“It Just Works” My Ass
by Tony Hung on November 17, 2007
The closest thing I’ve come to owning a Mac is through my brother, who purchased a notebook some months ago — but that’s the best thing about being a blogger: its part of our writ to write about things we barely know about. Anyway, contrary to the motto “it just works”, it just _doesn’t_ work, as he’s had a number of hiccups from time to time. Admittedly not as severe as the misadventures he had with his Dell or, prior to that, his bargain-basement PC, but it certainly isn’t quite as its billed to be: short of perfect.
Therefore, it was with schadenfreude-like glee that I read about Leopard’s earlier mishaps (although I understand much of it has been patched), and now, Robert Scoble’s own royal frustrations (see Rob Hyndman’s problems with peripherals).
While there are a lot of things that macs in all their incarnations do very well, one thing I cannot abide by is the snobbishness that many Mac-owners take about their platform and hardware of choice. There’s no question that PC owners do the same, but I think the real issue is that Apple corporate echoes the same kind of childish tropes through its own marketing voice (‘it just works’), advertising, and error messages that are coded right into OSX.
On the other hand, I don’t think you will ever hear anyone who is attached to Microsoft ever make smug suggestions that their products are without error …which I take “it just works” to mean.
8 comments
Ahhh. A man with a sharp wit. Someone ought to take it away from him before he cuts himself. – Peter da Silva
by earl on November 17, 2007 at 11:55 am. #
What I cant understand is when someone says he/she is a APPLE fan. A fan of a company that is so tight lipped, closed, monopolizes and so full of marketing crap.
by Arpit Jacob on November 17, 2007 at 12:36 pm. #
Hey Earl — know what I think its witty? Someone who makes rejoinders using pithy quotes. That’s wit.
No wait, that’s just smug hauteur.
Goodness, I always confuse the two. ;)
by Tony Hung on November 17, 2007 at 12:45 pm. #
“Much ado about nothing”
-Shakespeare
by Ashley on July 30, 2008 at 3:49 pm. #
I Recomend changing you brother probably he is the fault
Cheers
by Anonymous on January 23, 2009 at 5:55 am. #
It’s all about marketing. The internal parts of a mac, mabook, etc are all sourced from the same manufacturers as pc parts. Ex… Logic board- Foxconn, hard drive -hitachi, seagate, etc…internal fan-sunon. Of course they will break and will need to be fixed. The difference is the operating system, it is quite good but not excellent. Oh and the price too.
by ed hernandez on November 22, 2009 at 1:40 am. #
When I say “it just works” about my home computer, which is a Macintosh, I don’t mean that it never has any problems or is virtually perfect. What I mean by that statement is that under normal operating conditions (the vast majority of the time, excepting the occasional problem) the procedures involved with getting something done in the software are generally simple to invoke, intuitive to find, and the details are hidden by the careful integration across hardware and software, including third party applications. That is something I can NEVER say about my work computer, which is a PC, under ANY operating conditions. Doing stuff sometimes takes multiple apps and is a herky-jerky process with a lot of manual intervention and details. It just doesn’t work.
by Thompson on June 10, 2011 at 11:49 am. #
iBooks could ‘just work’ but I need Lion to even download it. iCloud would just work but only if I install Lion. My MacBook is only CoreDuo therefore won’t run Lion, so iCloud will never sync it with my iMac anyway. PPC programs would work if I had Snow Leopard but I just installed Lion. Grrrrr!
Unfortunately Steve Jobs’ philosophy died with him and I am quickly falling out of love with Apple.
RIP
by JEH on January 26, 2012 at 12:30 pm. #