Dan Costa Has Sand in His Vajayjay

You hit the nail right on the head. It’s pieces like this that the WinDroids use to pro­nounce their Windows Mobile phones are bet­ter because they have some “miss­ing” fea­ture from the iPhone.

The rea­son these arti­cles are use­less to any­body try­ing to make an unbi­ased buy­ing deci­sion is that while they use all their col­umn inches to describe all the fea­tures other phones have that the iPhone doesn’t, they never do the reverse.

So pity the poor saps that heed their advice think­ing they have some­thing “bet­ter” than the iPhone with no wifi and a shitty half-assed web browser. Oh well.

@waf­fle­juice: Thanks. The other thing that Dan’s doing, that loads of tech “jour­nal­ists” do is to make the assump­tion that his needs are the same as every­one else’s. I swear most of these chumps have Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

@The Angry Drunk: Oh yeah, there was a BIG round of NPD back when the MacBook Air came out.

Fantastic. Absolutely hilar­i­ous dis­sec­tion of an awful arti­cle. I think many “jour­nal­ists” suf­fer from a lack of abil­ity. Common sense appears to be lost on these folks. Here’s to the com­ing excuse of “It’s a com­men­tary by a well-respected colum­nist.” Most mag­a­zines like to break that one out when­ever the facts or lack of fact-checking get in the way.

My favorite part of the arti­cle is that he doesn’t once men­tion a bet­ter prod­uct. As you said, what’s the value in the “Don’t buy X” prod­uct arti­cles? If you can’t even name one prod­uct that I should buy instead, how we can really trust the magazine’s expert opinion.

Anyway, thanks for writ­ing this, it made my day!

“any­one who really wanted an iPhone already has one.”

Well. I guess that’s that then. Apple, your job is done. Time to free up the iPhone engi­neers to work on the next MacBook Pro.

At least he didn’t call them (the priv­i­leged jour­nal­ists, I mean) ‘syco­phants’ like Thurrott did last year! Kudos to Costa.

Why do peo­ple write “don’t buy” arti­cles? Because they’re paid to.

A bet­ter ques­tion might be: Why do fat guys with ugly beards who think that imag­i­nary hyphen­ated words are the pin­na­cle of inter­net com­edy waste hours of time point­ing out the fact that PC Magazine has an anti-Apple bias like they’ve just dis­cov­ered fire and then start insist­ing that every­one else in the world is nar­cis­sis­tic? Bonus points if you can get the answer out with­out using the term “cunt-nugget” or sweat­ing through an arti­cle of clothing.

@Kevin Smith wannabe: You are an idiot. Clear enough for you?

In short: No wire­less. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

Somebody with a stronger stom­ach than I have should go through the archives and see if Dan did a TCO analy­sis of buy­ing a PC vs. a Mac.

what i always “loved” about PC mag­a­zine arti­cles is their think­ing that macs are like all the win­dow PCs they write about. they truly have no idea why apple prod­ucts are so great and pop­u­lar. to them, it’s a mir­a­cle peo­ple don’t see the “logic” that arti­cles like this try to explain.

every­time i read an arti­cle like this i keep remem­ber­ing the time microsoft built the office suite for mac.…BEFORE get­ting a mac depart­ment. maybe that’s what pc mag­a­zine needs…a mac depart­ment. (i won­der if there is an apple prod­uct in the place)

lol

>What’s miss­ing?

Cheese in the crust, man! Pizza Hut pwn’s Apple.

@Dustin: That’s the beauty of these sort of hit pieces. They don’t have to men­tion a bet­ter prod­uct. All they have to do is cob­ble together a list of “miss­ing fea­tures” and pre­tend all other phones offer them, all on the same device, for free and with­out any sort of ser­vice con­tract. At least that’s as close as I can get to their logic (note the TCO argue­ment van­ishes when Dan talks of “free” phones with more fea­tures than the iPhone, as I’m cer­tain those “free” phones are tied to ser­vice con­tracts as well).

Who has sand in his vag again? Lord, it’s a phone, try not to have a coro­nary because your ego some­how got offended by a col­umn about a THING, a pile of sil­i­con and plastic.

Oh, go ahead and call me an “idiot” like you did that other com­menter, or a “jack­ass” like Gruber con­stantly does. Such an effec­tive way to argue, doesn’t make you look irra­tional at all.

Almost makes me not want to buy one of these things. This is what I hate about being a Mac user — being asso­ci­ated with emo­tional, poorly-argued trash like this.

PS How is it with great writ­ers like Pogue and the folks at basi­cally every mag­a­zine and news­pa­per (and web­site!) in the coun­try using Macs, we end up with peo­ple like you rep­re­sent­ing the users? I guess it’s always that way, like poor une­d­u­cated whites being the self-appointed US patriots.

