I ran across a blog posting that was reacting to another blog posting (as that’s what we blogs do best) that classically sums up effects of the cult-like fanaticism of Apple fans, and how their attitudes actually deter typical tech people from buying Apple products.
Best statement from Kevin Maney:
Here’s something I know from experience: Dis Apple or Steve Jobs publicly, even in a mild way, and the Apple Cultists descend on you like the zombies in Dawn of the Dead. Or maybe the flying monkeys in Wizard of Oz. You get the picture. Nail Apple in a public forum, and you can depend on your in box filling with nasty-grams from dot-mac addresses.
Followed by a classic story via The Marketing Ninja:
An example: one of my college friends was among the first group of people to get an iPhone, and he has not stopped talking about the iPhone since. Every single meeting with him means that I have to spend at least 5 minutes watching him perform some mundane task on his iPhone or watch some lame YouTube video on his tiny screen.
Within a few weeks of owning an iPhone he started to make fun of his other friends and I for using Razors, Treos, and so forth. Nothing, however, topped my his attempt to pick up girls at bars by showing them his iPhone; a few of my other friends and I stood back and watched, all of us thinking “an iPhone would be cool were it not adopted by people like who think that an iPod with a touch screen and 2g wireless will get girls into the sack.â€
Apple’s not an innocent bystander in all of this. People around me will tell you how much I groan whenever the “I’m a Mac” ads come on, where Apple sets up their PC straw man, beating him with a flaming 2×4. Rather than tout the Mac’s features, they are more interested in portraying PC’s as lame. You’ve definitely seen this smugness transcend from Apple Marketing to the fanatic consumers.
I admit: Apple makes beautiful products which become trend-setters throughout their product line (Ipod, iPhone, etc), there’s no excuse for the elitism adopted by people who own these products – to the point where they need to ridicule people who don’t own these products.