Newsgroup: it.comp.macintosh
Titolo: Un'opinione su "mamma" Apple

Tratto da "TechWeb newsletter del 18-11-1998"
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Apple's Heavy Hand Strikes Again
By Fred Langa 
Mac users not only put up with outrageously totalitarian behavior on
Apple's part, but also actually love Apple for it. 
Let me say it up front: I'm not a Mac user. I don't purport to be an
expert in the inner intricacies of Mac hardware or software. 
But some of what Apple does is so broad in its sweep, so open, blatant,
and billboard-obvious, you don't even have to know what a computer is
to see what's going on. And, I believe, anyone not wearing Mac blinders
can see how totally wrong it is. 
We already discussed one recent example: the offensive, deceitful ad
campaign for the iMac. Some of the ads made obviously and deliberately
misleading statements about the speed of the iMac ("faster than a
Pentium II/400," for example). Other ads pandered to the worst
attitudes and attributes of people. In effect, they said, "Buy a Mac
and you can be among the smugly superior chosen few." 
But it's Apple's corporate behavior that drives me nuts. Imagine the
outcry if Microsoft somehow could force all PC makers out of business
at a whim, leaving only Microsoft-branded hardware available to buy.
Yet that's exactly what Apple has done. First it prevented clones from
appearing, then, much later, when a few Mac cloners were finally up and
running, Apple pulled their licensing. You want a Mac system? You have
to buy it from Apple. No choice, no freedom, no options. 
And now, Apple appears to have planted another anti-clone land mine in
the new Mac OS 8.5, which mostly plays cosmetic catch-up to Windows,
adding features that have been in the Microsoft OS for years. 
Apple says it supports OS 8.5 only on Apple-branded PowerPC systems.
This is bad enough -- sort of like saying if you buy a Buick, you can
only use Buick-brand gasoline, Buick tires, Buick wiper blades, etc. 
But it's worse than even that. It's not enough to have an authentic
Apple-branded system. Early user reports suggest even the components
have to be Apple-branded. And God help you if you upgraded your system
with, say, a non-Apple drive: The new OS may refuse to install, or may
install and trash your drive. 
MacInTouch, an online Mac community, reports "more than 1,000
MacInTouch readers have reported severe disk corruption associated with
the upgrade process. Many lost valuable work, and others lost a great
deal of time or money." 
MacInTouch also reports, "Apple continues to investigate the issue,
collecting drives for analysis and requiring the owners to sign
nondisclosure agreements that prevent them from discussing the
problem." So it's hard to know exactly what's going on. 
But it sure looks fishy. Hard drives are pretty generic. They're
commodities. There's no mystery to them, no new standards and practices
to be worked out. I mean, if we were talking USB or DVD issues, I could
understand it. But hard drives? 
Putting the best possible face on this problem, it looks like colossal
incompetence to fail to provide decent hard-drive installation
routines. A less charitable view, circumstantially backed by Apple's
"Apple only" support policy, suggests something far more evil: a way to
force users to buy and use only products from Apple. 
Either way, users lose. Apple once again eliminates choice and makes
you do things its way or not at all. 
Man, I'm glad Apple has a tiny market share. It would be a horrible,
expensive, choiceless computing world if it were in charge. Microsoft
has many failings and ugly practices, but in its wildest dreams, it's
never been anywhere nearly as totalitarian as Apple. 
Apple says, "Think different." But what it means is think in exactly
the way Apple wants you to. 
No thanks. 
(Fred Langa is a senior consulting editor and columnist for Windows
Magazine.) 
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Senza commenti, per il momento.
-- 
"And the whole world could have passed through me 
But I don't know that it means much to me"  

 Senza commenti, per il momento.
e senza traduzione...io fo' fatica a leggere i messaggioni poi in
inglese...e d'altronde che aspettarsi da un commentatore di parte...
f.

 Magazine.) 
Ah beh... allora si spiegano le bull*hit... 
-- 
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