Whenever I hear somebody moving to a Macbook and make any sort of complaint onkine, lots of people unhelpfully tell you to buy a $1000+ iPhone and that will solve all your problems, or when an Android user is “switching to iPhone”, a similar thing happens with “just use a Mac”. Why the hell do you need to purchase all the expensive devices to just use one?
Most of the time, using an iPhone, Mac, etc., does not “just work”. Maybe the UI is simply not very usable (not just Liquid Glass, see MacOS’s terrible implementation of a settings app, iOS not having an option to combine the quick settings and notifications), third-party devices (headphones, chargers, tablets, etc.) simply do not work well (no, “get the iDevice” is not helpful!), iOS having the most ass file management that may as well not exist, all the different bugs poking around everywhere (through my own experiences with iOS* and my friend’s with MacOS), etc. “Give more money to Apple to fix it” is not good advice and does not help to solve anything.
Why is it that, when Apple has inherently worse hardware, everybody seems to put up with it? On their Macs, you have 60 Hz LCD displays on a $1000+ laptop, no good ports selection unless you spend thousands more, ridiculously priced memory and storage upgrades that would be a death sentence to any other company, very shallow key travel that feels terrible to type on compared to other options, etc. As for their iPads, you have similarly not so great displays on a relatively high end tablet unless you spend thousands on a tablet with an uber-fancy M5 chip (why would anyone need that???), a keyboard case that is so expensive despite feeling like a cheap membrane keyboard you got on Aliexpress and being so top-heavy, etc. Who in their right mind would purchase a $550 set of headphones made of ridiculously heavy metal, with uncomfortable cushions, terrible battery life, mid ANC, and several year old innards?
How has Apple manipulated so many people with their marketing? I don’t really see anything quite like it in other product segments. What is the secret apple sauce?
*note that I currently run an Android phone, but I have my issues with them too that I won’t get into. My particular device is very bloated and incredibly annoying to work with sometimes, but it’s what I’ve got. On my laptop I happily run Linux, where the device simply listens to me which is a nice change of pace
edit: Actually, no, I think something similar occurs with Nintendo (in video games) and Disney (for films)
edit 2: A lot of people have added their own thoughts, and I think it boils down to these:
- consistency (this is the main one): aside from a few odd products, Apple has mostly had a good reputation for build quality and having all their products be at least good enough, sometimes excellent, in part due to their limited product selection. If you look at other laptops and phones, they are quite hit or miss for the most part
- some form of elitism: some people (not all, but definitely some) want to show off that they are better than others, and Apple having expensive products is a brand name that lots of people recognise. They think that if you see the metal chassis and the half-eaten apple, it means that person has a lot of money and influence! And since they want to show others they have lots of money and influence, they too want Apple bits (similar to the variety of other “luxury” brands)
- that one exclusive feature that you associate Apple with: think features like Airdrop or how the AirPods seamlessly switch between Apple devices, it’s one of those that traps people in the closed ecosystem
- the failures of their competitors: Windows is shooting each of their own toes, plastering all their bloat and CoPilot bits everywhere. In part due to Windows, it’s difficult to make a competitive laptop, particularly in the budget segment, since Windows 11 makes everything run worse. MacOS is the only other option besides Windows for most people if they want a laptop, this is speaking as a Linux user, as there aren’t many laptops that ship with a Linux distro OOTB. Macbooks don’t have very good repairability and have horribly expensive memory upgrades, but a lot of people don’t really care about that
- they are good enough: There might be better options available for the price, maybe there’s a 120 Hz laptop with OLED, maybe you can get better camera hardware, maybe you can have a lighter chassis, you can get an equivalent for a far lower price, etc., but a lot of people don’t want to wade through all the garbage and are okay with spending more for something they are familiar with. Apple’s products aren’t always the best, but they are never the worst, and for a lot of people, that’s enough
I think there are many reasons, some of them are:
- Apple has a very straightforward design that is instantly recognizable. People love that, it’s the same people who want to have a “great unboxing experience”
- They combine hardware and software - it is not Apple vs Android but Apple vs Samsung, Motorola, Sony and whatever; on the mobile and desktop market there is so much crappy hardware. Apple users just buy the BigMac they already know, even if there are much better burgers around
- you always never get pure Android, it is bloated by phone manufactures. You have the Samsung app store and the xiaomi app security checker and other bloat.
