Cracked Apple

As I sat here writing on my MacBook, listening to iTunes, with my iPod in my backpack, I came across an interesting article at a humor website I frequent: http://www.cracked.com/article_18377_5-reasons-you-should-be-scared-apple.html

check this out too: http://www.cracked.com/blog/dell-vs-mac-a-harrowing-tale-of-customer-service

I am incredibly thankful for these. You see, I rail against the hippy culture which surrounds me at school for many reasons which will probably end up as other blogs. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

College students hate corporations. College students love Apple products. I do not get it. The same people who lecture me on Wal-Mart, big oil, and even the university administration leave Apple alone. I won’t name names but there are quite a few people I’ve had such experiences with. One example I remember vividly was shortly after the economy had crashed (late ’08, in case you live under a rock or in some sort of golden castle) someone expressed great joy at the fact that Apple dropped their prices on certain products in order to alleviate some of the extra financial pressure people were feeling. ‘Yay Apple Steve Jobs! The corporation and CEO with a heart!’ is what it amounted to. To me, it seems Apple could see that people had less money and therefore would buy fewer computers unless they dropped their prices. That’s a way of protecting marketshare. Sure, maybe it helped some broke college students out (which is good) but we’re talking about motives here. You must remember that they still turned a good profit after dropping their prices; meaning they were screwing everyone until they realized it wasn’t going to work anymore, due to events outside of their control.

That’s kinda ranty, but it’s been on my mind for a while. I just hate to see the hypocrisy in it all. People talking about corporations like they’re monsters while they support one that does exactly what all of the others do. These are people who have been in Apple stores before. If you don’t know what I mean, they’re places where everything costs 160% more than it would be on Amazon.com (that’s my experience with Final Cut Express) and there are salespeople everywhere. Seriously, everywhere.

If the store is crowded, say on a Saturday afternoon, they make people line up like it’s a trendy club and then let each customer in with a salesperson escort. They then tell them that they just want X and the salesperson convinces them that they need deluxe X or X, Y, and Z or a Shamwow or Slapchop or whatever they’re peddling nowadays (iPad? Really?). They use all of the classic salesperson tricks (look you in the eyes, or that space in between them; make you say yes to 3 things before trying to close the sale; etc.) and it’s shameless.

I like Apple products because they’re user friendly and don’t get viruses. They aren’t more or less evil than Microsoft or any other big corporation. I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you lecture me on Apple’s  superiority over its “amoral” competitors in any way, you’re wasting your time. It’s a consumer electronics company. Period.