Can you look at funny memepics on the web while Pandora is playing in the background on Apple TV? Shop for a new game on Steam while playing a YouTube video? Connect an Xbox 360 controller to play games? We do all of these things. I haven't used an Apple TV, but somehow I doubt that it excels at multi-tasking or interoperating with the non-Apple universe.
> dumbed-down products
> streamlined but extremely limited
What the hell are you even talking about here? It's certainly not TV sticks because all of them offer similar functionality. It's certainly not Apple laptops or desktops and their unix backed OSX. What then? Phones? What activities do you do on your phone that cannot be done on an iPhone? In what tangible way is an iPhone dumbed-down and extremely limited compared to, what, Android? And most importantly, in what way does using an iPhone irreversibly force you into the Apple ecosystem?
All of Apple's products are dumbed down compared to competing products. Windows has soooo much more flexibility than OS X and I'll be glad to give you a couple of good examples to shore up my argument.
For starters - the really big obvious one is that OS X only runs on a very small sub-set of the hardware that Windows runs on. I don't care if their business plan dictates it, it's dumb and I won't use OS X because of it. Windows runs faster on the same hardware anyway.
Here's a big one for which there are lots of examples - Apple simply does not let you customize OS X nearly as much as you can customize Windows. Apple's dumb-it-down attitude reaches all the way to the smallest of features - for instance, go try and change the color of your mouse cursor in OS X. One day I tried to change it to white because I like that better and I found out that OS X has the cursor bitmap burned into a fucking ROM or something... that's just a tad ridiculous, don't you think?
I think it's hilarious that some people are so in love with Apple that they don't even see the most basic examples. If the mouse cursor example hasn't convinced you please let me know and I'll come back with a larger list of just how many ways OS X is limited (and therefore dumbed-down) compared to Windows and Linux desktops.
(EDIT: And the same arguments go for the iPhone versus others. Apple doesn't let you customize it nearly as much as Android and of course they don't let you run it on the hardware you want, so yeah the iPhone is dumbed-down. Enjoy your prison yard!)
> Here's a big one for which there are lots of examples - Apple simply does not let you customize OS X nearly as much as you can customize Windows. Apple's dumb-it-down attitude reaches all the way to the smallest of features - for instance, go try and change the color of your mouse cursor in OS X.
You escalate the notion of a mouse cursor theme being difficult to change into the entire operating system being difficult to customize. An operating system does a lot of stuff, I don't see how any of this follows.
> I think it's hilarious that some people are so in love with Apple that they don't even see the most basic examples.
I'm not sure what you think this tiny thing is indicative of, but I guarantee to you that most people have never even thought about this because it is irrelevant to their lives.
> And the same arguments go for the iPhone versus others. Apple doesn't let you customize it nearly as much as Android and of course they don't let you run it on the hardware you want, so yeah the iPhone is dumbed-down. Enjoy your prison yard!
To summarize your arguments: Apple provides fewer hardware options and a lot less theming options. Seems to me like your words are a bit too harsh considering you are describing a full desktop operating system and a full mobile operating system, both of which have significantly more knobs to tweak than just themes. They also run software you know. Limiting access to fiddle with themes is hardly a prison yard. Also, not everybody has the time to fiddle with themes. Also, just because something is customizable doesn't mean you can make it look good (customizability comes at a cost to coherency). Also, plenty of people use Apple strictly because of how their products look and feel. I think your theming metric is quite weak in general, but especially when used to back up the claims that every single thing Apple makes is "dumbed down" and "extremely limited."