- Apple knows marketing very well, they tricked their customers into thinking apple cares about privacy. If you only have the Google surveillance mother ship as an alternative, they rather choose the product that promises to care about their data
- Windows is a huge pile of crap. It is such a frustrating and bad OS that has annoyed people for decades. Yes there is Linux, but it usually does not come preinstalled
- apple users join a cult when they buy Apple products. It is very important for people to “be different” or to “be smarter”
- by paying a higher price, people have the feeling of buying “premium” (which by itself is a marketing word)
I could go on and on and on. I have never used an apple product in my life and am a Linux FOSS enthusiast by the way. But I think it is pretty east to understand.
you always never get pure Android, it is bloated by phone manufactures. You have the Samsung app store and the xiaomi app security checker and other bloat.
That is true, my specific device has a pretty bloated ROM that doesn’t listen to me at all! Whenever I install an app through F-Droid / Obtainium / Aurora Store / etc., it does a “security check” that always fails (what’s the point then?) and tells me not to install this app, despite having given the install unknown apps permission already! And whenever there’s an internet problem, the phone tells me to disable private DNS (I’m using NextDNS), and there’s no option to disable that. The phone also has a whitelist for SMS messaging apps, meaning I have to choose between the stock app and Google Messages, which isn’t great.
Most of the initial advertising and such can be disabled though, and with Android I can use a custom launcher (Kvaesitso) that feels infinitely better than both the stock launcher and whatever iOS uses! And I can actually access the files through USB like a sane person, which is way better than the delicate dance with iTunes that Apple required!
If I ever get another device, I would definitely go with one that supports something like LineageOS or GrapheneOS (maybe CalyxOS if they come back), or perhaps mobile Linux will be strong by then? Who knows.
Windows is a huge pile of crap
Indeed, even if somebody was oblivious to how privacy invasive Windows is, the OS is annoying nowadays and is too bloated to run on lower end devices. If only a large manufacturer pushed Linux on the desktop as an option for a reduced cost (currently it’s just Valve, Lenovo on some of their business class devices, and smaller manufacturers like Framework and System76). Imagine if Dell, Asus, etc. had the guts to say screw you Microsoft, and they developed their own spin of Linux for their own hardware that ran better, that would be neat. Unfortunately, money. It seems like MS is currently one of the main drivers for Mac adoption…
Apple has a very straightforward design that is instantly recognizable. People love that
People like knowing what they are expecting, they don’t like surprises. I think this makes sense, given that Apple has been doing a similar design ethos of metal and glass for ages now (even in product categories where it isn’t all that great in, like their headphones and headset).
by paying a higher price, people have the feeling of buying “premium”
Perhaps given rising prices for everything now, more people will become price conscious? Dunno really
It may be hard to believe, but some people actually buy apple products because they like them.
They dont like them in any meaningful way, they are shiny, they are used to them and everyone they know has one. That is the size of it.
To re-phrase for the cheap seats people are willing to pay for familiarity and ease of use within a contained and overwatched environment. This demographic will make the transition to AI guardianship with barely a blip on the resistance scale. I am not being derogatory, it is probably the smart move.
Personally, I don’t get why the solution to many of the issues people experience with Apple devices is to buy another one.
Yes, this is only a subset of people and the Internet shows you the worst of them, but I still find it a little hard to believe somebody reasonably suggests to purchases another device that costs so much!
Personally, I don’t get why the solution to many of the issues people experience with Apple devices is to buy another one.
I’m not really familiar with this. My wife uses a macbook. She’s had it for 6 years and I can’t recall any real issues with it.
Just from my personal experiences when I was using an iPhone several years ago, as well as whatI have seen on the Internet
One of the funniest essays I ever read was by porn actress Bobbi Starr. It was about porn’s addiction to Apple products. Someone copied it from an issue of FOX Magazine.
The idea was that a girl could shoot, edit, and distribute all her own stuff on Apple devices.
There’s a thing that happens on Mastodon throughout June: #AudioMo. Basically, people taking part record and upload a bit of audio every day. Pretty simple.
I used to do it when I used iPhones. Record and edit in Ferrite, add a thumbnail image that I’d edited in Pixelmator, then export from Ferrite as an mp4 static video, ready to upload. It was a piece of piss.
These past two Junes I’ve had a Pixel on Graphene, and I’ve yet to figure out a similar workflow for it. I’ve tried a bunch of different apps, but none of them really match the quality I got used to on iOS, and I didn’t fancy spending loads of money trying different apps, only to find they were lacking in some way.
I’m beyond nontechnical. Someone gifted me an iPhone back in the day and I’ve stuck with them because I’m too lazy to learn another system.
You could probably do something similar with Termux and Ffmpeg, but that requires terminal knowledge, and would be quite a steep learning curve for someone not familiar with it already. FFMPEG and shell terminals are not the most intuitive pieces of software.
Yeah, there’s an enormous gulf between using a thoughtfully put together app, and cobbling together a solution using command line tools on a phone screen.
