Invasion of the Apple Fanboys | Hacker News Reader

Invasion of the Apple Fanboys

avc.com

30 pointspx39 comments

I recently switched to using a mac after a long time of pc+linux, the most jarring part of the change was dealing with the community.

Every time I asked a question I could split the difference of replies fairly easily, one group would almost be offended that I asked the question, told me "I just learn how its done the mac way", and offer me their sub standard solution, these were often fairly rude.

The others were would point me towards an app here or an app there, I got help writing my first objc and SIMBL plugin, even the authors of a lot of cool applications, witch / sizeup / alfred etc were easily contactable for questions about their apps or just in general.

While intellectual snobbery has always been somewhat of a problem in computing, I think the class snobbery I have seen in a small set of mac users is a particularly bad trend.

Whenever I need Mac-related advice, I always email two friends with both email addresses in the To field (where they can both see them). Both are normally slack to reply to emails but when it's time to demonstrate the wonders of Mac, they fall over themselves trying to be the first (and most comprehensive) to respond to my problem. Useful and amusing!

lol, very similar to the old "it sucks that linux cant ....." reverse psychology

be offended that I asked the question, told me "I just learn how its done the mac way"

This is just a distorted echo of rude responses from the Linux community. (Not really an echo. One is not the cause of the other. Rather, they both have the same cause in the psychological roots of the "smug [X] weenie" phenomenon.)

I may be a bit biased but aren't most rude linux comments rooted in "RTFM" or documented processes (eg "Don't top post!, "Use the search feature"), and not "This is the linux way"?

"RTFM" = "the linux way" (of old)

The ideologies of smug [X] weenies differ, just as the dogma of religions differ. The underlying psychologies are still similar, however.

I don't see a meaningful difference between someone who says "RTFM" or "UTSL" and "just get used to the <x> way."

Asinine responses are asinine responses, regardless of who does them or why.

RTFM!

Now do you feel that your back in the linux community? :p

Or RTFArchive on many forums, on Usenet etc.

I have a friend who got into mac shortly after I did. While I was happy about how much more low maintenance this platform was, he saw nothing but problems. I asked him what he was seeing and I was pretty shocked. "Why do you want to replace your keyboard driver?", etc.

What I've found is that in Mac it really does help if you try to find the mac way and use it. This didn't work on Windows because windows has too many problems (so many wrong defaults, system breaking on its own under relatively normal usage, etc.). It doesn't work with Linux either because the only "Linux way" I can see is to have your own way (i.e. infinite customization potential).

With Mac the system is very stable (it does have issues, especially around multiple users logged in at the same time, but overall it's very good) and most of the defaults are quite sensible once you get used to them. If you refuse to "go mac" then you're setting yourself up for a continuous upstream battle of never ending customization. And if you're going to spend so much time administrating your machine instead of using it you may as well use Windows or Linux.

>>I recently switched to using a mac after a long time of pc+linux, the most jarring part of the change was dealing with the community.

I'm jaded from reading too many language war trolls... :-)

What gets my goat are the higher prices for everything -- today there is a repair bill for my Mac portable which would pay for an ok Linux laptop... :-(

(Apple sell some guarantee extension, but I thought naively that I didn't move the portable around enough for it to break. :-( But maybe it is me; my work Lenovo T60 isn't that steady, either...)

I'll buy the argument that Apple do design (GUI, hardware and O/S integration) better, but I really don't see that much of a win compared to Linux for using a browser, bash and Emacs.

In defense of...

Long time Apple users frequently encounter questions like:

"How do I make the close button appear on the right?"

"How do I make the application close when I close the window?"

"How do I make the window fill the screen when I click the plus."

These questions are like buckshot on Mac forums. They're posted every day, despite the fact that there are readily available (by searching) answers, or good philosophical reasons why "it doesn't work that way" on a Mac.

I'm not saying that you asked one of those questions, but there are many similar, but more complex, questions that evoke the same reaction. Many Mac users like they way OS X works, and wouldn't want it to work more like Windows/GNOME/KDE/etc. This results in a hostile reaction when users come along suggesting the like.