Yo. Drunk guy. I think I love you.

Great piece. You’re going on my blog roll thingy.

I’m get­ting sick, like you, of asi­nine com­menters who don’t feel the need to pad their com­men­tary with facts or cloud their think­ing with rationality.

When I was a child we called them “fuck­ing retards,” but that isn’t polit­i­cally cor­rect anymore.

Drop on over to my crappy lit­tle web­site some­time. It looks an awful lot like yours, what with the same theme and all. Feel free to pee in the shrubs and fart. I run fairly infor­mal gath­er­ing as a gen­eral rule.

Nice blog you have here.

@Cursing Makes You Right: Oh, I won’t call you an idiot; I have other epi­thets in mind.

First: Look you jack­anape, what makes you think my ego is offended. What I am offended by is pompous “jour­nal­ists” who couldn’t string two log­i­cal propo­si­tions together to save their lives.

Second: I have nei­ther the time nor energy to “argue” with peo­ple who exist solely to drive up the hit-counts for their cor­po­rate mas­ters. You want to have a ratio­nal dis­cus­sion about the mer­its of the iPhone 3G and I’m all in. But that was wasn’t Dan wrote, he wrote a check­list of half-baked argu­ments with­out any actual substance.

Third: What are you threat­en­ing me with not buy­ing an iPhone? I don’t give a crap what you buy or don’t buy; but if you make a deci­sion based on my blog then you get the title of Mother of All Retards.

Fourth: Who the fuck ever claimed that I rep­re­sented any­one? Do I actu­ally have to put some sort of “the opin­ions expressed on the blog are those of the writer blah blah blah” dis­claimer up so that the fee­ble minded don’t get con­fused and some­how con­flate me with Apple PR.

By the way, it’s not the curs­ing that makes me right. It’s the being right that makes me right.

@The Angry Drunk

Wow. Your arti­cle was spot-on, and your com­ment defense was spotter-onner. People like you are why I like the Mac com­mu­nity: bright and enter­tain­ing. I love being asso­ci­ated with peo­ple like you.

You’re right? No, if you look past the juve­nile curs­ing you’re a Nixonian smear artist, assert­ing the fol­low­ing with zero proof :

–Dan (who I don’t know and I could care less about his mag, for the record) is jeal­ous of access. Really? Proof? He makes a good point about how Apple manip­u­lated the press and all you have is this BS?

–Dan doesn’t believe what he wrote, he’s just doing it for hits/links. Again, where’s the proof? What have you proven? How are you “right?” Not even going to argue with this mud you are sling­ing. The impe­tus is on YOU to back this stuff up. You’re just smear­ing. For God’s sake, you didn’t even bother to float a con­spir­acy the­ory on how he per­son­ally ben­e­fits from more traf­fic to PC mag.

People like you and Gruber love to libel writ­ers like this. Argue? Fine. Most of your points are mat­ters of opin­ion, and in at least one case you nail the guy (free phones thing). But then you have to use all kinds of nasty name call­ing and then smear the guy per­son­ally, WHEN YOU HAVE NO EVIDENCE. It’s sick and wrong. And your bay­ing lynch mob of com­menters makes it worse.

And you’re right, why should I let this inter­fere with enjoy­ing my tech. Good point. I won’t do that.

@Cursing Makes You Right: Ok, I take it back, you are an idiot. “Nixonian smear artist”, “libel”. Are you for real? Dan Costa wrote a shitty puff piece of “opin­ion” for PC Mag and I called him out on it. On my blog. Which gets maybe 50 page views on a good day. If not for the fact that Gruber (who you apprently have a hard-on for) decided to give me a bump you would prob­a­bly never even have heard of me.

Tell me this sweet-cheeks, do you zip around the Internet defend­ing poor paid con­tributers to major indus­try mag­a­zines from us evil 50 page view a day blog­gers; or is your lit­tle cru­sade con­fined to peo­ple who get linked from Daring Fireball?

In short, get bent.

@ Cursing Makes You Right

TAD isn’t just beat­ing up Dan Costa, here. He’s call­ing out a sys­tem of stu­pid, fact-free opin­ion pieces that run FUD as news. Dan Costa really isn’t worth all this as an indi­vid­ual con­trib­u­tor. He just hap­pens to be the name on the most recent crap-ridden drivel.

I also would like to apol­o­gize per­son­ally for the way our edu­ca­tion sys­tem has failed you.

Peace.

@Rip Ragged: Truth be told, I went back and looked at some of Dan’s other arti­cles, and I agree with a num­ber of them. He just rolled snake-eyes on this one.

By the way, does being a mem­ber of a “bay­ing lynch mob of com­menters” enti­tle me to any freebies?

I’ll pay the shipping.