In this information area I present accumulated information on Apple products, principally based upon my own long-term experience with the hardware and software offered by that company.
Why be preoccupied with Apple? It's not preoccupation, or fannishness, or even excessive interest: it's the appreciation of innovation. Apple is renowned for conceiving products whose engineering define a level of excellence for the rest of the industry to aspire to. Examples include the drop-side openability of the G3 desktops, the straight-through airflow design of the G5 towers, the superb unibody engineering of the MacBook Pro, and of course the breakthrough design of the iPhone.
What's Apple's secret? It's no secret — it's simply the result of a better approach to products. A lot of companies approach the marketplace with the objective of making money, and try to devise a product which will achieve that end. That results in a typically pedestrian product, with little distinctive about it or the people who produced it. What the people at Apple instead do is create devices which do things that they want done, and which excites them in extending technology and our potential as a culture. The iMac is an excellent example... Prior to the iMac, the computer paradigm was to have the computer in an indifferently designed, ugly, noisy box next to a typically design-unrelated bulky display, with ad hoc speakers of a wholly different design alongside, all connected by a mess of dust-collecting cabling. Apple remedied that hideous tradition in creating an elegant all-in-one solution, with the computer and hard drive and optical drive and speakers inside a flat panel display.
In Apple's products, they are also addressing one of the worst of human traits: adapatability. But isn't adaptability good? It is in certain respects, but is bad where it allows us to become accepting and innured to uninspired and often poor solutions to our world which may allow us to get things done, but dull our minds and naggingly annoy us at a subconscious level. This is institutionalized by a pervasive culture in the corporations which produce products where conformity and tradition are rewarded by a management structure which adheres to a bureaucratic approach to product generation. Worse, what develops is a like meta mindset among corporations, resulting in a lot of mediocrity. A common mindset results in products evolving along a common trajectory, often endlessly going down a misguided path rather than embarking upon a fresh look. This is why smartphones all ended up with a plethora of grime-gathering buttons and minimal display space and horrid menu systems before Apple engineers, exasperated with using these things themselves, embarked upon a whole paradigm shift with the iPhone. The same lack of mental initiative among computer manufacturers led them to extrapolate laptops into the dismal smaller versions called netbooks which, as Steve Jobs said in his keynote, don't do anything well: the better solution is a touch tablet — and hence the iPad.
It's all about doing things well, and thinking independently. Too few companies are interested in doing things well because they are run by people who hew to a corporate mold of approaching business in a certain way, and who concentrate on the mechanics of running a business. These are administrators rather than leaders. An administrative type will never either inspire the people in their workforce, nor allow them to be creative. Deviating from the heads-down corporate objective is deemed a distraction, and cannot be allowed. Do your assigned work and don't rock the boat. If you look at Microsoft over the past ten years, you'll see a sad example of that, with consistently late, lackluster, same-old products deriving from complacency, indifference to customers, and lack of vision. About the only "innovation" you see out of Microsoft these days is hardware and software which copies what Apple has produced and proven successful.
Why on earth would people stand in line for hours to buy an Apple product — repeatedly? Isn't that irrational behavior? No, it's something else... Apple is a phenomenon, and the reason for it goes to the essence of human psychology. It's about our collective ability to succeed, as a species...to extend ourselves, to expand our capacity as living beings. People are drawn to the extremes of our creations. The Titanic was, after all, simply a ship, and lives have been lost on many ships. But the Titanic event was so horrible because, more than anything else, it represented our collective failure as creative beings when we have striven to produce something exceptional. We failed — abjectly. That was the fundamental tragedy. Apple is the other end of our spectrum of creativity, representing our ability to succeed. That inspires and excites us. We absolutely need the reassurance that we can demonstrably succeed, that we can do things extremely well, and do that repeatedly. Each step builds upon the last, and we collectively advance. This, then, is not about products or technology, but about our ability to do such things.
An excellent explanation of Apple's success can be experienced in the TED Talk "Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action", available in iTunes podcasts, or click here.
iOS and its use with Apple devices (iPhone, iPod touch, iPad)
Effectively Using an AirPort Base Station (or Time Capsule)
Bento vs. FileMaker Pro Parallels
Fixing a 17" Apple PowerBook's Video Problem
How are accounts hacked? Typically by "social engineering" — getting people to divulge personal information. Phishing is far more successful than you would expect, where you would particularly expect intelligent people to also be "smart"; but, ironically, they are the most likely to give personal info to blind requests. Note also that people often use the same account identifier and password across multiple accounts, and compromised accounts are often trafficked, so incidents such as these can easily occur on retail sites unrelated to the site associated with the phishing ploy. Easily guessed passwords are a common problem. There was one posting I read of a guy whose credit card was abused who used his dog's name as his password — where his dog was prominently featured by name on his photos site. Broadly speaking, the use of Windows computers is a common cause of problems, where Windows is notorious for security problems and where PC owners often don't keep current with OS patches and blithely install software from the Internet on their computers and browsers. Using public computers (Internet cafes, airports, car dealerships, fraternity houses) is another way to inadvertently surrender your information. Buying non-Apple wireless base stations is another good way to compromise your security, as such units typically default to the nearly useless WPA "security". Carrying credit cards with RFID chips in them is folly: it has been widely demonstrated that someone walking near you with an inexpensive device can get your credit card number. Security experts can cite innumerable cases of people doing costly dumb things.
Drama, rather than solid information, sells news; thus, almost all published reports of such problems is heavy on anecdote and devoid of details. If you search the Web for reports of account hacking you will be hard pressed to find any information on actual causes or the computing habits of the people involved. Investigative journalism is rarer than ever.
See the Apple QuickFacts reference