This doesn't justify a hostile attitude, but it does explain where it comes from.

Apple criticism is going the same way as the "three topics to avoid" (religion, politics, global warming).

I mean, I am an Apple fan, but some of the blind fanboyism you see in other fans is... well... insane!

I see this from Android fanboys too, though. Apple vs. Google (or iPhone vs. Android) looks to me like those endless religion wars on the best programming language, Vim vs. Emacs and so on.

Blind fanboyism has always been there, on any side of any competition. Could be that it is just natural (which does not mean it has to be forgiven).

What's worse than fanboyism is blind hatred by people who never used a product (or did not even held it in own hands). Alas, this seems to happen more on topics related to Apple. The second worst is labeling everyone "fanboy" without any thought.

Blind fanboyism has always been there, on any side of any competition. Could be that it is just natural?

Yes, it's natural. It's how we organized ourselves into tribes for mutual defense in the Stone Age. Noam Chomsky calls it "irrational jingoism." It's also how countries get people to die for them in war and how sports teams market themselves.

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/1992----02.htm

Apple fanboys are by far the most annoying, in my experience.

>I see this from Android fanboys too

Or google fanboys in general. Personally I find google fanboys the most annoying at the moment. Perl fanboys used to be the most annoying but there aren't many of those left thankfully.

Yes, true. But that's true of anything on the internet; I've even run into a pretty vitriolic debate over whether an E6400 was any better than an E6200 overclocked :)

But I do think that there is a particularly strong fanboyism attitude where Apple is concerned. People will jump down your throat at even the slightest "indiscretion", and make it a point of commenting to tell you you are an idiot.

etc.

I think every "community" has the same problems, particularly when the popularity rises. You got people trying to do stuff the "those guy over there way" instead of the "community way". Linux, OS X, and OpenBSD all have had this. Criticizing the community tends to illicit a reaction even if the critique is valid and educational. People stop sorting decent critiques from the trolling, which is a true shame.

Technical communities also have one really bad catalyst for really bad reactions: crappy journalists and the trolls that follow them. Apple gets a lot more of this than most, because of the visibility in the mainstream press. Heck, there is even a podcast to point this out (AMB). Apple communities get hit by people trolling on rumors and not actual product releases. My favorite was trolling on the terms of the NDA for the original iPhone SDK and how that would be the policy going forward ("No one can write any books on iPhone Development"). Given this, people don't have infinite patience and don't do real well sorting out the trolls from the legitimate critiques. Fact checking articles about Apple or Linux results in some sad thoughts on the state of tech journalism. Combine that with the absolute lack of proof needed, poor math skills, and the "we have sources" line which seems to be the catch-all for badly sourced articles.

In his original blog post, Fred predicted that Android will take over the iPhone market share the same way that Windows beat MacOS back in the day. As politely as he worded it, his post was pretty much flamebait, and the response was unsurprising.

And now he writes "I hope they don't start a denial of service attack". Seriously?

Apple, despite its many hit products, is still open to criticism. Fred's prediction is not flamebait, it's just a prediction, and a totally fair prediction in my opinion.

I'm glad the startup and early adopter community recognizes Apple fanboyism. I hope they recognize their own bias toward Apple as well, which I've noticed here on HN.

Agreed, criticism is great.

But what Fred Wilson wrote is closer to flamebait than well thought-out commentary. Kind of like Gruber calling Eric Schmidt "creepy".

The post in question: http://daringfireball.net/2010/08/creep_executive_officer

Some choice quotes:

Here’s my theory: the problem with Google is that Eric Schmidt is creepy. I think he’s a really weird dude. Recall, for example, this comment of Schmidt’s from 2009, regarding Google and privacy: "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place."

Schmidt said: "I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next. The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating that serendipity can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically."

I think some of the stress over this predication can be broke down in the "Apple lost to Windows therefore Apple will lose to Android" argument combined with "there can be only one / highlanderism" and a lack of historical context. With all this going on, articles in the class seem to be thrown into the link-bait category.

