1. From a social media teenager bullying story:
At Hudson High School, Facebook is yesterday’s news — “Most of Facebook is just people saying, ‘Is anyone still on Facebook?'” one student says — and increasingly, students are interacting on Twitter.
This is the dirty little secret of Facebook–teenagers don’t use it anymore. You don’t see this in print much but it’s been true for a while.
2. Rush Limbaugh’s latest idiotic claim that Republicans are the real Apple users, and that the lamestream tech media discriminates against Apple, is strange and wrong on so many levels, but I’ll pick just one: the butt of the tech media is Microsoft, mainly because most of what they’ve been doing lately has been a half-success (Windows Phone and Windows 8) or a miserable failure (Surface and RT). Apple gets a lot of press, most of it good, and their products are always well-reviewed.
Google is probably the tech company that gets the biggest undeserved kisses from tech journalists, at least in the tech press I read. Case in point: the Moto X, which smells a bit like a turd to me, with a substandard screen, being sold at the same prices as nicer looking and more powerful phones. The Verge seems to be searching for something good to say about it to justify the score it gets.
Overall, though, tech mags are read by a younger mostly male audience, which tends towards pockets of libertarianism but probably votes mainly Democratic, like most of the younger demographic. Making them the object of hatred of his Efferdent brigade is a no-brainer for Rush. The part I don’t get is the side of Apple love: fixed income angry old men are not going to pay “extra” for a Mac when they can buy a cheap laptop at Best Buy for half the price.
maye
my teen and his friends are all on tumblr. once parents figure out tumblr, they’ll be on to something else.
cleek
teens don’t use FB because most teens don’t have kids to post pictures of, nor do they eat lunches worth taking pictures of.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
I figured that’s why they call it Mombook.
Marmot
When did Repubs find out about Apple? Last I recall, they were all “Windows 95 is amazing!”
Craigo
Rush did concede that most tech people are “liberal Democrat” in their political leanings. Must have been one of those brief moments of lucidity in between pills.
Redshirt
MySpace is poised for a hipster comeback.
jayjaybear
Are we supposed to be bothered that teens don’t use Facebook? That’s what I’m kind of getting from “dirty little secret”. If so, I’m not sure why.
gene108
\
I don’t think anyone under 30 really uses Facebook much or 25 anyway.
Because of the upward pressure from teens to not be one of the “olds” the 20 somethings are jumping onto Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, etc.
I think Gen X is probably the sweet spot for Facebook users. Baby Boomers can be overwhelmed by all the new forms of media and the Millennials don’t want to copy middle-aged codgers.
mistermix
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): It’s the MySpace of the 2010’s.
PurpleGirl
The only reason I have a Facebook page is that I need it in order to use the Facebook pages of the cat shelters and a few other hobby interests.
I think that as companies began to use Facebook lots of younger people left it behind. It became too corporatist.
Just Some Fuckhead
Old people ruined Facebook and now they’re trying to ruin Apple.
mistermix
@jayjaybear:
The coverage of Facebook that I see in the press is all focused on their mobile strategy and their stock price. If a group that is deeply invested in, and who have a deep understanding of, social media are abandoning it, then to me that’s the real story. They’re the canary in the coal mine.
dr. luba
“This is the dirty little secret of Facebook–teenagers don’t use it anymore. You don’t see this in print much but it’s been true for a while.”
I was under the impression that Facebook wasused mostly by middle-aged women. And some middle-aged men.
Not teens, anyway, for quie some time. They’ve been avoiding it for a while. Who wants their parents to know what they’re up to? Not an entirely bad thing though–fewer One Direction fan posts. (No Bieber, though–my younger friends and relatives have some taste.)
schrodinger's cat
@gene108: I don’t use Facebook and am not a teen. I have no desire to to 100s of photos of the most mundane activities of my husband’s extremely large and crazy family in India.
ETA: I will give you one example, there was some religious ceremony for my husband’s pregnant cousin, and her father shared photographs ( 300 or so) of people basically standing around and doing nothing.
Marmot
@Redshirt: This disturbs me. It sounds like a joke that could actually be true.
Spaghetti Lee
A lot of my early-20s friends still use FB. Granted, a lot of them don’t, but I don’t know if they’ve jumped to tumblr or just don’t do any social media stuff at all.
Either way, I hate tumblr, so I figure I won’t be one of them.
PurpleGirl
@Marmot: Hey, I’m still using Windows XP as my OS. It’s stable and I can run old word processing software on it. I don’t have the money to keep buying new software.
Keith P.
Limbaugh’s thinking is likely, “I have an Apple phone. Therefore, Apple is conservative, therefore liberals hate Apple, therefore the media hates Apple.”
Marmot
@mistermix: Yep. What’s the right metaphor, though? It’s a fruit rotting from inside? They’ve built upon a foundation of sand?
Maybe the canary is best.
beth
My teen deleted her Facebook account and communicates almost exclusively on Tumblr or Snapchat. Facebook is for aunts and uncles, mom and dad.
schrodinger's cat
@gene108: I don’t use Facebook and am not a teen. I have no desire to to 100s of photos of the most mundane activities of my husband’s extremely large and crazy family in India.
ETA: I will give you one example, there was some religious ceremony for my husband’s pregnant cousin, and her father shared photographs ( 300 or so) of people basically standing around and doing nothing.
? Martin
Tech press on Apple is generally quite good. Financial press on Apple is catastrophically bad. Limbaugh has been a die-hard Mac user forever, and I have a hard time believing he’s not a shareholder.
I don’t give any energy to what Limbaugh says here because it’s just as utterly incoherent as anything else he says.
As for Facebook, kik and instagram are where they seem to mostly live, with some twitter thrown in. Facebook is how their teachers organize sports/etc., so that pretty much kills it right there.
MattF
Well, fwiw, twenty years ago I shared an office with someone who was both a Limbaugh fan and an Apple fan. So, possibly, he’s not completely wrong, just living in some alternative past epoch.
NonyNony
My takeaway is that Limbaugh is probably an iPhone user. Since conservative == good, in the Apple v Android “my giant megacorporation can beat up your giant megacorporation” pissing match, if he’s identifying Apple as “conservative” it’s probably because he’s an iPhone user.
Also my takeaway is that Limbaugh must be having problems keeping his daily three hours of hate rants going if he’s propping up his hatred of all things liberal with a dose of hatred of all things Android. I look forward to his commentary on which brand of cola is the “conservative” one (probably Pepsi) and which of the big two comic book companies is the “conservative” one (both in my opinion, but he’d probably go with DC since Marvel gets all the good press for the last few years).
@gene108:
I’m usually on board with the ragging on the Boomers for various things (don’t get me started about how they raised a shitty generation of kids in the Gen Xers – my generation – and have only themselves to blame for where we are in this post-Reagan wasteland that is the 21st century USA), but this in my experience is wrong. Most of the folks I know who are HEAVY users of the Facebook are Boomers. The only reason I ever got a Facebook account was because my Boomer mom pressured me into getting one so I could post pictures of her grandkid for her to see. I think grandparents – especially retired ones – use Facebook a lot and that is the Boomer demographic at the moment.
Waldo
As Yogi Berra famously tweeted: Nobody goes on Facebook anymore. It’s too crowded.
Freemark
The reason Rush loves him some Apple is because the corporation is a Republican dream. Outsourcing master, check; tax cheat master, check; protecting their profits and market share by any underhanded means necessary, check. Apples products may appeal to Democrats but business practices are pure Republican.
The other reason is that Republicans, that do use computers, have to use Apples. They can’t mentally handle the complications of Windows, Android, or especially Linux.
dan
Macbook – $1500, laptop – $300.
Cris (without an H)
From my perspective, the point of facebook is to get back in touch with your old acquaintances from high school and college that you haven’t heard from in years. If you’re still in high school, you don’t need it for that. (You do need it, though, for your parents to get hold of you.)
Xboxershorts
Anyone who wishes to pay a premium for an Apple product that is no more reliable nor capable but that also comes with proprietary and intrusive apps like iTunes can blow their money and give themselves all the grey hair and aggravation they so richly deserve.
I worked an Apple repair shop many moons ago and I have never used an Apple product since. The experience totally turned me completely sour on all things Apple. That and I completely detest the built in DRM management of iTunes that renders one’s media collection into lockdown state.
I’d rather wrestle with Windows or run my home network cloud on Samba than be locked into Apple’s proprietary bullshit.
In other words…the moronic republicans of today are welcome to blow all the dough they can on Apple’s faux hipster douchebag inspired products..
PS..Facebook is great for coordinating amongst my many geographically diverse friends. I will continue to use it for that purpose.
mistermix
@dan: I was being generous on the double price thing.