It would probably be easier to answer the intent behind the question, if the question itself wasn’t embellished with wild exaggeration.
Apple is a cult.
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Apple has always designed things for people who want to do things without having to be a technologist. For which I will always credit them, massively.
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Apple has always designed things to work together seamlessly. Again, massive kudos, even though I condemn their using this to lock people in.
Then there’s Job’s cult of personality, marketing Apple as for people who are better than the plebes.
I’ve never been a fan of Apple as a company, but I’ve always given massive credit for the good ideas behind making things that just work.
Or creating the myth it just works. As someone that supports corporate macs this is definitely a myth.
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As someone who prefers linux but is relegated to Windows, my wife is strictly an Apple person and I have to say I’m impressed with them.
She doesn’t use a laptop a lot but she has some upcoming certifications to renew and so she brought out her 2015 macbook pro. It was outdated and had no recent OS updates available. However after a simple manual installation of a few year newer OS it runs just fine. At one point we considered buying her a new laptop this time. While looking at new laptops I told her we could get a cheaper Windows one that would be ok for a few years or another, slightly more expensive macbook that would last another 10. I don’t think we’ll need to buy a new one though as her 2015 seems ok to run at least until 2028 and that’s only because of available OS upgrades.
Our kids were also using her iPad 2 when they were younger from 2011 and it ran fine until 2022 and again, no hardware issues, just old performance and lack of support.
But probably the biggest thing is when I put a pihole on my network. Almost EVERY device be it google, Samsung, Windows, LG, smartphones, printers, TVs, etc etc is CONSTANTLY pinging outside your network. To the tune of thousands of blocked attempts per day per device. Yet Apple products are constantly at the bottom of the blocked attempts list, closer to about 100 per device per day.
I used to be an Apple hater, but switched ~4 years ago for some of the reasons you’ve given here.
I handed my 2012 fat macbook pro down to my mom. Still kicking with 16 gigs of RAM since I upgraded it when I still had it. I myself got it for like a hundred or two hundred euros. It’s running on a newer MacOS than it officially supports with opencore. Yes, Linux will support devices even longer, but how many laptops have this kind of hardware longevity? Mostly just Thinkpads, but not all generations of those either. And SOME generations of Elitebooks, but not most of them. Bit of a survivorship bias on this one though, some of the 2010-2012 15" models had different forms of graphics chip failure, mine was 13".
Android landscape is changing, but when I switched to iOS, you could get, for the same price, 3 years of Android updates for a flagship phone vs ~5-7 for iOS. But if you have an iPhone 8, you still got security updates in May despite not having had a new major version since 2022. That model is turning 9 this year.
Android runs on non-Google devices too, so Google needs to make money off those by doing something other than selling hardware. iOS only runs on Apple devices, they’ve already made their money off each device. Not saying they’re absolute privacy champions, but they have a lot more to lose in terms of reputation if they were doing extensive spying on you 24/7.
This all without even getting into the Apple Silicon chips. M1 when I had it was ridiculously fast and power efficient already.
The reasons you hate these things are the reasons other people love them.
Other people are not you. They have different preferences and values. They like what you hate.
I run hybrid zoom sessions for people and rely solely on macbooks to run them. I have never had issues with them, and am very happy to stay on their OS (tahoe now).
I use Arch. Since around 2009. I might stop soon. My 2018 desktop might be the last PC I own. I got a MacBook from work and I’ve been using it more and more the last few years. Macs are so ridiculously fast and power efficient, it’s not even funny. I see the new laptops on LTT and you either have to use windows 11 or struggle with x86 processors.
The Macs have awesome build quality screen, sound, haptics, speed, battery life, thermals…
I tolerate the OS, I’m either on the console, IDE or browser 95% of the time anyway. Rectangle for window tiling + homebrew makes me feel 97% “at home”. I wish Asahi would allow me to run KDE but I’ll take it.
I don’t even have any other grapple product, I imagine if you have airpods, iPhone, apple TV, etc it’s even better and more magical.
At this point I would rather use a Mac than windows I suppose. They are actually rather secure and are Unix which is nice.
But in general, if you don’t care about moral, being caught in an actively hostile eco system, have enough money, and being the little bitch of bog tech, Apple is quite nice?
I mean tbh what is a valid Alternative? Android, same big tech dependency, just different company. Samsung wannabe apple but in shit and more evil. Windows, same big tech, just incompetent company and evil on top.
So apple seems at least to be quite okish if you don’t have the skill to degoogle your phone and use Linux?
