I Don't Give A Damn About My Apple Products

If it works, who cares what brand it is?

But how can we define our identities, if not in terms of the brands we identify with!? ;)

I sometimes get into an endless loop with friends about this when it transpires that I own an iPad.

- Ah, so you finally saw the greatness of all things Apple!
- No, I only bought an iPad.
- Ah, but why didn't you get an Android if you hate Apple?
- I don't care about Apple. The iPad was my choice of tablet , is all.
- Ah, so you love Apple products!
- No, the sheet music reader that made me want a tablet in the first place only exists for the iPad.
- Ah, but if Android is so great, why doesn't it have any cool apps? Is it because you and everyone else loves Apple, perhaps?
- ...

You buy a gadget and get religion by association.

When you drive on a highway you do not care bout the company that build it.

Religious beliefs have been around in IT since I started in that business in 1995 and long before that. I bought a Mac in 1994 and realized that most apple software had a price tag 5-10 times higher than software for PC, even if the Mac had a great and simple user interface. I have never liked closed platforms with hardware and software coming from the same single company.

My only strong opinions relating to Apple are from when my debit card was cloned in 2008 and the criminals bought some Macs at my expense. I had and still have a bog standard PC. It works fine for me â¦

Being as I am in a mixed marriage --I'm the one with the PC-- I was surprised when my spouse went for the Android phone. He liked it so well, I ended up getting one, too. Great interface, syncs with all my google stuff. A year or so later, I got an iPad. There are things I really like it for, but frankly, I don't like the interface; for one thing, I've always loathed iTunes. I dislike how the keyboard works, too. I would not care for an iPhone, based on my experience with the iPad.

My next smartphone will be an Android. My spouse's next phone will be an iPhone. Go figure. Guess it really is a cult.

(OT) Breaking news: "Oldest artist's workshop in the world discovered" http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21046-oldest-artists-workshop-in-…

100.000 years ...that is some serious technology staying power. Of course, today we mix paint in plastic trays rather than abalone shells, but the basic idea is the same. IT industry, eat your heart out!

It's debatable how much "quackery" had to do with Jobs' death. This site says Everything, this site says Not So Much. What it boils down to is that Jobs may have delayed treatment by about nine months early on when his cancer seemed like the innocuous kind that makes up 5% of pancreatic cancers. His treatment then became very aggressive including Whipple surgery that removes a large chunk of pancreas. The cancer moved to his liver. He had a liver transplant. In spite of everything, he died.

Now that is not the medical history of someone who embraces quackery. And all this "nine months delay" business is based on a single story that appeared in Fortune magazine a while back. Was it accurate? It seems to me that Jobs is being turned into a whipping boy by both scientists and quacks on the basis of very little hard information.

My assessment, from independent evaluations and playing with the stuff myself:

Apple products are a lot more expensive.
They have been the industry innovators, which in part explains the high prices. The other parts are the build quality, plus they have the highest profit margins in the business.
Design is good.
Build quality is a lot better that the competition.
The graphics are excellent.
Reliability is just average compared to the competition.
After sales service is good.

Cheaper stuff will do the same job. It just depends how much you value the build quality and the quality of the graphics, whether the substantial extra cost is worth it.

I think the iPad is a toy. I simply don't understand why people think they are so wonderful. But that goes for any tablet.

Declaration - I currently use a Compaq laptop, which I wish would die because it is a cheap piece of junk and I hate it. It offends me. It does the job, which is why it is still here. When it dies, I will replace it with a MacBook Pro. I want the Apple graphics because I am into photography.

I have previously been deterred by the idea of a closed environment, but find it actually doesn't bother me.

I am using an iPhone4. I can make no useful comparisons, because it is only the second smartphone I have used. But I have no complaints. It works. The battery life is adequate, but only barely, so I got a juice box to plug it into which doubles battery life.