Thinking about it, Rush’s target demo is perfect for Chromebooks ($200 and idiot-proof as long as you have a decent wifi signal).
The Moar You Know
Failbook, as my teenaged next door neighbors call it, is for old people. The kids apparently are communicating in lots of ways, but Facebook is reserved for their parents and grandparents.
Talk smack about Google all you want but my Nexus 7 kicks both the iPad and the disgraceful iPad mini up and down the block, and even worse for the comparison, it’s half the price.
I know a LOT of Republicans who use Apple machines, and they do it for the same reason that Democrats do; it’s a simple UI for technical illiterates, and it works well for a population of computer users who have no desire to open the hood and see what’s under there. That’s more than fine, it’s how most computers should be, because that’s how most of them are used. As to “being discriminated against”, well, that’s just flat-out wrong. The media of all stripes puts on the kneepads for Apple and gets to work with vigor.
Sounds like someone bought a few too many shares at $650.
MomSense
@cleek:
Plus they really don’t want their grandparents, parents, aunts, and uncles to see what they are really up to!
My kids have been talking about the myspaceification of facebook. It was already stale but once it went public it is now full of all of the sponsored posts and advertising in the feeds.
cleek
@dan:
the generic laptop probably doesn’t have the same specs that the macbook does
Gin & Tonic
What a US-centric perspective. FB is huge and still growing among all segments in the non-English-speaking world (excluding China, of course.)
max
This is the dirty little secret of Facebook–teenagers don’t use it anymore.
It’s a big classmates.com now as far as I can tell.
2. Rush Limbaugh’s latest idiotic claim that Republicans are the real Apple users, and that the lamestream tech media discriminates against Apple, is strange and wrong on so many levels
I read it as the other way around: he seemed to be thinking, er, ‘thinking’ that Apple has a bunch of cash and some successful products, so Apple is just like Republicans. And the media picks on them because of that. (i.e. he’s bitching about people bitching about Apple doing nothing with it’s cash hoard.) Of course, last I heard, Apple was for supposed rich hippies.
I’ll pick just one: the butt of the tech media is Microsoft, mainly because most of what they’ve been doing lately has been a half-success (Windows Phone and Windows 8)
I’m not sure about that half-success part.
or a miserable failure (Surface and RT).
I read it as major fail, fail, total fail, and OMG! What a bust! (In fact, since billg left, they’re like batting 2 or 3 for like 20.)
Apple gets a lot of press, most of it good, and their products are always well-reviewed.
The er, Apple in the usual suspects’ eyes.
Case in point: the Moto X, which smells a bit like a turd to me, with a substandard screen, being sold at the same prices as nicer looking and more powerful phones.
It looks pretty nice, it just seems like its at the wrong price point.
The part I don’t get is the side of Apple love: fixed income angry old men are not going to pay “extra” for a Mac when they can buy a cheap laptop at Best Buy for half the price.
It’s Lush Rimjob – it’s not going to be more than half-coherent at best.
max
[”Twas ever thus.’]
Belafon
1. FYWP for not remembering my name, and complete destroying my comment.
2. My oldest uses Facebook to communicate with the friends he is going to meet for the first time when they get to college. It actually helps with planning being able to write more than 140 characters.
3. I can’t wait for the inevitable “The government is invading my privacy by reading Twitter” whining. Some of it here.
4. The Apply-versus-the-world mentality is as annoying as the Christians-are-being-persecuted complex.
schrodinger's cat
@MomSense: I left a message for you on the other thread, I wanted an update about the situation with 3 kittehs and the chipmunk. Thread needs more kitteh, Purrsident Kitteh, no less.
Gin & Tonic
@Belafon: FYWP for not remembering my name
This.
Hey mistermix, this is broken. Going to a new thread, you have to type in your nym and e-mail again.
The Moar You Know
@PurpleGirl: When you are finally forced to upgrade, I think you’ll find Windows 7 a nice transition. Not much changes, and it is very stable.
I’m one of the rare ones who is enjoying Windows 8, but the UI is not ready for primetime and the 8.1 version doesn’t sound like it will be either. I DO NOT want to transition the office staff into Win8 until it has a start button, you got that, Microsoft? You created this monster, you deal with it. Put the stupid button back in.
Citizen_X
@cleek:
Nobody does.
With the sole exception of jeffreyw. That is, someone with great cooking AND photography skills. If that doesn’t describe you, pls don’t post pictures of your damn lunch.
Ted & Hellen
Like everything else in the media, it’s an exaggeration to say “teenagers don’t use…” FB. But their use has dropped significantly.
And why would that be surprising? Who wants to hang out where your mom and dad are?
piratedan
@beth: waiting for it all to come full circle as Teens and tweens discover this little known “hidden” feature on their phones that allow them to actually speak and listen to each other called “voice” that offers “real time interaction”.
srv
The kids are not on twitter, they’re on snapchat.
Like chatroulette, but pr0n pics with people you know.
Roger Moore
@cleek:
And those specs are more or less irrelevant if you’re mostly using it for surfing the web, sorting your photos, and editing the occasional office document. Modern computers are grossly overpowered for most of what we use them for, which is the main reason tablets are such a big deal.
Belafon
@The Moar You Know: I installed this, classic shell. I realize it’s not from MS, but it added a start button and menu.
Matt McIrvin
I got on Facebook so I could keep in touch with my relatives, most of them near or past retirement age. Some of my 40-something old friends are there too. It is not, by and large, a youthful cohort.
I am actually more active on Google+, which has become a science/math geek haven for some reason unclear to me. When that started out, the circles feature was heavily promoted, and I figured that for that reason I’d use it mostly for circle-restricted posts. But my real-life friends and family largely abandoned the place after just a few days, and it instead got a clientele oddly resembling the better parts of Usenet circa 1995 (though Google’s unpredictable UI changes periodically drive some of them away).
Twitter apparently doesn’t function properly unless you’re using a sufficiently fancy client program to read it, and I haven’t bothered to obtain one, so I’m not very active there.
beth
@piratedan: Ha ha, when my daughter was younger, she loved going to my mom’s house and talking on the wall phone that had a cord attached. Surprisingly, she didn’t think wireless phones were curious but the idea that sound could come through a cord just blew her mind!
Comrade Dread
Conservatives want to be seen as cool and hip instead of the guys who hit the buffet line at 4pm for dinner and show their AARP card for discount.
? Martin
@MattF:
50% of phones sold in the US right now are iPhones. Apple is expected to sell 350 million iOS devices just this year, and has sold over 500 million in the last 4 years. With devices selling for under $50, you don’t even need much money to be in the club. There’s really no label you can put on Apple users as a result.
Capri
The fact that people use Apple products regardless of their political leanings should be instructive. I read a very good article once about how manufactured and false most of the Red vs. Blue, Libtards vs. Teabaggers dichotomy really is in this country. Example number one is that both purchase their products at the same big box stores, use the same technologies, and (with the exception of the content of the TV, radio, and blogs they used) have basically the same lives.
Ruckus
@NonyNony:
Being an early boomer and a FB user I have to agree.
Most of the users I see are boomers although some groups have younger users. And of course nothing is absolute.
Xenos
I went back to school for the last year, getting a degree with a bunch of whippersnapper 20-somethings, and I was surprised to find that they use facebook for everything. Instant messaging, collaborating on projects, sending documents and spreadsheets by attachment, and so on.
I have teens in the house and they have zero interest in facebook. Tumblr is the new online personality platform for sharing whatever interests them, or that they have created, and keeping the conversations and the private details to an absolute minimum.
Villago Delenda Est
If Rethugs are Apple users, how does Lardass explain the debut of the Romney ORCA project?
I’m glad Steve Jobs is no longer alive, because this comparison would kill him for sure.
Belafon
@beth: Did she go through the “papyrus is cool” phase?
Shakezula
I completely failed to see the charm of Facebook and have Twitter and Tumblr accounts. Does that make me one of the Youths or just an anti-social bitch who’d rather know what strangers are up to?
As for Rush being pro-Apple and attempting to make it the next martyr to the Ebbil Libruls, I can only assume he has some economic stake in the company. Maybe Apple products will be the next Goooold or Seeeeeds, or Salvaaaation.
And speaking of Rush, how about that fatberg?
Villago Delenda Est
@Gin & Tonic:
Same here. It’s pissing me off. FIX.
? Martin
@Freemark:
Apple has given benefits to same-sex partners for ages. They’ve been strong supporters of gay marriage. They put money behind opposing Prop 8. They pay well above minimum wage for their retail employees and give health benefits for part time workers. They are climate change realists and have put real energy behind energy conservation and environmental concerns. They are not anti-union. They have a mimimalist retail dress code. Tattoos and piercings are fine. Religious headgear is fine. Orange hair is fine.