In my bubble, apple has very little bad press about security, had few bugs until maybe 2 years ago, then it got worse I think? And the device connectivity is pretty solid. If you have enough money, their devices are pretty high quality, from a manufacturing standpoint. And they slowly allow repairs on their devices again
Have you ever heard the phrase ‘walled garden?’ Apple makes their products to work very well together and with anyone else’s products they work in a way that is intentionally functional, so they can’t be said to be actually blocking interoperability, but mediocre, so you’ll get a better experience with their products. If you care about price, you aren’t using apple anyway, so it milks their price-insensitive customer base for more money while only really bothering the people who wouldn’t buy them anyway.
I think there’s a neurotype of people who are more likely to have expendable income and have a certain view on how computers should work and also really seem to be concerned about appearance and social credit. Apple knows exactly who their customers are and cater exclusively to their customer base.
If you have any kind of bent towards getting more from less then you likely have existed in spaces devoid of resources. And are therefore not their target market
There is a lot of angry people, despising everything that even touched apple and let me tell you there is a lot of things I hate. For example you need second mac to reinstall os after breaking partitions no usb stick for recovery for you sucker. That said there is a lot of neat features that just work like apple tv box screen-sharing or using iphone as keyboard instead of dealing with arrow typing on remote, or when someone calls I can just respond on my laptop. To sum it up yes you can find cheaper device yes you can also find more performant device. What you won’t find is this walled garden of things that just work together. And for those angry people it’s okay that some people have different preferences than you have.
As someone who migrated from android pixel to an all in Apple ecosystem I’ll provide my context. As a software developer for cloud most of my software runs in Linux, so having a platform that mirrors it pretty closely is a plus, in addition to being a sturdy and performant coding machine, development on a windows laptop has always been far clunkier and unstable comparatively to my Mac experience. From there a person recommended I get an Apple TV to get away from my Samsung smart TV integrations that were dog shit slow, this was a vast improvement plus I could mirror my laptop to the tv easily.
From there I decided I wanted to do some pen drawing on a tablet, and I looked into things like remarkable etc but my experience with android tablets with pens was lackluster so I went with a iPad Pro with the pencil and it has been a great experience, the fact that it can seamlessly be controlled by the MacBook was pretty stunning the first time I accidentally discovered that feature. Follow that up with being able to plug in the iPad and have it be a 2nd display and it has been a great companion to the MacBook.
I got my wife a iPad Air as well and she loved it so when it came time to upgrade our phones I looked at my history with android, of my last 4 android pixel devices all 4 of them had to be recalled either for a bricked scenario from a patch or battery expansion. I decided I might as well give the iPhone a try, this also allowed my wife to have a universal computing experience as she could open tabs on her phone then migrate to the tablet seamlessly.
When I got the iPhones I decided to get their AirPod pros as well since I heard they can pretty easily transition(without button press) between devices easily, and that it has hearing aid grade audio enhancement(I am old and have bad hearing in certain scenarios. The user tailored enhanced hearing was game changing in certain environments and the transitioning between devices has been in all but 1 scenario a great experience(for some reason my iPhone 16 and the AirPods don’t always get along, requiring a phone restart to get them to operate).
Android auto vs CarPlay is personal preference but I find CarPlay to be a bit more sleek and easier to navigate and more performant.
So the trick at least for me has been how seamlessly it all fits together, the hardware quality and polish(aside from the iPhone/airpod thing that does annoy me pretty hard) and the reduction in overhead I have. Instead of dealing with windows 11 bloat and spyware, android device quality and occasional patching problems, a TV that runs like dogshit because it’s using old phone hardware to drive the experience, I can instead focus on what I want to do with the hardware, it just makes me more productive, less admin work, more time to create.
Time will tell I suppose if I feel the same way when my current stack ages out of the support window, but overall I prefer the low maintenance I encounter with this setup so I can focus my efforts on my docker swarm and other facets of my homelab.
How has Apple manipulated so many people with their marketing?
Look around you. People are DUUUUUUMB.
People don’t do their homework. People like to one up each other. People like to flaunt that they have the coolest shit.
I’m an IT professional. It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than to find an actual IT professional that likes Apple products unless they work for Apple.
It’s not that Apple products don’t work, it’s that they’re inferior in every way but I guess looking cooler.
To each their own. If people want to blow a bunch of money unnecessarily, then that’s their prerogative. But people who know better are going to mock them for it.
IT professionals may hate them, but software engineers tend to love them. Something about having a unix system with great performance and less fidgeting to get things working most of the time.
This is a pretty unhelpful, dare I say DUUUUUUMB, answer
Source: I’m an IT professional who has met exactly one IT professional in my life that liked Apple, and he was right out of college.
Point being, from experience, I know experienced tech people don’t like Apple. And that only people susceptible to advertising buy their garbage.
P.S. Fuck you.
