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Comment by beamso | Hacker News Reader

> Did you ever stop to consider why Apple "fanbois" are?

Some of them appear to need to follow the underdog, conform but not conform, or are spoken to through the marketing.

> In any case, Gruber is talking about industry conformity, not consumer conformity, which is a whole 'nother pigeon.

The industry is conforming to follow Apple. HP through marketing. Dell through design. MS through marketing/Zune/Pink. Google through Android.

edit: You jump through additional hoops to get Linux working properly. Video drivers and sound drivers are poor, sound quality is poor. Getting used to the synaptics driver for the glass trackpad was hard. And you need the drivers from Apple for Windows, which they tend to take their time with.

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"Some of them..."

Some of them, certainly. Are you honestly claiming that all or even most Apple users do so because of marketing if there's no quality product to back it up?

Edit: as per your post history/above, you appear to use Apple hardware. Just because of the marketing?

"HP through marketing."

Without a product behind it.

"Dell through design"

It is to laugh.

"MS through marketing/Zune/Pink."

Which might do something for them, as by all accounts the new Zune is decent, though with some of their typical tonedeaf touches (30-second ad plays before running an app? Puh-leease.), though their smartphone OS is still atrocious.

"Google through Android."

With their 7% marketshare to iPhone's 40% (numbers from AdMob, which is naturally not entirely representative of the smartphone market as a whole, but close enough for the purposes of argument.). And this despite Android's improved openess over iPhone OS and the wider variety of harder. Or possibly because of it... Only having one platform to develop for it certainly a massive competitive advantage for iPhone over virtually anything else out there.

"Video drivers and sound drivers are poor, sound quality is poor."

Considering that video/sound chips used by Apple are all (reasonably) commonly used hardware these days, Linux not having drivers for it is squarely the fault of the Linux community/hardware manufactures who don't provide drivers for them. Ditto goes for Windows, with the trackpad being the obvious exception there.

> Are you honestly claiming that all or even most Apple users do so because of marketing if there's no quality product to back it up?

You said 'fanbois'. I replied to 'fanbois'. You took the 'fanboi' reply and blew it out.

> as per your post history/above, you appear to use Apple hardware. Just because of the marketing?

I bought Apple because OS X 10.1 looked like a way of running Linux while still having access to commercial apps should I need them. That was in 2001. I've not bought a non-apple computer since (5 laptops, 2 desktops, 2 iPhones).

As for the other comments...

Dell's Adamo was meant to be a competitor in design and functionality for the MacBook Air but is strangled by CPU and price. There is also a thin 16" laptop but it too is strangled by CPU. It looks like they inaccurately forecasted a 15" Macbook Air, designed and implemented a competitor without Apple coming to the game, which they should have.

You also have to remember that Zune/Pink and Android are late to the market in comparison to Apple. If Apple were showing Android's AdMob numbers this early you'd be talking up their chances. Because Apple are leading the market and their competitors are in their early stages of market entrance it's acceptable to look at their total numbers and go 'pah' rather than focusing on the growth.

WinMo and RIM certainly aren't in the early stages of market entrance. For that matter, the only competitor that still is anywhere close to Apple's marketshare is Symbian (which surpasses it somewhat, I believe.) But sure, let's look at it in a year or two.

"I've not bought a non-apple computer since"

Why not?

"Dell's Adamo was meant to be a competitor in design and functionality for the MacBook Air but is strangled by CPU and price."

And thus isn't. And part of Gruber's point is that better designed hardware is worthless with shit software, which will still be Dell's problem no matter what they do.

Edit:

"You said 'fanbois'. I replied to 'fanbois'"

Well, technically I replied to you saying "fanboi" in the first place. For that matter why do you think Gruber specifically is a "fanboi"? He certainly doesn't blindly agree with everything Apple does like many Apple fans, and has been very vocally critical of them at times.

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