Every pro-republican claim you can invent can be countered with a pro-democrat one. Simple fact is that they’re a company that looks out for themselves, like any other. They operate in a very liberal area with a very liberal employee base (at least in the HQ) and based on my interactions with their retail employees in quite a few locations, they’re pretty damn liberal as well.
You do realize that Macs are the only certified UNIX systems that you’ll encounter as a consumer. BSD SUS V3 certified. Mine also simultaneously runs Windows. I don’t know many programmers that don’t use Macs – even the Android/Windows programmers I know use Macs. All of the linux programmers I know use Macs.
schrodinger's cat
Since I am cheap I have never bought any Apple products myself. I used to run a computer lab with Apples in the early to mid 00’s and I did not find them that intuitive or easy to use. They did look cool though.
Tripod
Like a bad comedy bit.
Old people compute like THIS, liberals compute like THAT.
Roger Moore
@Gin & Tonic:
I seem to have to do it for every post, not just once per thread.
mistermix
@Gin & Tonic:
@Villago Delenda Est: OK, yesterday I tried one setting on the caching and it apparently didn’t work. I’m trying another now.
I’m logged in to WordPress, which means I’m not treated like a commenter, so I don’t see the issue. It is timing related – the caching plugin expires the cookie after a certain point in time. Since you guys are regular commenters, let me know if it happens again. I’m not in every thread all day so if it does happen, send me an email (my email details are on the right).
Gin & Tonic
@mistermix: OK.
raven
@mistermix: I use my lastpass auto fill.
mistermix
@Gin & Tonic: Thanks. I’m doing what the plugin author says to do to keep your comment handles around forever, but it obviously has some issues.
schrodinger's cat
@mistermix: FWIW it was happening to me yesterday, but not today.
eemom
Also too, the columns are too skinny again and the comment box is back to looking like address labels.
Also three, the server kept dropping the connection yesterday when I tried to click on comments.
Jussayinzall. Maybe Bezos should buy BJ.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Gin & Tonic:
There’s a big caveat to that “excluding”. One thing I’ve learned over here is that an overwhelming percentage of Chinese that are studying in North America (and I presume Europe as well) have a VPN and they share it with their friends who are back home. There are more Chinese on Facebook than you might think.
JD_Rhoades
@MomSense:
Plus they really don’t want their grandparents, parents, aunts, and uncles to see what they are really up to!
Exactly. When my mom and sister in law got on FB, my kids didn’t totally flee from it, but they now only post “family-friendly” messages. The Girl’s on Tumblr, and refuses to give us her the address now that she’s 18. I have no idea what The Boy (21) is on. I’ve talked to both of them about how privacy on the Web is an illusion, but I think it’s less about privacy, and more about independence.
mainmati
@gene108: The birth range for Boomers is 1946-1964. That’s an awfully large span of time and people who are overwhelmed by new technology and includes a large proportion of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and tech heads never mind a large proportion of the rest of that generation. I think you are thinking of the silent generation of WWII; adults in the 1950s, etc.
JD_Rhoades
@Comrade Dread:
I don’t know a single conservative that has a Mac. I know a few with iPads. But then I know a lot more liberals with those. Rush is, as usual, talking out of his ass.
The Red Pen
Whatever Apple was, is or will be, it is currently a winner. Apple is a winner and winners prefer Apple. Nerds may try to lord their Galaxy S4s over iPhone users, but — hey they’re nerds. Everyone else wants an iPhone.
Wingnuts are bullies. Wingnuts are always willing to support winners. I saw the same thing when Microsoft was being sued for abusing its monopoly. The wingnut love for Microsoft was palpably moist. I once had a moron insist that Windows was dominant because it was the best.
“If that’s true, what other operating systems did you evaluate for your PC?” I asked.
“Oh, I looked at Mac, but I didn’t like it.”
“Mac OS doesn’t run on PC. I asked what other PC operating systems you looked at.” I was met with a blank stare. “I can name two other operating systems you could be running — OS/2 and Linux,” I said mentioned two other viable options at the time. “If you are an informed consumer, you would have looked at those.”
After another span of blank stare, he glibsplained that Windows went to 11 or something to that effect.
MikeJ
@eemom:
Cole would then get to ride the SLUT.
(The South Lake Union Trolley goes by Amazon HQ.)
Mandalay
@Freemark:
Not really. I listened to Limbaugh in the early 90s and he was pushing Apple back then on a very personal level. He bought Apple when most were going with Windows.
I still remember how he bragged about his technical skills, and how he didn’t need anyone to teach him how to use his computer, as though that made him a technical whiz. He was completely in love with himself for no reason way back then as well.
JD_Rhoades
@Redshirt:
MySpace is poised for a hipster comeback.
Because they’re pretty obscure and you’ve probably never heard of them?
srv
@? Martin: Haterz gotta hate and feel superior enriching Billy and Ballmer. Amazing how Bill is so beloved now, their eyes have all been adjusted.
There are just now, in the last 6 months a few thinkpads that are better than a 5 year old t60p. Spec’d out, they run as much as a pro.
Linux is cute, for people who don’t value their time, or for coders who are spinning up servers from their… macbook.
cat
@mistermix: You are so incredibly wrong… Trying to compare turn of the century internet demos to 2010 internet demos shows how shallow your knowledge of the internet is.
We had this same discussion about another ‘fact’ you got wrong about AOL, the early internet users, and the timeline of the internet adoption.
At its peak Myspace has ~60% of US internet users, which was around 80M people. Facebook currently has 60% of the internet users in the US, Though now its 152M users due to higher internet usage. Facebook may look like MySpace but the higher penetration of internet usage means they have a high percentage of US residents in its network then MySpace.
Facebook is safe, The college kids and the college bound kids that started the network may have left it but its grown to the size its pulling in the demos that will sustain it and assimilate the ‘youngs’ after they grow old and return to the mainstream.
James Gary
Re teens and Facebook:
As Belafon alludes above, Facebook provides a more-structured environment for keeping track of a widespread cluster of friends than some other social-media systems do. When you’re a teenager and your social world consists of a relatively small number of people (most of whom you see face to face every day) Twitter and/or Tumblr might be a better fit. However, for older people whose social interactions tend to be looser and more necessarily public (i.e., involve coworkers and other professional links) I think Facebook’s basic setup works a lot better.
I’d also add that my (limited) observations seem to bear this out…over the last few years, the (admittedly small) sample of people I’ve watched grow from teenagers to young adults have tended to be on Facebook more and more as their social circles become more and more diffuse. Obviously, if privacy/secrecy is a huge concern for you, Facebook isn’t the best platform–but that’s really the *only* reason I can think of to avoid it.
RepubAnon
@Marmot: I heard that Rush Limbaugh is pressuring Darrel Issa to investigate this scandal of the MSM favoring Windows over Apple. In light of this old scandal involving a threat to the New York City water supply (and possible voter fraud), Hillary must be involved:
NEW YORK—Determined to circumvent Justice Department action forestalling the release of his powerful new operating system, Microsoft CEO and evil genius Bill Gates dropped Windows 98, coded into liquid form, into New York City’s water supply sometime this past weekend. (http://www.theonion.com/articles/evil-genius-gates-drops-windows-98-into-nyc-water,557/)
I am not a kook
@? Martin:
Oh, come on now. “Certified BSD” means less than nothing. Unix has always been mostly backend systems, not consumer OS like Apple. Nowadays the standard Unix is Linux, apart from some poor bastards in silos with IBM or Oracle service contracts. Consumers touch linux systems on almost all internet sites that matter, and with Android. Oh, and stuff like Kindle, Roku, your newish TV, Tivo, wifi router and so on, where consumers don’t interact with the traditional OS directly.
(I belong to the hardy, aggravated group who runs Linux on the desktop/laptop myself. Lot of people run Ubuntu on Macs, because the hardware is nice but they need a real Unix for work and Ubuntu makes it really easy. I don’t because I despise Apple’s authoritarianism.)
cat
@The Red Pen:
Thats not what the sales numbers say, but go on…
cat
@? Martin:
And I know 100’s who don’t use Macs, so tie?
Suffern ACE
I don’t have much of a personal social media strategy. However, I do think that Twitter is training wheel social media. Maybe its a good thing that the adults and kids are separate. I’d be disturbed if the youth tried to take over LinkedIn because they feel the highlight their professional qualifications at 14.
NonyNony
@The Red Pen:
Oh, my giant megacorporation can TOTALLY beat up your giant mega corporation.
Also your giant megacorporation wears combat boots.
And your giant megacorporation is so fat that when it sits around the house it REALLY sits around the house.
