I come in peace! Let’s try and sign an armistice before things turn nasty! It has been an all out war between so called “Apple fanboys” and “Fandroids” for ages. In this day and age, any of the following comments are considered as acts of war.
All of the following are real comments extracted from Youtube:
“You just put everything that isn’t Apple down. And don’t say you don’t, because you do.”
“Windows phone is the future you noob ass reviewer.”
“I have the first iPad and one reason that pushed me away from buying the iPad 2 is the design! The thing is ugly!”
“I don’t care what all of the Android fan boys are talking about because I can’t hear them. They don’t have an APPLE logo on so they don’t exist.”
“You are an iOS fan boy and I would certainly say you are an Apple fan boy too. Stick with using Apple devices if you can’t give an unbiased opinion.”
The reason for all of this, I believe, is down to the personalisation of technology. And this all started with the original Apple vs Microsoft battle. Before these two companies emerged, technology was completely impersonal. Nobody really took that much notice (or even cared) if you said that an IBM machine was rubbish.
The technology industry, and by technology I mean video gaming, computing, mobile devices, and so forth, is dominated by two or three big companies. There are not many “generic” manufacturers – there are two or three very strong brands in each area.
Let’s look, for example, at video games. Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. The fanboy war is going on there as well. If you have a market with two or three huge brands dominating, people are going to form allegiances and fight. It’s human nature. That’s just the way it works.
Take another market, say refrigerators. You have many different manufacturers, and none have considerable dominance. If I insult your refrigerator, you’ll be much less affected than if I insult your phone or your computer.
This topic is a very interesting one, but essentially, the ongoing war between “Fandroids” and “Apple fanboys” is down to two words: technology personalization.
