David Hewson: Diary of a Mac returnee: When Mac users turn ugly.
A member of my family recently spent a couple of weeks working in tech support for a large media company with an extremely popular product available for both Mac and Windows. He’s got a fairly agnostic attitude towards computers, with no particular bias in either direction. After a couple of weeks dealing with tech support requests he came home steaming about Mac users in general. A bug had emerged in one of the applications the company used. This software worked fine under OS X 10.3. Under Tiger, the printing can go funny.
Why? Well, anyone who hangs around tech areas knows the answer already. Tiger has bugs, big ones sometimes. The problem with the company’s app not printing was to do with Tiger, not with the app.
Would the average Mac user calling up to complain accept this? Not at all. Most simply railed against the third party company for not meeting Apple’s exacting standards, and absolutely refused to believe that the real problem might like with the operating system itself.
I’ve long thought this kind of blind loyalty has been extremely damaging to Apple itself. It allows the company to get away with murder on occasion, in customer service, quality of product and its general attitude towards the people who buy its wares. It’s also extremely off putting to people sitting in the middle wondering whether to plump for Windows or the Mac.
My own experience of Mac users has been much more positive than this. In fact, I’ve found in meeting Mac users face to face that they’re much more willing to blame Apple than third parties – but perhaps that’s because British Mac users tend to be less inclined to believe in Apple’s corporate myth.