And your giant megacorporation is so ugly that even the tide won’t take it out.
Ever notice how guys who prefer giant megacorporation A walk like this … but guys who prefer giant megacorporation G walk like this?
Also too – the greens will totally TROUNCE the blues in the upcoming chariot races.
Belafon
@cat: I missed that one. This programmer uses Linux, Android, and Windows.
Villago Delenda Est
@mistermix:
It’s happened again. My system still has the autofill info, but the site has forgotten me. I have to go and fill it in again.
My previous behavior was unless I told CC Cleaner to wipe them out, all of them, the Name and E-Mail fields would autofill without any action on my part. Every time I open up a new window, I must refill the fields.
Suffern ACE
I’m actually happy to “Like” baby photos. I’m not certain who these sociopaths are who get all snippy about parents wanting to show off their children.
Yatsuno
OT: what was the name of the commentor who was just assigned to Yemen? I saw there was an evacuation of all non-essential personnel and was just hoping he’s all right.
WereBear
Statements like this crack me up. Apple has an interest in their operating system actually working, so they do keep a grip on all elements.
But even people who hate Apple should love them for being about the only thing that kept Bill Gates moving with the tides. If there were no competition at all (which Gates would prefer) he’d be telling everyone to stop whining about having a Trash Can, the Command Line Interface is good enough for the likes of them.
Apple: Trash Can – 1982
Windows: Recycle Bin – 1995
different-church-lady
This is the first time in 25 years I’ve been ashamed to be a Mac user.
@schrodinger’s cat: You should be thankful: back in the day you’d be trapped for an hour sitting on a physical couch next to someone flipping through a 3″ binder full of paper-printed photos of people standing around doing nothing.
different-church-lady
Which means we’re within 3 years of the “nobody uses Twitter anymore” articles.
Shakezula
Still dumping my info. Maybe the title of this post should be Three (Three!) Technology Notes (Ah-ha-ha!)
Suffern ACE
@different-church-lady: Exactly. Now, if we could just convince people to use Grid Lens on their phones, we could reduce those 300 photos down to 60. There is progress to be had.
Shakezula
@different-church-lady: I wonder if advertising is what chases people off. I haven’t been on Facebook in a couple of years, but it seemed advertising was ramping up around then. I’ve noticed it has become more pervasive on Twitter in the form of “Promoted” tweets. I could see that reaching a frequency that caused me to abandon the Twit.
McJulie
The last time I was in a position to ask a bonafide young person what she wanted out of Facebook, the answer was, more or less, entertainment. Tumblr is more entertaining. Twitter is more frequently updated. So both of those satisfy the “entertain me” impulse a bit better than Facebook. Also, Tumblr and Twitter are both very streamlined compared to Facebook, which to my mind makes them much more functional on a small-screened mobile device.
I am not a young person by any means, but even I tend to post only “family-friendly” stuff on Facebook. That’s just the vibe it has. It’s the place where I don’t want to (necessarily) alienate conservative in-laws, and the place where I “like” pictures of my adorable nieces.
The Moar You Know
@mistermix: I’m getting my credentials wiped after every comment.
Opera 12.16, Win 8.
At home I get them wiped after I leave a comment thread and go to another, or to the main page.
Opera 12.16, Win 7
Good luck.
schrodinger's cat
@Suffern ACE: I like them too, I just don’t need to see 10 versions of the same photo.
Redshirt
Ah, a good old fashioned “Apple vs. Windows/Google” thread. It’s refreshing in light of recent topics.
Walker
@cat:
It is hard to tell what the Android numbers mean. Many people are of the opinion that they include a lot of devices that people just use as dumb phones.
It is true that Android owners do not buy apps. It is suicide for a mobile developer to make the Android their primary platform (though Windows Phone is an order of magnitude worse). There is a reason all major apps release on the iPhone well before the Android, despite the sales numbers.
Eric U.
@piratedan: I have been waiting for the text app that translates voice to text and then the companion app that translates text to voice. Although, we went through a number of years here on campus where a couple is walking somewhere and one of the people is texting. Now we are back to one of the people talking on the cellphone to someone
different-church-lady
@Shakezula: It’s true that Alex Lifeson has put on a bit of middle age paunch, but I wouldn’t call him a fatberg.
Roger Moore
@srv:
He looks a lot better now that we’ve had a chance to see what his successors are like: all the parts about Bill we didn’t like, but without the success to back it up.
scav
ooooooooooo, Trashcan! Science!
and the utter intuitiveness of dragging disk to said can for Eject instead of delstatdotstar. and the war on paperclips to get disks out that didn’t intuitively eject.
they’re fine boxes, just not universal savior and the absolute fount of all that is innovative and perfect in digits.
lol
The only people more annoying and condescending than Apple evangelists are Linux/Android evangelists.
Every time I hear one of them ranting about the totalitarianism of the iOS ecosystem, I always think of those “fiat money is fascism” rants you hear from gold bugs.
different-church-lady
@mistermix: For what it’s worth, it seems almost random for me — perhaps that expired cookie thing you were talking about. I need to retrain myself to check the ID fields first, type comment second.
I am not a kook
@WereBear: Apple concentrates on consumer toys, so it makes sense for them to control both hardware and software. I have recommended Macs for people who have no interest in technology. My interests are in backend enterprise systems, where real work gets done, and Apple has nothing to offer. In my world, Microsoft is also a has-been.
We did dodge a bullet back in the day when Microsoft crushed Apple, before Jobs came back. Bill Gates had nothing over Jobs on the control freak megalomaniac front. If Apple had ever gotten their hardware + software combination adopted as standard, we’d all would still be paying through the nose for pretty devices. There wouldn’t have been competing personal computer hardware manufacturers to drive down hardware prices.
different-church-lady
@Eric U.:
Wait… cellphones can handle voice calls now?
The Moar You Know
@different-church-lady: Only one skinny guy left in that band. They’re still a force to be reckoned with, regardless.
different-church-lady
Thread needs more flamewar, so this might be a good time to note that I never understood the appeal of Neil Young.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
. Rush Limbaugh’s latest idiotic claim that Republicans are the real Apple users, and that the lamestream tech media discriminates against Apple, is strange and wrong on so many levels,
It means Rush uses a Mac and doesn’t want to be seen as gay by his aging frat boy audience.
different-church-lady
@The Moar You Know: In essence, drummers have desk jobs.
schrodinger's cat
@different-church-lady: Who is Neil Young?
I am not a kook
@lol:
Guilty as charged, although I don’t evangelize. I use Linux because it works for me, I never push it on anybody except my kids. I prefer Android’s (limited) openness to Apple’s walled garden myself but if your iDevice works for you, be happy. Apple fanbois just get so annoyed by even a mild criticism or deviation. Think Different!
Suffern ACE
@schrodinger’s cat: I think in the future, what parents need to do for their children is to force them to take the Yearbook class in high school. It’s kind of like taking shop or home ec. If everyone went through a process where rejecting photos became a habit, our social media would be a much tighter place, indeed. Actually, Yearbook is a lot like Latin.
ruemara
@The Moar You Know: Jeez, you’re a delight. I enjoy knowing what’s under the hood, started in BASIC and COBOL, can install most of my own tech and I love my Macs. I have nearly a decade’s worth sitting at this desk. Yet, I’m working on my cheap gaming laptop, a Dell. I detest Windows for it’s bloat and intrusiveness, and if I had to choose, I’d go with LINUX. I’ve met many a Mac techhead. Just because you haven’t, doesn’t meant that we’re such broad generalization.
Villago Delenda Est
@lol:
Adam Smith: The first fascist.
Oh, and mistermix, it SEEMS to be working now…I actually rebooted my box, and the site remembered my name and email this time. Totally.
brantl
Rush thinks conservatives use Apple because it’s simpler. Case closed.
different-church-lady
@schrodinger’s cat: Canadian singer songwriter from the 15th century. Specialized in plainsong.
Roger Moore
@WereBear:
It is demonstrably possible to make an OS work without complete control over the hardware environment. Windows manages. So does GNU/Linux and Android/Linux. There are some advantages around the edges in limiting the hardware, but the main one is that it’s a lot cheaper for the developer. So you’re basically left with a choice between somewhat better quality with a locked down system or greater flexibility with an open one. Apple does some very nice stuff, but they’re inherently limited and won’t tend to be the first on the scene with really radical stuff like Raspberry Pi, OLPC, Galaxy Camera, or TIVO, which take advantage of the hardware flexibility of open systems.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore:
Can you say “Ballmer is the devil”? Sure you can, boys and girls!
eemom
@different-church-lady:
Lucky for you this isn’t an AL thread…..get yer ass bannerated with that kinda talk.
scav
@different-church-lady: Actually, if there was a bright shiney case for a phone that looked like a tin can, I might be tempted . .
different-church-lady
@eemom:
I might take that as a blessing.
