the shrine of apple

This is at once unsurprising and slightly worrying: The Shrine of Apple: our goal – to showcase every product ever made by Apple.

apple hyperbole

One thing I've noticed is Macheads have a serious problem with hyperbole.

"EVERYTHING Apple does is awesome!"

"Macs NEVER crash!"

"PCs ALWAYS crash!"

"Their typography is ALWAYS brilliant!"

...and so on, ad infinitum. The reason this shits me so much is it's so obviously false, Apple don't get everything right and they cut corners like any other company.

The funny thing is after years of gushing Macheads declaiming the sheer perfection of the experience at every possible level, even the slightest problem is magnified. For example the crappy quality of this graphic tacked onto an ugly survey form:

Does it matter? Of course not, it's just some random survey. But it's what I'll think of next time someone says Apple is the domain of perfect text treatment AT ALL TIMES.

zomg science says apple really is a religion!

Memex 1.1 � Blog Archive � The Church of Latter-Day Apple

I mentioned Umberto Eco’s famous essay arguing that the Apple Mac was a Catholic device, while the IBM PC was a Protestant one. His reasoning was that, like the Roman church, Apple offered a guaranteed route to salvation – the Apple Way – provided one stuck to it. PC users, on the other hand, had to take personal responsibility for working out their own routes to heaven.

I’ve always thought that Eco’s essay was just a lovely literary conceit. But now, courtesy of Evegny Morozov, I find that there is even a scholarly literature on the subject. Or, at any rate, one learned article. It appeared in 2001 in the Oxford University Press journal Sociology of Religion: a quarterly review under the title “May the Force of the Operating System be with You: Macintosh Devotion as Implicit Religion”.