Why I dislike Apple products

Okay, fine, I do not dislike Apple products that much (but it was an eye-catching title, wasn't it?), but I do dislike Apple.

First, as the people in this video here, point out, apple has invented almost nothing, ever.

For those of you too lazy to watch the whole video, I will give you the premise right here:  This youtuber asked his audience to send him something, anything Apple made that was original.  Let me run down the things their users brought up, in the order of recognizability.

iPod- the first commercialy successful mp3 player with a screen was the Diamond Rio, 1998 (iPod was released late 2001)
iPad - 1989 GridPad, a DOS based tablet (and several windows tablets after that) beat Apple to the tablet market
iPhone - Linksys put out the first iPhones, when Apple released the same product, they sent Linksys tons of money not to make a fuss about it
iOS and Mac OS- both are simply UNIX BSD with a custom kernel (kernels are easy to make)
         EXCEPTION OS9 was completely original, and it was absolutely unambiguously terrible
App Store - Ubuntu Software Center came two years earlier
Firewire- combined effort from Texas Instruments, Sony, DEC, IBM, Intel, SNS, and Thompson
MagSafe (magnetically connected power cables) - used on Oriental rice cookers for decades, but noone bothered to patent it before Apple
30 pin dock (on the bottom of every Apple mobile device) - Motorola 1963
AppleTV - Microsoft beat them with MediaCenter tv
Inductive charging (charging a battery without a hard wire connection) - Nikola Tesla ran ALL of his electronics with induction.
Mini display port - a regular VGA display port shrunk down to fit on a laptop
Thunderbolt expansion port - invented by intel, Apple pays them to put it on their machines
First laptop with a handle - DataView 25 from 1985.  It even had a wireless keyboard.
Apple Pippin (game console) - Bandai made the software and IBM made the hardware, Apple only marketed
Newton (Apple's PDA from back when those were popular) - PDAs were invented long before then
Apple QuickTake (digital camera) - Kodak had the first digital cameras, Kodak thought it was just a fad, so Kodak went back to the tried and true market of regular photographs (and we all know how that turned out for them)
Ample 2E card - Wosniak's machine with a different shape connector
Apple logo - in Genesis 3:6, Eve took a bite out of an apple, thereby making the first Apple logo.

Of course, there is no problem with selling products that are not original, but there is a problem with marketing them as original, and then suing the people they ripped the idea from.  Right now there are lawsuits in motion concerning electronic devices with rounded corners, and laptop computers shaped like a wedge.  I feel that there is something wrong with a business when they sue somebody because "I made a rectangular product, so now you have to find a different shape".

Another issue I have with Apple is this:  their computers are very user-unfriendly.  I don't mean in the sense of the interface being inadequate, the mac and iOS interfaces are excellent (but not original), but in the ammount of power their users have over their own systems.  Do you want to make an app or program that will run on iOS and Mac?  You had better be prepared to dish out a good quantity of money and a very long waiting period to get the certification sub-program so that you can test your app, much less put it on the app store.  Windows, Linux, and Android (basically the same as Linux), require no such certification, so you can install and run any programs and apps you want, or write your own programs and provide them for free on the internet.

There is a huge community for such "Open Source" software, and for any of your software needs, there is an opensource version of the leading software that will work just as well, sometimes even better.  For example, you just bought a new computer, but you don't want to pay another $100 to get the Microsoft Office suite.  You can visit OpenOffice, and get essentially the same programs for free.  Is Paint not enough photo editing power, but you don't want to spend $200 on Photoshop? Download GIMP, a free software that can perform the same tasks.  But good luck, if you own a mac.

Same thing applies to mobile devices.  Unless an app has a huge demand from a large group of followers, developers do not want to go through all the hoops set up by apple to get their product to run on an apple device.  As a result, small communities who could use an app with a very specific function cannot get it.  Three-dimensional chess?  Tengwar Transliterator? Starcraft 2 Build Orders?  These things are found aplenty on the Android app store, but do not exist at all on iOS.

The final reason I do not like apple products is this: the boxes containing apple devices have no screws.  I mean this mostly figuratively, of course.  I like the aesthetic of not having screws, but what I like even more is the ability to alter and improve the thing that I own.  If you're a Mac user, and Skyrim will not run on medium settings on your system, too bad!! Go buy another computer for $15,000.  When I purchased Skyrim and found my system inadequate, I went to my local Frys Electronics, bought a video card for $100, and now I can play on High settings, Ultra when I am willing to let framerate drop a bit.  I have also added USB ports and ports for a 7.1 surround sound system.  My machine is arguably better and a $15,000 Mac, and cost me a total of $700 (not including my second monitor, which I kept from my last computer).

Apple makes a good product, but because of their business policies and unnecessary expense, I prefer not to buy from them.


DISCLAIMER: Before the flaming starts, I want everyone to know that I do in fact own an apple product, namely and iPad that was given to me as part of a scholarship.  I like having it, and I use it often, but I do not cherish it nearly as much as my customized desktop PC or my Android phone with a custom OS.