WereBear
My only computer was an Amiga for many many years. Sigh.
Villago Delenda Est
@eemom:
Or an “AmStaf is the dog of SATAN!” thread…
different-church-lady
@Villago Delenda Est:
I don’t think Ballmer is competent enough to be the devil.
? Martin
@Xboxershorts:
iTunes does not impose any DRM. iTMS music is DRM free. iTMS video/books purchased from the store are DRM encumbered per the publishers/studios. But if you put in non-DRM books/video, then iTunes doesn’t give a shit and doesn’t restrict you in any way.
Belafon
@different-church-lady: I remember having to explain to my kids not too long ago what I meant by “flamewar”.
eemom
@different-church-lady:
but srsly….Heart of Gold? Sugar Mountain? Pocahontas? Not a sliver of appeal in the bunch?
different-church-lady
@Belafon: And they were like, “Why would you want to do that?” right?
Villago Delenda Est
@different-church-lady:
The hiring of Mark Penn lends credence to your assertion.
different-church-lady
@Villago Delenda Est: I know, right? Plus I totally nailed that “lawn chair and cocktail” thing yesterday. Completely wasting my potential.
NotMax
@JD_Rhoades
That would be Xanga.
The Other Bob
@dan:
Where? Any cheap laptop I have investigated is basically devoid of software. Add a decent package of software and other options that laptop is at least $1200.
different-church-lady
@eemom: Three words: Harvest Moon — gorgeous.
I don’t think he’s horrible, I just don’t understand why some people worship him as a god.
I completely suck at starting flamewars.
The Red Pen
@cat:
I guess if we’re going to go by sales numbers then almost no one wants a Ferrari.
different-church-lady
@The Other Bob: And let’s throw in the fact that Macbooks start at $1000 while we’re at it.
Sometimes I think Mac hate is the equivalent of
saying, “Why should I buy a Honda when I can get a Yugo and then totally trick that thing out!”
cat
@WereBear:
Ford has an interest in their cars actually working, so they do keep a grip on all elements. What do you mean I have to buy ford approved oil and filters at twice the price or void my warranty? You mean can’t I buy “Support Gay Marriage” bumper stickers because some people find it offensive?
Your “keep it working” vs others “Authoritarianism”. I use the car metaphor because everyone agrees and I think the law does too that you own your car and the above statements would be ludicrous. I’ve yet to hear a convincing argument that you don’t own your phone.
Roger Moore
@The Other Bob:
That’s what Ubuntu (or Debian, Fedora, etc.) is for. You get the OS, yes, but you also get a ton of usable, if not exactly what you’re used to, software. I think that’s the main goal of the Chromebooks, too.
jeffreyw
Throwing this comment up against the wall just to see if it sticks.
ericblair
@I am not a kook:
We’re doing mobile enterprise deployment. I’d just say that Apple makes single-user appliances that communicate with Apple. If an IT shop tries to insert itself in the process, it’s not impossible by any means, but there’s one hangup after another (Apple ID, iTunes, etc) that needs to get worked around, and the Apple guys don’t give much of a crap about your issues. Blackberry is still hanging on in the enterprise world, because if you’ve got mobile devices and you want to lock those suckers down, they’re still the go-to platform. Android is pretty flexible but you have to deal with a lot of different devices if you go the BYOD route. Windows 8 is on the radar, but it’s mostly “um, we’ll worry about that later.”
Eric U.
the day Ballmer said that all his customers are ripping him off was the last day I used personal money to buy msoft software. Pretty happy with Linux on my home box. I have thought about switching my wife to linux for the security. She mostly just checks email and there are some great games on linux.
It was a proud day when my son told me he had installed linux on his desktop. then the little bastard told me he switched back, so I’m reconsidering the notion that he’s not adopted
Billy Dilly
I think LinkedIn may take of the “serious” adult market while FB is mostly gossip rag.
Xantar
@NonyNony:
I rather liked that Guy Gavriel Kay book.
Xecky Gilchrist
I’m trying to think of something more ignorable than the tech press and just not managing it.
cat
@The Red Pen:
You are terrible at this.
Apple can make as many phones as the public wants to buy (discounting the shortages the first few weeks/month of new products), Ferrari makes ~2000 cars ON PURPOSE and plans on lowering their builds in the future to ‘enhance the ownership’ experience even though the demand is there at even the new higher prices. So sales numbers are no indication of the ‘want’.
Even if we play along, and Ferrari makes a 50k that is identical to their current line up, at least in the US, it would struggle. Your pony cars or your sporty imports are a lot of lifestyle choices. Not to discount a lot of buyers make rational choices and 2k mile engine overhauls and 1800 oil changes and tune ups will nip a lot of dreams in the bud.
The Moar You Know
@different-church-lady: Not by a long shot. Some university wired up the guy from Blondie, Clem Burke, a couple of years ago and ran his EKG during a show. He burned about 600 calories an hour. No other exercise save competitive swimming even comes close.
My second instrument is drums, been gigging them for a few months now. It’s a lot harder than standing around playing bass.
Also: Neil Young. Annoying and deliberately so. I’ve heard him sing in tune just fine. He doesn’t just to piss people off.
different-church-lady
@Billy Dilly: LinkedIn is very specifically focused on career networking for professionals. Everything — I mean everything — is about your resume, your job history, etc.
I have yet to gain any practical benefit from it, and I don’t know anyone else who has either. Mostly everyone I know does it because they’re “supposed” to. But it’s quite obvious LinkedIn has no interest in being the “adult” version of a broad social networking timekill toy.
gelfling545
By a strange twist of fate I have become acquainted with an unusual number of just-out-of college 20 somethings over the last couple of years. Every one of them has had a facebook page but they also use a variety of other social media as well. I think this is fairly typical of what’s happening among the younger people: they no longer use one media exclusively. Polling my high school age granddaughter & a few of her friends, I hear that this is the case for them as well but, of course, everybody has a facebook page, sort of by birthright or something, apparently. And they are (I am told) the very cutting, bleeding edge of cool in the local high school set as they attend the city Arts Academy. So, apparently, the trend appears to be toward multiple points of access.
Punchy
Got a link to support this?
Marmot
@PurpleGirl: I feel your pain. I’m stuck with Win 7 at work, and it never opens windows in the same locations, resizes things, and so on.
different-church-lady
@The Moar You Know:
Heck, that was probably just the cocaine.
OK, seriously, I drummed for a bit, and yeah, it’s physical, even if you are sitting. And really, it’s not a chair, it’s more like a stabilizer for your ass.
ThresherK
@WereBear: Completely off-topic, but thanks for the advice re cat brushing you provided in this space a few days ago. I’ll let you know how it works–if I have enough fingers to touchtype afterwards.
And I didn’t know more than a few Amigaheads, but they were all the most creative people in my circle back then.
Southern Beale
Steve Jobs stuck it to BIG GUMMINT by refusing to get his car tags! So there!
/sarcasm
I say that as a huge Apple user, I might add. I dunno, it’s fucking lame as hell to try to politicize EVERY single fucking thing. I abhor all Microsoft products, they’re not user friendly to me, and they’re just bad on a lot of levels. I refuse to have anything Microsoft on my computer. Not even Excel. But NOT because I’m a liberal, but because I’m a computer user.
Maybe Rush thinks Bill Gates is a big hippie with his foundation trying to cure sick kids and stuff. Who knows. I read the Steve Jobs bio, he was an asshole, but he was also some kind of Zen-vegan-hippie too. Who knows what his politics were, I sure as hell don’t and who the fuck cares at this point.
Also, Rush is an idiot. Maybe he wants to look kewl.
? Martin
@Roger Moore:
That’s not the only reason they do it. They also do it because there’s damn little money to be made selling an OS because it decomposes into a commodity market. That’s why Windows hardware tends to be such shit. It’s cheap, but the cheap stuff is shit. And the decent stuff mostly wouldn’t exist if not for Apple demonstrating that there is a market for decent hardware over $1000. Android is steadily sliding into the same scenario with lower and lower priced phones undermining the part of the market that is advancing. And desktop linux has gone where exactly? It’s not to diminish the actual utility of these things, but if there isn’t money flowing into them, then how do they keep advancing?
Bottom line is that like anything that requires actual labor, that values labor, is going to require real revenue to support. There’s no difference between cheap hardware and software and cheap clothes or being a Walmart consumer, and yet there’s a whole community that has made buying the cheapest computer and the cheapest software possible an actual virtue, who would recoil at the thought that buying $4 Old Navy Bangladesh t-shirts, or $40 WalMart bicycles was a virtue.
