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Everyone Else Looks Bad

Entry 340, on 2006-06-01 at 15:20:00 (Rating 2, Computers)

Today PC Magazine named Apple as its "Hardware Company of the Year". Its interesting the way this magazine, which is primarily oriented around the PC world, regularly compliments Apple on its products and gives it many awards for best products. For example, I remember them giving Mac OS X the best OS award. Remember, this is from PC magazine. Anyone who doesn't think Mac OS X is the best general purpose OS is crazy, but I thought PC magazine might have at least pretended a PC OS was best!

PC Magazine made comments like "Apple once again introduced products that made everyone else look bad." This is true. PC design is distinctly uninspiring. Its always surprised me how no PC manufacturer seems to be able to make an elegantly designed, beautiful machine like Apple can. Is it really so hard? If you don't care, then yes it is.

Maybe another comment: "We continue to hope that some of the Cupertino crowd's design ideas will trickle down to the rest of the tech industry" explains the situation. The PC world are waiting for innovations to trickle down from Apple, are they? By the time they catch on to Apple design features (if they ever do) it will already be too late. Anyway, why wait for a PC company to steal Apple's ideas when you can have the real thing from Apple now?

Apparently PC Magazine attributes Apple's design success to "a huge RD budget" and a "single-minded despot running the show". Don't other companies have similar amounts available to invest in R&D? What about Microsoft or Dell? All they seem produce is mediocre, cheap rubbish. And Steve Jobs is single-minded, is he? If he is then surely Gates and Dell are as well. Maybe the difference is that Jobs is single-minded in producing the coolest products on the planet. The others are just single-minded about producing the biggest profit with the minimum effort.

Maybe more PC users reading PC Magazine will finally see the light, and realise that instead of waiting for the rest of the industry to pick up cool design from this so-called trickle down, they can get the real thing now, when they buy a Mac. Everything else *does* look bad, but the new Macs sure look good!

Comment 1 (204) by Anonymous on 2006-06-03 at 21:51:02:

Oh man, you really like Apple don't you. Why do you think most people use PCs with Windows instead, if Apple is so great?

Comment 2 (205) by OJB on 2006-06-04 at 20:37:04:

Well yes, good question... why indeed? Maybe its because Macs are a bit more expensive, or that there are just a lot more places to buy PCs, or that there is such a huge industry out there who support PCs and encourage others to buy them, or that its just the traditional "safe" option.

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