I have an iPad sitting in the cupboard belonging to my daughter, given to her as a gift by an over-zealous relative. Neither of us uses it because we both regard it as a useless piece of junk. If you have a smartphone and a laptop, what do you need a tablet for?

I have an iPod which I inherited from my daughter which is also sitting in the cupboard because my iPhone serves as an iPod. My daughter is using a newer iPod which is permanently attached to her ears with super glue. That would be totally redundant if she had a smartphone, but she doesn't want one.

Your fellow science blogs blogger, a practicing surgeon, disagrees with the claim that alternative medicine killed Steve Jobs.

I note that you're not a doctor/surgeon, and AFAICT have no relevant expertise in the treatment of cancer.

Now our respectful insolence friend ...

1. Thinks that Job's choice to pursue an alternative course of treatment was stupid (I agree).

2. If the cancer had been aggressive and if he'd refused conventional treatment after dabbling with alternative approaches, the claims would probably be correct.

3. However, there's no indication that the neuroendocrine tumor (not pancreatic cancer) Jobs had was aggressive, and no indication that delaying surgery and follow-up treatment increased his risk, particularly since it was caught very early. Most people don't detect it nearly as early as it was in his case, and still have an excellent prognosis.

4. "His treatment then became very aggressive including Whipple surgery that removes a large chunk of pancreas." The author of respectful insolence points out that the choice to do this surgery would have to do with the *location*, not extensiveness, of the tumor. Jobs was unfortunate that his tumor was at the head of pancreas rather than in a location more accessible to a surgeon. He also points out that the difficulty (mortality rate is relatively high for this surgery) and the implications for future quality of life are such that a responsible surgeon would probably not recommend doing it if the cancer had indeed spread rapidly and aggressively in the 9 months from detection to surgery.

5. Finally, Jobs turned to conventional care relatively quickly (in relationship to how this particular kind of cancer tends to progress) and once having made that choice, stuck with it.

Not necessarily definitive but I suggest folks read it through. He also castigates those who claim that Jobs would've survived if he had continued with alternative approaches - not only are some claiming that alternative medicine killed him, others claim that conventional medicine killed him.

He thinks the real answer is one that is so often true with cancer: Jobs was unlucky in that he fell into that unlucky 10% or so of people with this kind of neuroendocrine tumor who are going to die from it rather than make it ten years cancer free ...

I got a apple laptop a few years ago and got a lot of "you finally saw the light" comments. Not really. I had a string of PC laptops and was curious. Also most people I work with have Macs, so it make things a bit better at work. It works fine enough, and I have Parallels and Win7 on it anyway. I can't say I feel strongly about it.

The only reason to follow Steve Jobs and Apple is that they were responsible for rolling out an awful lot of technology starting with all in one, ready to use personal computers (the Apple II), the mouse, icon, windows interface (Lisa and Mac), and a lot of other stuff. They were rarely the first, but they managed to bring it to market and get people to buy it, usually because they did a better job of integrating the hardware and software. Most personal computer companies make the hardware and buy their software from outsiders. Apple does hardware and software, so they can usually make them work well together.

Jobs always reminded me of Henry Ford, who brought the automobile, for better or worse, to the common man. He was always considered a market leader, aggressively brought down production costs, and was frequently at the brink of bankruptcy.

I always scoff at somebody who considers the Mac OS to be a "closed" system. As somebody who has a good bit of Linux experience, and a love for DIY computer science, I've found OSX to be almost as open in every way imaginable, aside from tinkering with the upper level API's, but they work so well that I have never felt a need to touch them (and Apple leaves plenty of hooks in the API's for future programmers to customize with). OSX is not iOS, no matter how much people from "the Windows side" naturally believe it is based on their limited background in Apple tech. A little time on Google goes a long way when it comes to opening up the Mac OS. The rock-solid UNIX foundation is still totally accessible to the end user.

I'm a Mac user, but, I have my limits. iPods are nice, but iPads are useless. Given the choice between Windows and Linux, Linux all the way. Microsoft software is the stuff of my nightmares.