Computers are among the best value per dollar of anything you will ever buy. Apple’s products are priced at about $1 per day for the expected life of the device – that applies to iPod (1 year life), iPhone/iPad (2 year life), Mac (3 year life) for devices you will likely use every day – in some cases for 8+ hours a day (as with my Mac). A new car, median price, will cost you $10/HOUR that you use it just in acquisition cost. Yet there’s no commentary on why an Accord costs $25K while a Scion can be had for just $15K (or a Tata for $8k). There’s no attempt to shame the Accord buyers for their wasteful spending, where the utility I get out of my Mac, which cost me all of $.25 a day more than a comparable Dell, seems to invite all kinds of commentary. And the societal benefits of lower cost transportation is FAR greater than the societal benefits of slightly cheaper computing. This double standard is really curious.
Really? Apple is the largest seller of music on the planet. They have a far larger software marketplace than Microsoft and have completely reinvented the economics of software (not necessarily for the better, mind you). They have the largest video sales of anyone online. Those radical moves were all enabled by taking advantage of their control of hardware. Sure, they could have made that hardware all open, but labels wouldn’t have moved into selling their stuff without it. Microsoft had been working for years on getting digital music sales to take off, but Apple pulled all the pieces together. The iPhone/iPad has reinvented how software is purchased and managed and gives any indy programmer the same retail presence as Adobe. The AppleTV is the only really successful, sustainable TV add-on so far since the TiVo, and competitors have had to play catch up with features like AirPlay.
Apple has done a lot more than you give credit for. Perhaps not in areas that you care about, but the modern state of computing outside of the hobbyist area is pretty much an exercise in chasing Apple right now.
? Martin
@cat:
I don’t give a shit. I’m not making a case that Apple is better. I don’t need them to ‘win’. I’m just refuting arguments.
Southern Beale
@different-church-lady:
Years ago I made the mistake of signing up for LinkedIn and I never, ever used it, found nothing to justify my involvement in it … and after canceling my account I’m STILL getting requests to be someone’s friend (or whatever they call it, I forgot) on LinkedIn. I’m guessing these are Spam? Some of them are from people I know and some are not.
I wish there were a better way to quit these people.
The Moar You Know
@different-church-lady: Yep. I wish there was a way to do it to work your core muscles. That 600 calories per hour is all just your arms and legs.
Southern Beale
OT but I just found out today that Bill Clinton has become a vegan. Waiting for Rush to jump on board that and tell all of his angry old listeners to eat Big Macs.
different-church-lady
@Southern Beale: You can get invites from LinkedIn users even if you don’t have an account — all they need is your email. I got them for years before I created my own account.
Unlike some other social media tech, LinkedIn uses a mechanism to try to keep connection hoarders and spammers at bay. Try to link to enough people who reject you and you get dinged. Get dinged enough and you get booted.
The whole thing still mystifies me, but at least LI is putting in the effort to be something other than a toy.
Matt McIrvin
It’s true: Rush Limbaugh has been a Macintosh fan for a long time. He liked Apple when they were “beleaguered” and Steven den Beste wrote endless essays about how the network effect meant they would be gone in a couple of years. It’s just one of those things.
I think that, for consumers, the choice of computer platform makes remarkably little difference these days. I use a Mac mostly because I decided I liked them a long time ago and got into that ecosystem.
Programming is a different story. For work, all I really prefer is using some sort of Unix-like OS; currently it’s another Mac, but I’ve done fine with Linux and even Solaris and HP-UX once upon a time. I’ve used Windows and Microsoft tools when I had to, but it wasn’t really my favorite. (And I liked VMS back in the day.)
We have a mixed-up household: I use a Mac and mostly Android mobile products; my wife uses a Windows PC and mostly Apple mobile products. The reasons for all this are path-dependent and probably not entirely rational.
different-church-lady
David Bowie doesn’t really do it for me either. Especially the Ziggy Stardust period.
The Red Pen
@cat: WP ate my comment in which I made you look like a fool.
If you would be so kind as to feel chastened, that would be great. I don’t feel like typing it in again.
FYWP
Mandalay
@The Moar You Know:
Jogging at 5mph – which is not much more that a very fast walk – will burn over 600 calories an hour! There are loads of ways to burn more than 600 calories an hour without going anywhere near a set of drums.
KXB
@schrodinger’s cat:
We just had one of those ceremonies for my cousin. I did take some pictures, but broke with tradition, and did not any of people while they were eating. Turns the event in “Wild Kingdom with People”.
Never had a Facebook account, but I do use Twitter, since it does allow for anonymity. No one needs to know that I follow The Atlantic, The American Conservative, Patton Oswalt, and various aspiring models who like to tweet half-nekkid pics of themselves.
Don’t know muck about Tumblr, except that it is possibly the most efficient filth aggregator I have ever seen. No matter what you are into, how strange it may seem to some, Tumblr will find it for you.
Gin & Tonic
@KXB: various aspiring models who like to tweet half-nekkid pics of themselves.
Um, linkies? Purely for “research purposes”, of course.
FlipYrWhig
LinkedIn may be the most annoying computer-related thing since The Hamster Dance. I liked how on Futurama they had Dr. Zoidberg at his second job greet his coworkers with “It’s me, Zoidberg, from work! And LinkedIn!”
eldorado
on the plus side, vi has totally kicked emacs’ butt, and spaces has tabs in the corner getting a standing eight count.
FlipYrWhig
Also, I am old, because I have never had any idea what Tumblr is or what people do with it.
eemom
@different-church-lady:
AFAIK I’m the only one on the planet who hates “Ground Control To Major Tom.”
I am not a kook
@? Martin: OMG, all you cheapskates are destroying Capitalism by not buying expensive Apple consumer products!!!!11! Shame on you, you should Think Different!
Yes, Apple has done innovative things. They happened to be in the right place at the right time to take advantage of the music industry coming to grips with the fact that DRM for music was fucked. Why was it fucked? Because the music industry had already published all of its back catalog in digital format without DRM (aka “compact disc”) and there was no way they could get that toothpaste back into the tube. Not for lack of trying, mind you.
Microsoft couldn’t get it done because they were too greedy like they always are. And they were trying to market their solutions to the music industry with DRM schemes that just annoyed consumers. Apple had enough clout to force some sanity into the negotiations because they had the premium music player at the time. The only way the music industry could hope to make money in the future was to make it easier to buy music than find it on warez sites.
I really don’t feel obligated to worship Apple and buy their products for all eternity because they were right a couple of times, like you seem to be implying. “Modern state of computing” has nothing to do with Apple, but more to do with cloud services software like Amazon’s and OpenStack. Consumer devices are the pretty face.
eemom
@Southern Beale:
I’ve had that same experience with Linked In…..and there’s an ominous undercurrent to it, in that my institutional employer thinks it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.
KXB
@Gin & Tonic:
Well, as long as it is for research purposes…. (Candace Smith, Pam Rodriguez, and an oldie but still a damn hottie – Daisy Fuentes)
DFH no.6
@different-church-lady: I’ll play!
Neil Young.
Well, let’s see. I’ve been to hundreds and hundreds of live music performances over the past 44 years, mostly “rock” (in its multifarious forms – my first concert was Led Zeppelin in ’69) including new music (Fitz and the Tantrums were excellent this past Sunday, for instance, as were most of the 30 acts we caught at Coachella in April) along with a lot of symphonic performances (Cleveland Orchestra and Phoenix Symphony, mostly) a fair amount of opera, bluegrass and other “roots” shows, and a smattering of other stuff.
I think I’ve caught Neil Young 8 or 9 times, solo (two years ago in Chicago) or with Crazy Horse (mostly), or with CSN (couple times).
And he’s just about the most energetic and crowd-pleasing performer I’ve ever seen. Blew away CSN the first time I saw them together (Cleveland Stadium in ’73) and even more so in ’02 in Phoenix (the other 3 sounded quite good, still, but Neil Young played and sang like he was half their age).
I enjoy most of his recorded music just fine (Harvest is still my favorite), but his live performances are on a level few other performers I’ve seen have achieved. Every time.
Not a god. Just one of the best in his profession for almost 50 years.
YMMV
FlipYrWhig
@eemom: Sacrilege! Also, IIRC it’s called Space Oddity.
Chyron HR
@eemom:
Well, hey, not every song can be “Magic Dance”.
The Red Pen
@FlipYrWhig: John Oliver recently observed, “[Linked-In seems] to have monetized irritating people!”
RSA
@lol:
I see almost all forms of desktop tech evangelism as “Ford versus Chevy.” (It’s getting to be the same way for mobile platforms, but not quite yet.)
