. Mac OS X version 4.1.2.3.4.5.6.7 Tigerrrrr. Ah-oom. Oooh, aaah, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, eeeeh, aaaaaaah. Oh Steve. zzzzzzzzzzz.”
[source: MacLive.net]
If you love everything Apple does, please don’t flame me – it’s a joke – and I just plagiarised someone else’s wit and humour, to share it with the world (well, the few people who read this blog anyway). I took a pop at Microsoft a few days back and now I’m redressing the balance! I’m sure someone could write something similar with the names Gates and Microsoft in it and if you still think I’m being unfair to Apple, there was another comment on the same post that made me laugh, pointing out that Vista could be an acronym for Viruses, Infections, Spyware, Trojans, Adware – make what you want of that (although I tend to agree that these are all caused by poor computer discipline).
Uh, I don’t hink it’s plagiarism unless you’re pretending that you wrote it :)
[source: Dictionary.com]
I’d like to point out that there was a smiley in my original comment about coming back to apologise; don’t make me sound like a bunny-boiling Mac lover :)
I ignored your Mac icons argument the first time you corrected me, but since you’ve brought it up again, may I point out that you initially mentioned Mac (and other OS) icons as a comparison to Windows Live Messenger Beta’s waste of space. My comment was merely to point out that Mac icons, at least, can be shrunk down to just 16 x 16px from a palette just one click (or keypress) away from the desktop, thus wasting less space. The only way to make Windows Live MSN Beta Message Client 8 take up less space is from the Security submenu, of all places, unless you hide it altogether. Or switch to something else.
All of that notwithstanding, I was amused by the post. I saw something similar a while ago. If I can remember what/where, I’ll let you know :)
Are you getting fed up with my pedantic butting-in yet? That’s what happens when you write about stuff I’ve heard of :)
Found it on Gizmodo:
Apple iProduct
Apple Haters Unite
Hi Alex,
Both links are very funny :-)
As for the smiley in the quote from your comment… selective quotation ;-)
Because I’m a pedant too, I had a play with some Macs when I dropped into PC World today. CMD-J does indeed bring up a dialog which includes the option to change the size of the desktop icons, but (and this is where I admit that maybe I should have been more specific) the bit I especially dislike is the oversized taskbar. In fairness, it looks okay on a high-resolution display (i.e. where there is plenty of screen space to waste), but at a more modest resolution (say 800×600 or 1024×768), they are too big and CMD-J doesn’t seem to have any effect there.
For the benefit of Windows users, the CMD key is the one with an apple on it (cf. the Windows key on many PC keyboards).
As for your “pedantic butting-in”, I did encourage you to publish your rants and write in the rules for comments that “Feedback and discussion around my posts is welcomed”. I’m just going to have to spend a bit less time responding to you so that I can write about stuff that you’ve not heard of ;-)
Mark
If, by “taskbar” you mean the Dock (where the applications are at the foot of the screen), there’s no key sequence to resize it; a simple dragging the vertical separator bar to the appropriate size should do the trick.
OK, enough. I’ll let you go and compose something obscure, technical and Microsofty about Windows Server 2003, and I’ll go back to just lurking :)