Right now Microsoft is going through the release of Windows 8 and their Surface tablet-thing. And the Apple bloggers I follow are all going around to the new Microsoft Stores to play with them.
They do have some valid criticisms, but too often their complaints boil down to:
- It is different from the Apple product, so who would want one? or
- It is exactly the same as the Apple product, so why not just by an Apple product?
This is the same ecosystem that recently went through a spasm of criticizing reviews of non-Apple products for not explicitly calling out the manufacturers for doing something in a similar way to Apple. One went so far as to imply it was a conspiracy to deny Apple the credit it so richly deserves. Or something.
Look, the list of Apple products I own or have owned is embarrassingly long:
- iPod Shuffle 1st gen
- no fewer than four iPod Nanos of various generations
- iPod Touch
- iPad (3rd generation)
- iPhone 4
Some people don't want to be told how to do things. They want to explore, to make their own ways of doing things. And I think that's fine. But Apple products are not going to meet that need.
The point of Surface and Windows 8 is to try to bridge the Windows desktop with a tablet environment, so that there is program and interface consistency Say what you want about the iPad, they make a very poor tablet extension of a Windows desktop environment.
Sometimes to find better things we have to try new things that may or may not look good initially (or ever). But rejecting something on the grounds that it is different/the same/more expensive is short sighted.
You don't like it? Fine.
Don't use it.
Done.