WereBear
The love techies had for that machine makes Apple-fanboi-love look like teen crushes.
Roger Moore
@? Martin:
Those were not radical moves, or at least weren’t radical from a standpoint of innovative ideas. Apple was not even close to the first company to make a portable music player, or to make a system capable of playing videos. The iPod was big improvement over previous portable players, but it was fundamentally an evolutionary step, not a revolutionary one. The thing that really made the system work was that Steve Jobs also owned Pixar, which gave him enough credibility in Hollywood to convince the entertainment industry to try selling their stuff in purely electronic formats online, which they had been reluctant to do before.
For all its reputation as an innovator, Apple didn’t really invent most of the stuff they sell. They didn’t invent the window and mouse interface- it was developed at Xerox PARC- but they were the first ones to bring it to mass market. They weren’t the first ones with a portable music player, smartphone, or tablet, but they went a long way to making those things more practical and cool. I don’t mean that as an insult, either. I think new ideas are overvalued, and the work it takes to convert them from an idea to a marketable thing is grossly undervalued.
different-church-lady
@Mandalay: Sure, but then you gotta jog for an hour instead of playing the drums.
WereBear
True enough. Everyone has reasons for choosing what they choose.
My mother adores her Chromebook. It takes care of itself, she does not have to manage an operating system. If she doesn’t know how to do something, she knows how to get Google to play her a video.
She isn’t wrong for loving her Chromebook. A hardcore gamer wouldn’t be happy, but my Mom isn’t about to build her own, either.
different-church-lady
@DFH no.6: That could be it, I’ve never seen him live, you have a point about… wait… DAMMIT, I SUCK AT THIS!
different-church-lady
@WereBear:
Exactly. The problem isn’t “I love my computer.” The problem is, “Your computer sucks!”
Southern Beale
@Mandalay:
Yeah but who jogs for an hour?
:-)
Southern Beale
@FlipYrWhig:
THIS.
Get a fucking blog.
I don’t get it.
NotMax
@different-church-lady
Have always been ambivalent about Bowie, just never finding an affinity for his output with the exception of his album Low.
FlipYrWhig
@Southern Beale: That’s all it is, right? A blogging platform? Why would that be cool or popular? I had a web page, when they were called web pages, in 1995. It said what bands I liked and what TV shows I watched. That doesn’t seem interesting. It seems a bit like a funny answering machine tape or a CB handle. Facebook, say what you will about it, is actually kind of useful when it comes to sharing things with the wide world of your acquaintances. I don’t have any pretense that I’m supposed to be entertaining the world. God knows that if that were my goal I’d be pretty well disappointed by now.
I am not a kook
@Roger MooreBuying music as separate songs and storing them on your pod or phone or computer is also quickly becoming old skool. I see this diverging into a 1%/99% situation, where audiophiles buy premium uncompressed music and everybody else subscribes to Pandora, Spotify, Google Music or ITunes with a monthly payment.
And for most consumers, the OS is mainly frippery around their browser window anyway. Mobile apps are just a user interface to online (“cloud”) backends.
In other trends, my 13-year old daughter does NOT want a phone and prefers sending and receiving hand written letters via USPS. She has friends in Finland, France, and Pakistan that she corresponds with.
JD_Rhoades
@DFH no.6:
Hes funny, too.
schrodinger's cat
@FlipYrWhig: Tumblr is a blogging platform, focused mainly on sharing photos.
The Red Pen
@WereBear:
Is there anything more pure than the love of a mother for her Chromebook?
RSA
@WereBear:
That’s great. In my opinion arguments about which platform + OS + user interface is better generally come down to individual differences with respect to people’s background knowledge, the tasks they want to be able to do, the applications available, and so forth. A lot of contention comes from confusing “This works for me and people like me” with “This is unconditionally better” or “This is better for smart/dumb people”.
DFH no.6
@different-church-lady: Well, you had to hate on David Bowie, especially as Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, so now I’m pissed!
(well, not really, but…)
Only time I ever saw Bowie perform was his very first U.S. performance, in Cleveland in ’72 (same music hall where I caught Led Zeppelin in ’69) and that was the start of his Ziggy Stardust tour. So that was cool.
Great show, though I’ve found most of the music from that album no longer appeals to me like it did then. His latest – just out this year – is ok. Not great, but trying to give it a chance (doing the same with Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories – though I didn’t like disco the first time around, either).
What’s next for you – hating on prog-rock, like Pink Floyd and Yes were just too bombastic for your tastes or something?
Oh, and no social media for me, at all (unless blogs count; which they maybe do, sort of, I suppose). No FB, Twitter, Tumblr, and especially no LinkedIn, not if I can help it.
Jebediah
@Villago Delenda Est:
I just asked Otto about that. He says they are acquaintances, nothing more.
DFH no.6
@Chyron HR: Bowie’s “Magic Dance” in Labyrinth was just embarrassing. Awful music, cringe-worthy scene.
Movie was ok, though, particularly as I saw it at the theater with my (then) young children, who were into the fantasy I had read to them (like Tolkien and The Chronicles of Prydain).
Willow was a lot better, IMAO.
Bubblegum Tate
@? Martin:
Which is sort of a funny situation. Yeah, Rush is–shocker of all shockers–completely full of shit in saying the tech press is negative on Apple. The tech press loves Apple. It’s Wall Street press that doesn’t like Apple, and that’s mostly because all Wall Streeters have an opinion of what Apple should be doing with its vast riches (which it acquired by being, you know, a very successful company), but Apple’s response is generally, “Fuck you, we know what we’re doing, and we’re going to run this company according to our goals, not yours,” which pisses off the financial press and makes them write all these articles about how Apple is stupid and wrong.
Shakti
@Southern Beale: Given the number of posts I’ve seen on Facebook that are just infographics and gifs, (“Share if you agree, like if you believe in X”) many people would be served better by getting a tumblr. Blogging is for thoughts longer than a paragraph and for things you are open to discussion on. I have never seen a tumblr where comments outnumber shares or likes.
The Red Pen
@Bubblegum Tate:
Actually, most analysts rate it a buy. It’s a strong buy if it dips under $400/share.
There are a few nay-sayers, but AAPL still has a lot of fans in the financial sector.
? Martin
@Roger Moore:
You’re viewing the hardware/software/services as isolated things. Apple doesn’t view them that way – nor do most people. You’re correct that the hardware wasn’t particularly innovative (the interface was, though), but nobody else saw how certain control over the hardware could allow the services to happen.
Steve did have credibility, but this was 2003 remember. Apple was struggling and Microsoft was their direct competitor on this. The labels went with Apple because Apple wasn’t turning control over the hardware and the interface to OEMs. They would control everything. The DRM that the labels demanded would remain intact. They would have one company to complain to if things went badly, not 2-3 as MS commodity approach would have resulted. And Apple’s approach was demonstrably better in its ability to generate sales as they weren’t relying on steering users to some 3rd party website, hassling with a download and then an import, etc. Apple always had the option to later dial the DRM back if the labels would allow it (which they did). And contrary to people’s beliefs, Apple chose non-proprietary, non-encumbered formats for the content (with a necessarily proprietary DRM wrapper), which also helped. But Microsoft never wanted to run the music store, so they left that to other retailers to negotiate. Basically, there was no leadership to make it happen. MS was waiting on the retailers, the retailers were waiting on the labels, etc.
The ‘push a button and it runs’ approach that you find now in iTunes music buying, video buying, app buying remains unmatched by anyone else. Why didn’t Microsoft do that – they had everything they needed? Why didn’t anyone else? Apple made it easier to buy music than to steal it – that was a huge thing. That wasn’t even considered possible or necessary. And they brought the same solution to apps 5 years later. Why didn’t someone use those 5 years to copy Apple?
I don’t think people realize just how revolutionary Apple was with digital content buying. When they entered it, the industry was seriously contemplating that digital content was impossible to monetize effectively – that piracy would simply destroy them. They were moving toward ever draconian physical DRM systems. Apple alone reversed that – and Apple lead the charge to get rid of the physical systems altogether. 60% of all digital music revenue, worldwide, is iTunes, and Apple outsells physical music as well. Digital content is expected to be a $13B business this year for Apple. That’s 1/4 of Amazon’s total revenues. 1/4 of Google’s. That’s a bigger business than HTC. Apple has more credit card backed accounts than anyone on earth. If anyone else had done that they’d be hailed as a silicon valley darling like eBay or Pandora for being so innovative, but because it was embedded within Apple, nobody seems to acknowledge it.
It’s as much of a tech achievement as the iPod hardware – and was every bit as radical an innovation as what anyone on your previous list has advanced. We just don’t really recognize retail innovations as being, well, innovative. But there’s no question that the one-click retail solution has been a huge benefit not only to Apple’s success, but also to a lot of developers and a lot of users.
