The Jobs-Apple haters are out in full force in GD ...

[Bake]

I've never really been a fanboy, but I just wonder, did anybody put a gun to people's heads and MAKE them buy Apple computers, iPods, iPhones, iPads? Did anybody MAKE them buy music through iTunes?

It makes me wonder how Apple managed to become, for a while, the most valuable company in the country ... especially if they were pushing such crappy products.

RIP, Mr. Jobs. Thanks for what you gave us. Or sold us, for that matter.

:hi:

Bake

[HopeHoops]

1. The only company that was seriously ahead of Apple in technology was Commodore.

Unfortunately, Commodore's management made a LOT of stupid moves - culminating in the last nail in the coffin of selecting Max Toy as their CEO at a time when it was critical to dispense with the "games only" image the product lines had acquired. Atari almost caught up with the ST, but the Mac II was way behind both Commodore and Atari. Hell, even the PET was ahead of the Apple II. The PC was a clunky piece of shit through all of this, and a very late entry into the market place. If it hadn't been for those three little letters "I", "B", and "M", the thing never would have survived. It royally sucked and there were far better CP/M-based machines available at the time. IBM DOS was just a crippled CP/M anyway. Microsoft taking it over just made things worse, but I think Microsoft has finally (after all of this time) gotten its shit together with Win 7. Vista is still way too prone to just hanging for no reason and IE is an invitation for viruses. NT 4.0 SP6 is the only other OS they've made that I would call "stable".

And remember when Lotus tried to sue other companies for stealing the "look and feel" of their spreadsheet? What about Lotus stealing the "look and feel" from VisiCalc - which was written and available for the Apple II before the first IBM PC was even sold! There was a lot of idea swapping going on in the 80's and it was overall for the better. I use OpenOffice on all of my machines, Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it is the most compatible office suite out there - it even reads old Word documents that the new Word has problems with (I'm sure intentionally). I swap files around between all three environments on thumb drives and never have a problem. Before long, there's really just going to be one environment where each individual OS emulates what it doesn't do naturally (slower, of course). We're pretty close to that point as it stands.

Apple was the driving force behind the rapid development of the industry, especially in the area of size reduction, but it wasn't the only one in the game. At one of the companies I worked at in the early 90's, the president actually said he wanted the PC version over the Sparc IPC because the PC was "a lot bigger so it has to be more powerful". Riiiiiiigggghhhhttt. The Sparc IPC ran circles around PCs.

[hunter]

18. Oracle now owns the OpenOffice name and they are neglecting it.

LibreOffice is the healthy branch of the same software with a very active developer community.

http://www.libreoffice.org

I've made the jump and I'm very happy with it.

I'd recommend LibreOffice over OpenOffice because Oracle doesn't do anything unless there's something in it for Larry Ellison. OpenOffice is never going to pay for his toys so he just give a shit.

[HopeHoops]

19. I'll have to give it a try, but frankly OO performs just fine the way it is.

I mean, seriously, how much more needs to be done? But just out of curiosity, is LibreOffice available on Win(whatever), MAC, and Linux?

[hunter]

20. It's available for all three operating system.

I use Linux, so I won't advise on Windows or Mac.

But yes, I agree, OpenOffice is very fine as it is.

[meegbear]

2. Wait 'til Gates dies ...

this place'll be HateCentral.

It's not the products, it's the in your face, you're an idiot if you're not using these that pisses people off. I drank the kool-aid, went to the 2005 and 2006 WWDC conferences and yes, saw Steve on stage, and wrote Cocoa apps for my old company. But in the end, it's just a shiny rectangle, and decided to return to Windows.

If that means more to you than anything else in the world, then, hey that's SUPER! But don't expect everyone else to fall in line and don't take anyone not saying anything less than "He was the bestest person, EVER!!1!" to be "I hope be burns in Hell".

[Bake]

3. I"'m not a fanboy, but there's plenty of the "burn in hell" types in GD.

If it weren't for Mr. Jobs, there would BE no PCs and no Microshit Windows. Gates wasn't building personal computers in his garage ...

Bake

[Yavin4]

5. I Tried To Make The Point That The Internet Would Not Be Possible

if it were not for the pioneering efforts by Apple to make computing easier and simple. Folks would not even have PCs in their home if it were not for Apple.

You would think that I posted that Hitler was a great guy for the amount of vitriol that I got.

[Bake]

6. Exactly.

So we can thank Steve Jobs for DU, among other things.

Bake

[Yavin4]

8. It's An Odd Mix of Haters

Some of them just hate anyone with money. Others are techies who are myopic in their thinking. They simply do not understand that computing is more than just arcane knowledge of how systems work.

A lot of techies have grown up with computers all of their lives, so they don't know of a world without user friendly GUIs.

