Apple Macintosh/YMMV

• The Band Minus the Face: Apple without Steve Jobs.
• Broken Base: People who use Macs for "creative professional" applications like graphic design and video editing, versus "consumer" users of the iPhone, iPad, etc. Some professional users feel that Apple is increasingly targeting the latter at the expense of the former, citing Final Cut Pro X and the stagnation of the Mac Pro line.
• Covered Up: The Apple Lisa, which was in some ways far more powerful than the Mac, also cost four times as much and wound up disappearing not long after the Mac appeared. In a way, Mac OS X has done the same -- no doubt there are many Mac users out there who have never even seen Classic.
  • Calling Lisa "more powered" is a kind of a misnomer. Lisa had much more memory and was usually equipped with a hard disk, thus being able to do much more complex stuff than the original thin Mac, crippled by its tiny 128K memory. But it cost at least three times more, and its CPU was clocked twice as slow as in Mac, 4 MHz vs. 8 MHz, and because most of Lisa's soft was written in Pascal but had to be rewritten in 68000 assembler for Mac to save the memory, Mac ran significantly faster.
• Dead Artists Are Better: Steve Jobs got this immediately after he died, being praised in the press as one of the greatest inventors since Edison.
• Designated Hero / Misaimed Fandom: The famous "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" adverts actually were supposed to be supporting the Mac but many people felt the Mac was Smug Snake in those adverts, bullying the Adorkable PC.
• Double Standard: If Microsoft does something wrong, there will be monopoly accusations, lawsuits, etc. But if Apple does the same, most likely people would basically at most, question their actions but in most cases usually just shrug it off. Pointing this out or giving it a mention gets you flamed. (This goes hand in hand with the Designated Hero trope above.)
  • Mostly justified, at least in the computer market. Microsoft's market power over the bulk of the PC industry is substantially higher than Apple's, which puts Microsoft in the position of being able to commit abuses that no one else in the market can counter without fear of retribution. Apple, being promoters of a different platform with a much smaller market niche, doesn't have to worry about such things. (Whether this remains the case with iTunes' huge presence in music sales is a much thornier issue, but only tangentially related to the Mac platform.)
    • That's an oversimplification, stemming mostly from the misunderstanding o the two companies' goals and policies. Microsoft is first and foremost a software company, and its business is selling operating systems for the millions of the infinitely varied PCs,and the sheer size of the market makes Microsoft's relationships with its clients an extremely distant and impersonal. Microsoft couldn't personally care for all its clients even if it wanted. Apple, on the other hand, is a hardware company with a strict control over any aspect of its products. This allowed Apple to create the genuinely well-crafted assemblies of hardware and software, and, due to its much lower market share, make its client think that it cares for each of them, thus inspiring a great personal loyalty.
  • The same people who like to decry the Mac as just a PC in a fancy case tend to be the same people who drool over case mods.
  • ...but at the same time though, there's plenty of Double Standards against Apple too. There was never any public outcry against HP and Dell for using Foxconn, yet articles about the working conditions in Foxconn were demonizing APPLE. Even if the products in the pictures were clearly Dell computers. Whenever someone writes a "Patent trolling" article, nine times out of ten, it'll be demonizing Apple. Samsung and Motorola, who do the exact same things, generally tend to get away with it. Because they support Android.
• Face of the Band: Steve Jobs, especially since his return to Apple; also, Susan Kare, graphic designer extraordinaire, who created much of the interface art (icons and such) for the Mac and went on to do similar work for several other companies.
• Fan Dumb: Apple's (former?) bohemian image and association with the creative professions has led to a great many Mac users who buy their systems solely for the image of it. Not to mention there's also their perceived snobbish user-base among the computer community and in Computer Wars. Mac power users are known to resent such people as giving the entire platform a bad image.
• Fan Hater: Do not, under ANY' circumstances reveal that you use OS X, and if you have an iPhone? Pretend you don't have it.
• Hate Dumb: However, in the recent years, when it became "Cool" to hate Apple in the Computer Wars, a Massive Hate Dumb arose who hate all Apple things on basis of being Apple, ignoring the fact that many of their stuff is designed very well and the fact that they acknowledged something most tech "giants" have still yet to master - that there is a huge basis of customers who simply want something that "just works" out of the box. In fact, there are just as many militant Windows and Linux users as there are Apple - They're Not So Different than the people mentioned in Fan Dumb.
• Hell Is That Noise: When something goes wrong on PowerPC era Macs (did you botch up during the upgrade?). You either get a DUN-DUN-DUNNNNN, a car crash, glass breaking, or most scary of all, the sound of an explosion. Usually accompanied by a Sad Mac.
  • Older Macs, such as the LC line, accompany Sad Macs with a creepy set of chimes known as the Chimes of Doom.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Bill Joy quipped in 1985: "Just about every computer on the market today runs UNIX, except the Mac (and nobody cares about it)." Now the Mac does, too.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks: It's been getting this from Microsoft Windows, Amiga, and UNIX/Linux users from day 0.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The start-up sound that all Macs make. Since the sound is built into the firmware of most Macs, it even plays when a system with a second OS such as Microsoft Windows installed boots into that OS.
• Never Live It Down: To die-hard PC users, the Mac is still the computer with only one mouse button. Modern Mac mice have been able to right-click for a while and Macs have supported third-party mice for years.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Copland was probably the most egregious example -- the core OS was good enough for Apple engineers to be using it as their daily OS in house, but management ineptitude ultimately killed the project by feature creep. (The carcass was ultimately stripped for parts, with most of the window dressing finding its way into the later Classic releases and the kernel apparently relegated to the bit bucket.)
  • Most anything Apple management did in the 90's, Copland being just one of these decisions. Only Steve Jobs' return saved the company from the fate of Sega, as the companies seemingly competed on shooting themselves in the foot more spectacularly.
  • They were little better in the 80's, choosing, for example, to market the original Macintosh for $2500, to preserve the high profit margin, instead of a much lower $1500-2000 price point the Engineering insisted on, thus crippling the machine's market share from the very beginning.
• Older Than They Think: Despite complaints from Apple fans of Microsoft being copycats, it should be noted that Apple did not invent the first PC or GUI either.
  • Mac OS X is not the first UNIX-based operating system for the Mac. That honor goes to A/UX, released in 1988.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: the Objective-C programming language was seen as a strange little beast (as well as an also-ran to the much more popular C++) by most programmers and got almost no traction at all outside the Next or Mac world... until the iPhone came along.
• Sacred Cow: The Mac has gotten this treatment (and arguably still does) back in the day in that any sort of criticism of the Mac (or simply preferring Windows over Mac) is bound to get you burned to a crisp. This is less frequent today due to the resurgence of Apple as well as some of the controversies Apple has been involved in as a new-found Mega Corp and all, but you can still find some very Defensive Fans in some areas.
• Viewers are Morons: Apple is often accused of designing products with this mentality. Justified in that some of their testers are actually of the moronic type.
  • And yet their targeting the "Moron" demographic was what allowed them to get so big in the first place...make that of what you will.