Mac Law Students

I recently stumbled across not one, not two, but three websites devoted in various ways to dissing Apple and the Macintosh platform. Looking at them in turn, I was surprised to find some valuable content, and annoyed at the anonymity of all three.

The Mac Sucks

The Mac Sucks purports to be “[t]aking a critical view of all things Apple, while remaining as platform-neutral as we can.” After reading a few of the posts and pondering the meaning of the term platform-neutral, I’m reminded of the scene in The Princess Bride, when Inigo Montoya tells Vizzini, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

On the Why Did You Make This Site? page, the author purports to be a level-headed informant, just out to do good:

I guess you’d say the ultimate goal of this site is to create a more-open-minded Apple customer base. I want people to think about the purchases they make, ignore the hype, see the reality, and vote with their dollars when they see the right product. If that “right product” is from Apple, so be it.

The implication seems to be that Apple’s customer base somehow can’t see the limitations of Apple products, and therefore are in dire need of some assistance. Poor benighted Mac users need to be shown the light of reason! It seems Ars Technica, Daring Fireball, Gizmodo, MacFixIt, MacWorld, and the dozens of other top-notch sites that cover Apple hardware and software have all been bamboozled. Apple advertising and Mac Fanboys seem to be the chief target of this blog.

We Hate Macs

We Hate Macs doesn’t attempt to hide behind a thin veil of impartiality. The writing is also top-notch:

OMGZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111 THE HATE COMMUNITY IS GROWING BY THE MINUTE, THIS IS FOR ALL YOU ITALIAN HATERS OUT THERE

As far as I can tell, I don’t think anyone affiliated with the site hates Italians. But they certainly are enthusiastic about their hatred of the Mac. Actually they seem more annoyed by Mac users than by Macs themselves. The site contains a lengthy analysis of Mac Fanboys and why they are to be loathed.

The Lame Leopard

The Lame Leopard is a strange blog that goes on and on about the horrors of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). It reads like a laundry list of problems encountered by an individual user who owns a MacBook and seems to have extensive Mac experience. One post made reference to issues with the original 128k Mac. So it seems that perhaps this person is a long-time Mac power user who is annoyed at the direction Apple has taken with OS X of late.

Got Names?

But that’s the real trouble with all three of these sites. While The Mac Sucks actually brings up some legitimate gripes, the name is calculated to provoke a negative response, and there is no information about who is writing the content. Yes, the writer purports to be a sysad who works with Linux, Macintosh, Windows, but we’re supposed to take this on faith, as the writer doesn’t use a name. Annoyingly, he/she also refers to self in the plural in many of the articles. “We at The Mac Sucks think…”

We Hate Macs is run by a handful of haters who use pseudonyms and tell us the countries they are from. Again, that’s not much info to go on when trying to determine the validity and utility of the opinions found on the site.

What Stirs Them to Such Anger?

It seems there are three main things that get these folks wound up:

• The smugness of Apple
• The smugness/stupidity of Mac Fanboys
• The limitations of Apple products

The Smugness of Apple

A common gripe from Apple-haters is that the company annoys them. Steve Jobs is so polished as a presenter, and he attempts to claim that Apple does everything first. Well, Apple has done a lot of things before anyone else got on the wagon. As for Jobs boasting, the guy is one of literally a handful of people who led the creation of the personal computer industry.

The ads are too slick, too clever by half, and somehow condescending. The “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” ads in particular get their goat. I personally think they’re very effective ads. My guess is that they are very effective, given that Apple has kept the campaign running for so long. As for whether they’re annoying or not, we’re talking about television advertising, folks. It’s an inherently annoying medium.

The Smugness & Stupidity of Mac Fanboys

Fanboys (and there are Fangirls, too) are folks who glom onto a technology or vendor and irrationally defend it against all comers. There are Nintendo Fanboys, Linux Fanboys, and Mac Fanboys, but oddly you never hear about Dell Fanboys or Windows Fanboys. That is because most of the time the people who call other people fanboys are not terribly enthusiastic about the technology they use. So they figure anyone who is really excited about a particular technology is probably being irrational about it. The idea behind this is that if a person becomes emotionally attached to a technology, if they really enjoy using it, they’re just being a tool.

Interestingly there is no term for the opposite of a fanboy, a person who steadfastly holds onto their technology preference while bashing others for holding onto a different technology. The closest term would be hater, but that doesn’t capture the full meaning. Purporting to be disinterested and rational, as the person behind The Mac Sucks does, while engaging in a bash-fest, is disingenuous at best.

The Mac Sucks and We Hate Macs do bring up a good point, though. There is no perfect platform, and everything Apple touches does not turn to gold. I’ve found over the years the best way to incur avoid [ed. 5/19/08] the wrath of the haters is to stay knowledgeable about what’s going on outside the Macintosh world, and to not assume that the Mac does everything better than PCs. I can’t even count the number of conversations I’ve had with skeptical PC users who sneer at my Mac, until they see that what I’m doing with it. “Oh, you can’t do that on Windows?” I ask, innocently.

The Limitations of Apple Products

Pricing comes up almost every time I talk with a PC zealot. You can run price comparisons all day long and find cases in which Apple comes out ahead on price, as well as cases in which HP or Dell comes out ahead. These comparisons usually don’t factor in the ease of use and overall productivity of the Macintosh hardware and operating system, iLife, and the associated capabilities the Mac provides. But that’s beside the point. Someone who wants to argue on price will, like a conspiracy theorist, never be satisfied. They’ll always find a way to beat you on it. So I don’t bother with that argument.

After pricing there are a long list of reasons why some haters find Macs terribly limited. They usually come down to graphics card capabilities, limitations on hackability, and design decisions like the one-button mouse (there are still huge numbers of PC users who think Macs don’t support two-button mice). Sometimes the reasons are legitimate. For a long time Apple didn’t ship Macs with enough RAM to really get the job done. Apple usually doesn’t lead the pack with graphics cards, either (not surprisingly, PC gamers seem to make up a rather large segment of the Mac-hating community).

There’s really no arguing with someone who looks at the hardware specs on a Mac and finds them wanting. Some people feel that specs define a computer. The higher the clock speed, the more RAM, and the faster the graphics card, the better the computer. Others, like me, feel that the overall experience of using a computer defines its utility.

Stand for Vitriol!

The Mac Sucks and The Lame Leopard have some useful things to say. So it is unfortunate that the authors of these blogs chose to use such inflammatory names. If the point is to shine light and reason into the dark confines of the Reality Distortion Field, you’d think more even-handed naming would be appropriate. But the names of the blogs and the tone of the writing don’t seem platform-neutral to me.

Speaking of names, I understand that the aforementioned authors may have jobs to protect, but it is a shame that they don’t feel they can attach their real names to their posts. I’ve found putting my name on Mac Law Students content beneficial, because it makes me stand behind everything I write. When I post on a discussion board under a pseudonym, I’ve noticed I’m much less deliberate.

Then again, I’m assuming that the people behind these sites are interested in accurately portraying both sides of a given issue. They may simply be sharpshooters, and sharpshooting is easier from a position of concealment.

Image Credit

The photo is a cropped version of Mad about the Ban, by Jan Tik, posted at flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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