[ZombieHorde]

17. Which group did my thread fall into?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x2067195

The workers' rights group?

[Spider Jerusalem]

11. The Internet predates Apple

by some number of years. We'd have personal computers, we'd have the Internet. No one company is bigger than emerging technology; "it steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time", as the saying goes. (Just like we'd still have planes without the Wright brothers, radio without Marconi, and electric lighting without Edison.) Apple didn't invent microcomputers, or the GUI, or the mouse, or any of it; they adapted existing technologies, and if they hadn't been around? Someone else would've. The world might look somewhat slightly different in the details with no Apple, but not in the broad outlines.

[Yavin4]

12. I Highly Doubt That

Computerswould have been the province of a select few instead of it being accessible by the masses. Computing would not have been made user friendly without Jobs' vision.

Yes, they would have existed. Yes, the internet would have existed, but average every day folks would not be using it.

[RebelOne]

13. True, I had Apple computers for years before I had even heard of the Internet. n/t

[REP]

14. Of course we'd have radio without Marconi - it was invented by Nicola Tesla

Nearly all Marconi's radio patents were rescinded and put back in Tesla's name; Marconi's "s" signalnwas broadcast using nearly all Tesla inventions.

[ElboRuum]

22. While it's not worth the vitriol...

Part of the problem with Apple is that people who love Apple seem to engage in historical revisionism, and you're probably talking to people who know better.

The PC in the home had more to do with Commodore's products than with Apple's. The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64">Commodore 64 was the largest selling computer of the 80's, and in the period between 1983 and 1986, it commanded between 30% and 40% of the PC market share. In the early days, it was a fight for the home desktop... and Apple's II series of computers lost to Commodore and IBM until GUIs started showing up. Commodore won this battle because its computer was both much cheaper and had great value for the price (the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_SID">sound chip it carried alone was revolutionary for the time and still enjoys popularity). Commodore eventually lost to the IBM PC and Apple in the GUI era even though the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga">Commodore Amiga was technologically commensurate with IBM PCs and Macintosh computers, largely due to poor marketing. Commodore was run by some stupid people at the time and they went bankrupt as a result.

The Internet is actually just HTTP protocol servers running on ARPANet network lines (a military research project) which originally connected major institutions like universities and such, which began to be expanded and used publicly in the mid-90s. This during a time when Apple was swooning. The WWW was popularized during the Windows 95 era.

The Apple that people seem to want to love is the Apple of the iPod, a relatively recent position, and it had little to do with popularizing the Internet.

[pokerfan]

9. don't know if I would go that far

Gates may not have building home computers but plenty of others were, including IBM. I feel the need to rewatch Pirates of Silicon Valley. The IBM situation was hilarious. They granted Gates complete rights to the OS allowing him to sell MS-DOS (PC-DOS) to other OEMs. IBM figured the money was in the hardware, not the software. Then they lost control of the hardware market. :rofl:

In defense of Gates, he made home computing affordable. But Steve Jobs made home computing elegant. David Pogue has an excellent tribute to Jobs in today's New York Times:

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/steve-jobs-imitated-never-duplicated/">Steve Jobs: Imitated, Never Duplicated

[retread]

16. No, Steve Wozniak was. Quote from the Apple Museum:

"In 1975, when personal computers came in kit form and resembled nothing more than a rectangular box with some switches and a few wires, Woz was already thinking in terms of video displays and keyboards. It was during his involvement with the Home Brew Computer Club in Palo Alto, California, that Woz designed and built what would be the Apple I computer. His friend Steve Jobs saw its commercial potential and together they formed Apple Computers, initially selling around 600 Apple Is at a price of $666 each. From here Woz, spurred on by his love of computer games, went on to design the Apple II, which after its unveiling at West Coast Computer Faire in 1977, became the first commercially successful personal computer, and by 1980 Apple Computers was worth $1.2 billion..."

But this America and ALL credit goes to CEO's, not the brilliant people they are standing on.

[Lucian]

4. I learned that Steve Jobs was better than Sam Walton because Jobs made his money in a different way.

:wtf:

:eyes:

:rofl:

[Bake]

7. WTD, indeed.

:hi:

Bake

[Lucinda]

10. I was just surprised it took them an hour or so to start bashing.

It was fairly civil at first.

[JCMach1]

15. Hate Apple, but love Jobs

You won't hear anything bad from me about one of the true pioneers of the digital age...

[SteppingRazor]

21. Oh, I dunno. I've only been over there in GD a few minutes and the Jobs love is overwhelming. n/t

[Taitertots]

23. Jobs didn't give you anything... Do you think he personally made those products?

All he did was siphon billions from the people who actually created the products you enjoy.