And I take umbrage to at least some of the ‘Apple didn’t invent’ comments. Being the first to do something isn’t particularly noteworthy in the engineering space if thing you were first to do wasn’t successful. PARC showed Apple elements of the GUI, but there was a ton that was missing. PARC couldn’t have been successful without what Apple added – and not just on the UI, but also on the hardware, the added software, and so on. It’s only when you consider the whole – which always includes a lot of other bits that Apple did invent, do you see where the success comes from. The previous MP3 players weren’t successful. The previous touch screen smartphones weren’t successful, and Apple was pilloried for not including a physical keyboard. Tech media were certain it would be a flop. Most companies would not have pushed forward with a project against that kind of public headwind, but Apple trusted that the other pieces of the platform would carry it, and they were right.
The iPod wasn’t selling well until the iTunes Music Store opened up. The success of the hardware turns out was dependent on the software and the service, so all need to be considered together because they are all inter-dependent. And Apple is routinely overlooked at some of the things they did invent. Sure, there were tablets and smartphones before the iPad and iPhone, but many of the patents on the iPad and iPhone actually date back to the Newton, which was nearly a decade before the Palm Pilot. And ARM, which powers all of this stuff was cofounded by Apple in 1990 to build processors to power the Newton. And none of the devices before the iPhone/iPad were successful because they lacked some of the basic elements that Apple brought.
pseudonymous in nc
Again, the problem here is the subsidy model, which creates an artificial price range for phones. I’m not a fan of featurism here — as The Verge hints, a lot of it is Top Trumps, and the top end of smartphones doesn’t really interest me much these days. What would interest me is if Motorola were to come up with a handset: that is meant to be the smartphone upgrade for those who haven’t yet taken the leap. Perhaps the custom options may do that. But the pricing’s still a bit off.
The Moto X isn’t going to be sold in the UK (and perhaps all of Europe) where there’s more of a market for unlocked non-subsidised phones, probably because they wouldn’t try to price it up with the iPhones and G4Ses.
@Xboxershorts: um, the Verge comments section is that way if you want to have a pissing contest with immature men who continue to repeat obsolete tropes.
Roger Moore
@Bubblegum Tate:
I think it’s also because there’s a perception that they’re losing their market dominance. The last quarter, their unit sales were up but dollar sales were flat and profits declined, which is a sign that they’re having to reduce prices to keep their volume up. That means a reduced profit margin, which is what Wall Street really craves.
? Martin
@Bubblegum Tate:
Yeah, but Apple is in a tough spot here. When you’re pulling down $40B annually in profits, where’s that growth going to come from? If you’re looking to double your profits, even over 5 years, you have to create the equivalent of 4 Googles over that time. It’s a tall fucking order. Apple doesn’t have us by the short hairs the way that Exxon does.
So, I don’t mind some reticence against Apple’s ability to grow here, but the short term commentary on Apple from the financial press is fucking idiotic. They’re trolling for page clicks more than usual.
? Martin
@pseudonymous in nc:
Yep. The dynamic in the subsidized market is entirely between the OEM and the carrier. The carrier is the one really buying the phone, not you. That’s another bit of a bind Apple has gotten into. Their only real avenue for growth is to be competitive outside of the subsidy market, but the profits to be made have been in the subsidy market. Which one is going to give?
? Martin
@Roger Moore:
There was a bit of a change in their inventory management which made things look a bit worse than they were, but they aren’t reducing prices so much as they’re selling more of the lower end (previous model) phones. That’s going to be an increasing situation as previously only AT&T had been carrying iPhone long enough to sell the previous models, but now Verizon is able to sell previous models, and soon Sprint will be able to. It’s not so much a change in consumer behavior as something that previously couldn’t really have happened for technical reasons. It should have been anticipated by the analysts (yet they didn’t).
And the real reason for the reduced margins is capital expenditures/depreciation. Apple is spending a HUGE amount of money on new equipment, presumably for the new iPhone/iPad, but it also looks like spending to get their US manufacturing up and running (this won’t be a shared plant from what I can tell, so Apple is likely paying for all the capex) as well as possibly for a new device category. So that’s not as bad as it seems as Apple is putting that money into capital value (which is what everyone has been demanding) rather than cash, and Apple takes those expenses as part of operations, so it comes off the profit margin. Apple is also taking more and more deferred revenue which has the effect of smoothing out the revenue curve. So long as Apple is overall growing, they’re going to underreport each quarter with that deferred revenue climbing each subsequent quarter. Should Apple start shrinking, that deferred revenue will come in as a larger portion of their revenues making their situation look better than it really is for 2 years. Not a lot of attention is paid to either Apple’s capex (which is atypical of many companies – they don’t do the assembly, but they own a lot of the equipment used for the assembly and now spend on the same order as Intel), or to their deferred revenues, which Apple makes no effort to point out.
ThresherK
@WereBear: Yeah, but there were so few of them that they actually acted like a “cult” (in a good way).
Hey, it beats trying to have done anything with a Coleco Adam (/rimshot).
pseudonymous in nc
@? Martin:
Yeah, I can like the iPhone and still acknowledge that Apple took huge advantages both of the subsidy model in the US and the ability to dictate terms to carriers.
I assume the subsidy market is going to give, eventually, in the US, but not without a lot of pain on all sides: from consumers as they increasingly have to think about whether it’s worth paying a much larger chunk of change up front; from carriers as they eventually see contract renewals drop off; from handset makers as they readjust to the new price range. The idiosyncratic cross-network incompatibility of the US carriers will serve as a choke point: if phones won’t work on other networks (rather than just being locked to them) then there’s less of an incentive to decline a contract.
(I paid $20 for a month’s service when in Europe last month. I could have paid $10 or $15 and been careful about monitoring data usage, but $5 not to worry was a no-brainer.)
BruceJ
@? Martin: Several years ago Someone asked Steve Jobs what motivated Apple , and it basically came down to ” WE want to keep making really cool stuff people don’t know they want yet, and sell enough of it to keep making really cool stuff people don’t know they want yet.” So ‘Doubling their profits every 5 years” isn’t actually in their DNA. That it keeps happening is a tribute to the kinds of folks who gravitate to Apple as designers.
Xboxershorts
When @pseudonymous in nc:
When you’ve dealt with Apple in a professional environment and found out what a horrible company they actually are, perhaps you’ll then be mature enough to understand why I will never, ever give them an ounce, penny, minute of my time or business.
The company sucks and that really is my personal, professional experience. And your snobbery has no chance in hell of changing that.
When you have 30+ years in IT, get back to me.
TriassicSands
Funny, I read the review (out of curiosity — I’m not looking to buy a smartphone) and it seemed to me like the reviewer really, genuinely liked the phone, even if it isn’t perfect. Looking for one phone that is the best at absolutely everything seems like a fool’s errand. It also seems to (disinterested) me that different phones are better for different people, and arguing for Samsung over Apple or vice versa, or any other us vs. them comparison is a complete waste of time. Rather than the reviewer struggling to find a reason to justify the Moto-X’s score, it seemed to me that mistermix is struggling to find a reason to devalue the reviewer’s opinion, and I suspect the reason for that is probably — just a guess — a misguided form of brand loyalty.
Phones come and go, but all these companies — Apple, Google, Samsung, etc. — really suck for one reason or another.
Comrade Carter
Write up a description of “fixed income” and “angry old men”. I’ll be in both of those.
My income is fixed by Social Security, and I’m “only” 52.
I own at least 7 Apple things, because they are better.
End of story. (And Apple users, contrary to Rush, are easily the most liberal of the three groups you mention.)
Crissa
I find that the savings for PCs is spent then in software (OS) and maintenance. The amount of maintenance you need for even identical PCs vastly exceeds that for the same number of Macs, once you add in an equal number of users.
But that’s my personal and professional experience. The amount spent upfront for a Mac is put back quickly in time an material on a similar PC.
pseudonymous in nc
@Xboxershorts:
YMMV, as they say. But I’m really not interested in the pissing contest you seek, given that you refuse to admit you were wrong upthread after being called on it.
@TriassicSands:
I think the reviewer’s point was that it was a very decent phone for people who aren’t obsessed with the latest and greatest phone. And I’m fine with leaving behind the pissing contest and spec-wankery at the top end.
Xboxershorts
@pseudonymous in nc:
Wrong about what? iTunes?
Take your iTunes device and plug it into a device without iTunes and go find your media files….wrong my ass. Apple hides it from you if you don’t have iTunes. I reject this model because Apple has no business deciding what I do with MY media files.
Enjoy your corporate koolaid son.