Comments on: How To Get Your Own Fanboys

By: Jesse

Jesse — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:36:06 +0000

"It just works" really ought to be "It just works or it doesn't." My girlfriend had an iBook at home and a Dell something-or-other running XP for work. The iBook died suddenly and completely — annoying, but no fuss. She considered getting a Windows notebook to replace it, because it's cheaper, and "That's what everyone else uses, so it will be easier to collaborate."

But her work computer has convinced her not to. It doesn't die, but it never works quite right. Currently she's fighting with glitchy network drivers on a daily basis. So she'll get another Mac.

(Then, there are those of us who found in OS X the perfect combination of UNIX and UI. It really is less of a fuss than my Linux box, and Gnome is fugly.)

By: mattmaroon

mattmaroon — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:44:04 +0000

RoR fanboys are almost entirely a subset of Apple fanboys.

By: 4231

4231 — Fri, 02 May 2008 09:07:39 +0000

After reading some of the current Ruby on Rails stuff going on with Twitter, I think you can now safely say that RoR has successfully legioned a group of massive fanboys.

By: mattmaroon

mattmaroon — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:48:03 +0000

I didn't mean necessarily here. And the reason they're so far down is that comments are votable. And I deleted a couple as well.

By: Kartik Agaram

Kartik Agaram — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:12:08 +0000

So I read this post and then the comments on your previous one. I had to get two-thirds of the way down before I found something I would term fanboy-ish. Not even something requiring thick fur.

Calling your readers fanboys because they have different contexts or experiences risks losing them.

The title is an interesting question, but based on the comment thread that induced it, it seems the prerequisite is: get users. Once you have them they'll rationalize not switching.

By: mattmaroon

mattmaroon — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:27:04 +0000

Classic.

By: mattmaroon

mattmaroon — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:27:03 +0000

They could have. Amazon did. The record companies are jumping at a chance to get anyone other than Apple in the game.

And they addressed the first problem by just letting you drag and drop as you would to a hard drive, rather than import library into bloated software, make playlist, sync playlist.

They gave record companies a chunk of profits to allow them to give people the tracks they bought on iTunes on the Zune's format.

By: Technical Writing Geek

Technical Writing Geek — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:03:10 +0000

The problem that cultlike entities — Hitler, Apple, the Democratic Party, Hannah Montana — face is that they have no goal except being in the club. So there's no motivation to make the product better, or to enforce other degrees of reality. The result is a slide into mediocrity.

Apple has been this bad since the mid-1980s at least, when they styled themselves as a femme Winston Smith crushing IBM's corporate dominance. Now they're fighting MS the same way and seem to be fooling some of the newbies.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 01 May 2008 13:48:17 +0000

Sorry, the guy modded a Power Mac G5 tower, not a MacPro. It was in 2004, I thought it was more recent.

Google "Create a Hoax, Earn Damnation" to read a story about it on Wired. It's the first link.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 01 May 2008 13:22:03 +0000

Did you ever read about that guy who took a MacPro enclosure and retrofitted it to house a crappy pc?

He got the empty tower from a friend but made up a story that he gutted it and turned into a PC. He took pictures of the process and posted on one of those modder forums.

The response was hilarious. He was literally getting death threats, like he took a shit on the holy temple of Apple or something.

Also, do you read the "Stuff White People Like" blog? Entry #40 is all about Apple products. Pretty funny:

"Plain and simple, white people don’t just like Apple, they love and need Apple to operate."