In 1985, the PC had around a 48% market share. Commodore had a higher market share than Apple. This was the year after the Macintosh introduction and the Apple II and Macintosh combined didn't amount to Commodore 64 sales or the larger PC sales. So all this Macintosh had the market and lost it to PCs is basically and untrue premise. It's not fanboyism to say a critique is not fact based, it is just good thought process. If you were really looking at this, ask how the Commodore 64 gave up all its market share to IBM or why (unlike most of the consumer electronics industry) a company was able to take 90% of the market.

This of course ignores the example of the iPod (which was done by the current management team) and the fact that the current management team was not at Apple from 1985 - 1996 to make decisions about the Macintosh.

For those who haven't read the article and think this article is just anti-Apple flamebait as the title suggests, here's the corresponding Windows slam: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/guides/2010/10/the-21st-cen...

Both articles are very well written with legitimate criticism, and are careful to point out why things are the way they are, which are often legitimate reasons, even if the author doesn't agree with them.

Edit: oops: my comment was a reply to this article: http://arstechnica.com/apple/guides/2010/10/the-21st-century..., which I read at the same time, with a similar title. Sorry.

Thanks for those links. It's rather entertaining to see that a pretty good tech site is going to great lengths to make a case for both platforms being basically crap. And it's a strong case. :)

Could this be related to what happened few days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1801727

and HN be the source?

An tangential question: why do some people relate to Android as Droid?

Is this (by)product of Motorola marketing?

'Droid' is a Lucasfilm trademark, which Verizon licensed. On other carriers, Motorola and HTC handsets use different monikers.

Droid = Motorola Milestone

Droid 2 = Motorola Milestone 2

Droid Eris = HTC Hero

Droid Incredible = HTC Incredible

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/10/17/verizon-droid

Ok. Thank you for clarification.

Many people don't know there's a difference between the two, and Verizon has so well marketed the Droid name that many people have just started to call any Android phone a Droid — kind of like people calling any tissue Kleenex.

Notice I said Verizon has marketed this — even though Motorola was the first manufacturer for the Droid, Verizon has the Droid naming rights — hence the HTC-made Droid Incredible and Droid Eris.

Thank you.

It is great for Apple to have branding under complete control.

You get the same chaff from internet dorks if you talk about anything that people are likely to attach their identity to: video game systems, programming languages, bands, whatever. There's nothing special about Apple fanboys. They're just fanboys who like Apple.

Picking Apple fanboys to complain about tells us more about the author of this blog post than about Apple fanboys. He had already decided to find something before he went looking for it.

I think you have a point in your first para, but wonder if your second one was unnecessarily inflammatory and what got you knocked down. I don't think his post tells us anything more exciting than 1. Fanboys exist, and 2. He happened to attract Apple fanboys on this occasion (or his blog is on the radar of Apple-oriented sites/forums).

No, I think it does tell us something about the author. He decided to look for confirmation that Apple fanboys are especially egregious. Why? I would guess that he has some problem with Apple or some of the encompassing culture. Whether random people on internet blog post comments reflect Apple culture or not, he decided to hold it up as evidence that Apple people are toxic.

I can't agree. I think the problem he has is with fanboys being wankers.

In this case, they're Apple fanboys but he'd have a similar gripe had he said something about the best console and attracted a PS3-360 war.

The difference is that any criticism of any Apple product anywhere on the internet is somewhat likely to provoke rabid responses. On the other hand, criticism of the newest Sony Vio, will probably be ignored and rarely elicits ad hominem, and the idea of Motorola fanboys is a bit absurd.

It is not really surprising given that Apple actively provides talking points to its customers (e.g. I'm a Mac).

Summary: the author submitted a blog posting to HN that was little more than consumer electronics advocacy & prognostication. The story got flagged & killed on HN, probably because it had nothing to do with startups, hacking, etc. other than the tenuous connection that the author is a VC. But the author didn't apply occam's razor and instead invented an elite cadre of apple fanboi ninjas in his head to explain the disappearance. Flagged.

Edit: By the author's standard of evidence, I could assume there's an elite cadre of fandroid ninjas downvoting me. Take note at how I don't blog about it and submit it as an article.

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