[tonguez]

“I am not alone, and part of an ever increasing amount of people, that seriously question the anti-consumerism (hence, anti-capitalist, if you're very patriotic) practices employed by the status quo.”

this is one of the most bizarre sentences ever written

[zamalek]

Why?

How many people on this forum, specifically, suggest that they use Apple devices because of, ultimately, good-will garnered by Apple? There should be no doubt that Apple manufactured the best laptop hardware on the planet, for the general use-case, between 2014 and 2020. Yet, many people continue to perceive Apple based on historic merits as opposed to current merits. You could always get much more than Apple for much less, but they had the quality nailed down: it is certainly not rare (especially on HN) to come across someone still using their MBP from 2014 and reluctantly considering an upgrade. Following the golden days of Apple hardware, we still have people defaulting to that prior perspective, even in the face of the the keyboard "don't use it in an environment with dust" problems of recent history.

Consumer psychology is extremely fascinating, and until you look at the overall behavior of consumers (which includes your own stupid self), you just don't realize how you've monkey brain has been exploited.

That sentence is only bizarre to people who haven't realized their own bizarre behavior.

Edit: I include myself in monkey-brain analogies, I am a human/stupid/exploitable just like you.

[paulmd]

> Edit: I include myself in monkey-brain analogies, I am a human/stupid/exploitable just like you.

Yeah, I mean, kinda right back atcha here ;) A lot of people are still stuck in the "apple is dumb Jony Ives design with no ports and super bad performance and overheating" era too, despite Apple actually putting ports back on laptops and having an in-house ARM core that is far and away the most performant laptop you can buy with multiples of the battery life of similar x86 laptops too.

A more productive take on the topic is that a lot of times these things come down to values differences between various consumers: you value repairability and open ecosystem, Apple customers value high-quality OEM parts/service and the all-around build quality (other laptops have a few of the selling points, but it's hard to check all the boxes that Apple does). You highly value the keyboard, Apple customers are willing to tolerate it even if it's not ideal because of the rest of the package. Apple customers value the battery life, you are willing to tolerate plugging in more often even if it's not ideal because of the rest of the package. Etc etc. Those are values differences, not in the sense of moral differences but different customers have different needs and preferences and a lot of time is spent arguing about stuff that ultimately comes down to "I value different things than you do".

It's fairly rare that things actually come down to what I'll call "alternative facts" scenarios - sometimes it does, like the broad disagreement over how to interpret M1 performance numbers (but the differences in performance/battery life that people observe tend to lead to a pretty obvious conclusion imo). But it's generally a lot rarer than the "I like different stuff than you" spats.

I'm saying this as someone who has an x86 apple laptop for work and is not particularly pleased with it, but who is looking at the M1 as a prospect for a personal laptop, but also considering a few particular x86 laptops as well. People get super weird on the x86 side with the "nothing apple can ever be good" shit too, or the Android people getting super weird about how sideloading is a must-have feature (and ignore how that sidesteps the app-review process and leads to facebook/netflix/other must-have apps forcing their way to escalated privileges). It's generally a lot of values arguments, people value different things and that leads them one way or the other.

Of course marketing does play a key role in telling people what they should value, and I am no different from anyone else in that I am affected by marketing even when I think I'm making rational, logically-supported choices ;)