Someone has to fight against the endless Apple hype. Even my polite, intelligent, well-written cohorts here at TheNextWeb are drinking the Cupertino kool-aide. I am here to push back against treating incremental updates to annoyingly overpriced, underpowered, or broken technologies as a godsend.
We all know that the technosexuals technorati love Apple: Apple software, hardware, middle ware, anything. Slap an Apple logo and in the words of Kevin Rose: “I don’t know what it does, but, I just want it!”
Blog coverage follows the same mentality: any update to make any Apple product a touch better bring in heralding cries of the “hardest/fastest/bestest/strongest Apple Whatever ever.” It’s enough to make the average PC user retch mildly.
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Given the major blogs that cover Apple are almost all in agreeance over the superiority of Apple products (go watch bloggers at a conference), except for the token Windows guy at Gizmodo, I will be the lone non-Apple voice.
Let’s break down what Apple released today, and why you really should be nothing more than relieved over what has been released, not excited:
New Macbook: Well, about time. After the last two rounds of updates to its laptop line, the plastic clamshell Macbook was a dinosaur. If you are at all surprised that Apple took the time to improve it, you are far behind the times. At an embarrassing 4.7 pounds, it packs a paltry 250 gigabytes of storage, and two gigabytes of RAM. Want more RAM? Be prepared to pay $50 per gigabyte to Apple.
The Macbook is still overpriced technology, whose only excuse for existence is that Apple has to have something below the Macbook Pro, and can convince college kids that a few hundred dollars in Apple tax is worth the OS X experience.
Even with the updates, the Macbook is still underpowered, and overpriced. Next!
The Magic Mouse: The Mighty Mouse was long the disaster of the Mac line. I use them on a daily basis, and to hear the news of a slick new mouse made me leap with joy. Until Zee mentioned that indeed it costs 55 pounds. Wow, really? I love your work here Apple, but like hell am I paying that much for a mouse. If I was a professional gamer I might consider it. Overpriced, I’ll just suffer with what I have.
New iMac: An incremental upgrade, and a good one. But the way that people are talking about it, you would think that indeed that Apple had just invented the iMac. The iMac line has always been strong, and some upgrades will hurt no one. Still, calm down everyone. They took away the cord from the keyboard to the computer, nice, but not cancer-curing.
Oh, and it’s the fastest iMac yet. Of course it is! Would apple upgrade the system to make it slower? All they have to do is put a better top end processor as an option and, viola, the fastest iMac yet. Why do we keep falling for this?
Mac Mini: This thing is still underpowered: up to a 500 gigabyte hard drive? That is just a disgrace to the user of the computer.
There you have it, the Windows fanboy view of the latest Apple updates. Some good things in there, for the Mac community (that I am a part of), but nothing that is going to revolutionize computing. Nothing that is worth having endless coverage over was announced today. Calm down everyone, Apple is just going to do this again after the holiday season. Oh, and can you just imagine the explosion of derivative posting that will occur when the Apple Tablet (if it exists) comes out?
Spare me.
The Kevin Rose quote was from the Diggnation episode at MacWorld when they announced the Apple TV.
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