Last week, I talked about Apple’s self-perception as a struggling company, fighting for good taste in a world of mediocrity. These predictions from the past are why Apple fans still cheer when the company includes Easter Eggs in its products that poke fun at Windows, despite the fact that the company is now a gorilla in the music industry and is stronger than it has ever been.
Being forced to listen to those kinds of predictions for years created the “us against the world” attitude that many Apple fans (including myself) still exhibit. I think that most Apple fans in the mid-1990s knew in their bones at the time that all of those grim predictions were very likely accurate. They turned out to be wrong, but only because Apple did a good job with OS X and made a great bet with the iPod.
Update: This post has been edited for clarity.
November 5, 2007 at 12:46 pm
Okay, you had all that time to tell us why “Apple fans have a grudge” and yet…didn’t happen.
FAIL
November 5, 2007 at 12:57 pm
This post is so bizarre. Not only is there no correlation between the title and the content, there isn’t any coherence to the first and second halves of the first paragraph, or between the first and second paragraphs, either.
November 5, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Everyone is rewriting Apple’s history. Now the Apple faithful knew in their bones that all those grim predictions were were likely true. I don’t think so. We didn’t know then what we know now. In 1998 I wasn’t so preoccupied with the predictions. We continued to use Macs where I work, and there wasn’t any talk of defection. I was more concerned with Microsoft getting away with murder actually, and getting away doing to Netscape what they had done to Apple.
Nothing like 20-20 hindsight and a short memory.
November 5, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Maczealots are like Jehovah’s Witnesses. Brainwashed douchebags.
November 5, 2007 at 6:11 pm
I’ve been a Mac user for a long time and I very much feared that the Mac was doomed back in the mid nineties. Honestly, I think that the thing that saved the Mac as a platform was Netscape’s decision to release their browser for the Mac and Windows. Had Netscape only developed Navigator for Windows, I don’t think Apple would have made it.