LuKreme wrote:
On 23-Oct-2009, at 16:41, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
Your average mac user is as dumb as a stump. As long as things work
they assume everything is hunky-dory. If things stop working they
NEVER assume it's their Mac that's the problem because Steve Jobs told
them Mac's are infallible and they worship the ground he walks on.
It's amazing to me you have ANY Mac users as customers.
Tell you what, the guys down the hall from me run a Mac-oriented hosting
service, MacHighway.com. Refer your Mac users there. They will not be
treated as if they are 'dumb as a stamp'.
stump, not stamp
No, I'll tell you exactly how they will be treated. They will not be
treated as though they are ignorant and need education. They will be
treated as though they are so smart that they don't need any education
whatsoever, and that if they ever have to fix anything with their
mystical Mac, that they have to pay someone to do it for them.
In short, they will be kept ignorant because that's the way the Mac
retailers and Apple keep them hooked.
It's like the Mac user I talked to the other day who was positive
that the only way to get more hard disk space was to buy a hard
drive from Apple, that the regular hard drives on sale at the store
wouldn't work. I corrected that when I told her that the Mac
sitting at my right hand here that I do support with had a crashed
hard disk in it when I got it and I pulled a hard disk out of a
PC that I was scrapping out to fix it. She was amazed that you
could do that.
Sure, a lot more people ignorant of computers buy Macs. Are you
going to argue that? The entire sales strategy of Apple is to
cater to these people and KEEP THEM IGNORANT because that way they
can sell them computers and peripherals that cost 6 times more.
And design their products so that figuring out how to take them
apart takes hours so that their average customer can't do it.
I'll never forget the first time I opened an iMac (Blueberry as
I recall) to replace a crapped-out dvd drive. I had 2 iMacs, see,
one with a fried video board, the other with a drive that someone
had jammed and bent by sticking a screwdriver in it. I figured
I'd remove the drive from the system with the crapped video board
before I tossed it out. It took me 2 hours of staring at it,
probing gently, and imagining how they had hidden access to
everything before I finally found all the hidden screws and got
it apart. And I only succeeded in the end because I wasn't the
first guy to take it apart, and the prior guy who took it apart
had obviously NOT figured out where all the screws were because
some of the screw mounts were fractured and the screws torn out.
Of course, once it was apart all their secrets were exposed and
it was easy to see what they had done, so the second one came
apart quite easily.
I haven't repaired a minimac yet, but I read that Apple designed
it with breakaway pieces that you HAVE to fracture to get it
apart - so that only Apple repair places who can order replacements
for the breakaways can reassemble them so they look nice. Apple
learned that trick from the automakers who do that with body panel
fasteners - but you can buy the replacement one-use fasteners from
any auto part store. Not so with Apple.
Where else can you pay $30 for a USB mouse that retails for $5 from
Fry's (or other retailer) than a Mac store?
Who else than Apple produces a cellular phone that costs $100 for
a new battery and you have to hand your phone over to a retailer to
install it? Ever other cell phone on the market has a battery cover
and you open the cover, take out the battery, and put in a new battery
that costs $30 from the store, or $10 off Ebay?
Yet, you open up a new Mac and what's inside? A PC motherboard and
processor, that's what there is!!! You can even boot OSX on a PC
motherboard if you patch out the checks that Apple put in it to try to
prevent the educated guys out there from doing it.
And don't even get me started about software. Every piece of software
worth a piss that's running on my PPC Tiger box here I either downloaded
and compiled on it, or downloaded precompiled binaries, and none of it
cost me a cent. There's a universe of Open Source out there that runs
on OSX with minimal effort.
Yet, Apple's response to the Open Source community is APSL 2.0 which
is incompatible with GPL. And do you think that anyone in a Mac store
knows anything about free Open Source Software, much less APSL? Or
would tell them to use, say, NeoOffice instead of selling them
MS Office for the Mac if they had a chance? Hah!
Your amazed WE have Mac customers?!? At least WE try to EDUCATE them
so they aren't stuck with Apple sticking it to their wallets. I'm
amazed that ANY Mac-specific retailer, much less APPLE, has ANY Mac
customers.
Ted
