I don’t like Apple products. That statement alone will probably make RF fire me, but it’s true. So imagine my surprise and delight when I ran across this video of an iPhone 4S being obliterated by a .50 BMG API round. It just made my morning a little brighter.

[via Gizmodo]

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26 COMMENTS

  1. Are kidding me! You lost me at I hate Apple products and the video ,the horror! But have to admit, it was pretty darn cool. Is that phone on ebay yet?

  3. iPhone 4S being obliterated…

    Recall that Jay Leno Frito commercial (“eat all you want, we’ll make more”); Apple is laughing all the way to the bank.

  4. Apple rage is fun to watch when it’s well done like this. The last Apple product I owned was a Mac Classic, so my feelings aren’t hurt, but I am curious to know why you don’t like them. Illuminate the indifferent and fans alike; what’s so bad about Apple?

    • Personally I don’t like the “walled garden” approach Apple has to content on their devices.

      Their computer operating system only works on their proprietary hardware and discourages upgrades, and their hardware is maddeningly difficult to disassemble to replace parts that go bad. With Linux, you can put it on whatever hardware you want and swap out parts at will. Cheaper computers that run faster.

      For their phones, their app store is regulated in a very heavy handed fashion. Anything that they don’t like is summarily thrown out and there’s no easy way to get “rejected” apps on your device. Android lets you do whatever you want.

      I do, however, use an iPod. A classic one, not the touch variety. It’s a good product, but I’ve never felt the need to upgrade.

      • I just don’t like the snobbishness that seems to come as an accessory with Apple products. My wife’s family are all Apple lovers and I swear that the only thing her dad doesn’t like about me(excepting my firearms, as they are all quite liberal) is that I’m not an Apple fanboy like everyone else. Looking down one’s nose at a PC user seems to be an epidemic amongst Apple people.

      • The “walled garden” as you call it is Apple’s “total widget” design approach. It is the reason their products simply work better than everything else on the market, and the reason they’re the most valuable technology company on the planet. So far as OS X and the Macs go, the reason they don’t violently explode every five seconds is that they don’t have to deal with shoddily written drivers and software to support some piece of crap chinese component that cost 12 cents to build and sold out of Best Buy for $49.95.

        That stability and “just works” ethos is why people whose time is worth money use them. When faced with “spend several hours screwing around with hardware and driver issues” is compared with “use those same hours generating revenue”, it is not a terribly difficult decision to make.

        They run the app store in a similar fashion. Apps that don’t meet the design criteria and standards of quality are rejected, and as such you don’t have apps that crash the phone every five seconds and look like a child scribbled on something with a crayon. I’ve written apps and had them rejected. Apple’s feedback was very concise on the reasons why they were rejected. So, I modified them to conform with the guidelines, and surprise, now they’re in the app store. It really isn’t rocket science.

        As to the hardware being “difficult to work on”– I can only surmise that you’ve never actually seen the inside of a Mac in the last decade or so. I tear several dozen apart on a weekly basis. I also tear apart several dozen Dell, Supermicro, HP, etc, etc servers and workstations apart on a weekly basis. The Apple products are elegant and logical, with cable management that makes sense and components that generally do not require tools to replace. The PC machines seem at times to be intentionally designed to make you bleed, largely as they are cheaply built in order to compete in a market with tiny margins.

        For myself, computers are tools and I use the best one for the job. More often than not, it’s a Mac, because they don’t waste my time and as such cost me money.

        • I get that they provide a better user experience for the average person, but I’m the kind of guy that loves to be able to tinker with their equipment. For me, Macs don’t make sense. For my sister, on the other hand, I got her one for Christmas.

          In short, there is no “one system to rule them all.” Everyone is different, and I just don’t like Macs.

          Four years in frontline helpdesk support does strange things to you, I guess…

          • Well, if you like to tinker, there’s always a hackintosh. The OSx86 people have come up with a number of ways to make the process relatively painless. That at least gives one the opportunity of trying the OS in earnest, if nothing else.

        • ” support some piece of crap chinese component that cost 12 cents to build and sold out of Best Buy for $49.95.”

          Dear Mr. Apple Zealot,

          Apple components and products are all manufactured in China. Please do some basic research before spouting off reasons for why anything that doesn’t have a shinny fruit logo on it is “crap”.

          Sincerely,

          The majority of the world (ie: people who do not belong to the cult of Apple)

        • The “just works” thing is bunk. Maybe 10 years ago it was true, but it’s not today. Windows 7 will automatically find any drivers you need and install them without any hassle. Android “just works” without having to connect it to a computer first to activate it. Amusingly, the only people I hear complaining about their systems are Mac users who hate things such as Apple removing optical drives from their laptops and (on previous models) Apple using dvd drives that caused stuttering due to DRM issues. Not to mention that options are very limited on Apple products and that if you want something simple (like an extra gig of RAM) they’ll charge you around three times the market price for that component.

          Apple’s App Store criteria are a joke – they change daily and at the whim of Apple. An app that was approved on day will magically be in violation the next without having made any changes. Then there’s the lovely new bit where Apple thinks that if you use a subscription, which does NOT use any bandwidth or advertising from Apple, that they should get a 30% cut. I used to own an iPhone and it was infuriating that when an app had problems after an update it took WEEKS for a new app to be approved….with Android if an update causes a problem, they can push a new update instantly to fix it (I’ve literally seen fixes pushed the same day).

          I’ve worked on PC’s for around 15 years now – with a PC you can change any component with no hassle. With a Mac you can upgrade the memory and the hard drive (if you’re lucky) – that’s it. Got a bad motherboard? You have to send it in to Apple to be replaced at more than twice the cost of buying the motherboard online and doing it yourself. Want a new video card? You have no choice but to throw it away and buy a new Mac. That is not “easy to work on” – that’s the exact opposite of easy to work on.

          If you don’t want to run much software on your computer, then sure, a Mac is probably fine if you also have loads of money to waste. After spending time in the Apple store while having repair work done on my iPhone, I swear my IQ dropped 20 points when they have presentations on the wall with instructions on how to copy and paste. They should change their slogan to “Apple – for people so uneducated that they really shouldn’t be touching a computer”.

          The thing most people get pissed off about is the religious devotion and downright lies that Apple users tell people for why Apple is “superior”.

          As for myself? I want a device that I have absolute control over – that’s why I drive a car with a manual transmission, that’s why I use Windows and Linux, and that’s why I have an Android phone. It’s MY property and I get to decide how I use it, not some pompous ass in a turtleneck.

    • I’m with Nick – I hate the walled garden. I hate that Apple thinks that they should have control over what software I install on my electronic device or what color scheme I should use.

      Now, Apple does have some very nice hardware (in general, the specs of the iPhone 4S are a major let down), don’t get me wrong. And I used to own an iPhone 3GS when it was the best smartphone around. However, now that Android phones have massively surpassed the iPhone series in both hardware specs and OS features, I switched to Android and can’t imagine going back. My only “hatred” of Apple comes from the fact that the media treats them as holy and superior when there are other products that are much better or when Apple is simply copying an existing product (such as putting a front camera on the iPhone 4 – Apple and the media claim this as “innovative” when there had been phones with front facing cameras for years before that and Android phones had been putting them in for several months before the iPhone 4 came out).

  5. Next you’re probably going to tell us you don’t like bacon. What is it about great customer service, ultra reliable, stylish and user friendly devices you don’t like?

    I too used to think I liked fiddling with linux computers and swapping out pieces parts. then I got a MacBook and become more productive and found my computer no longer got in the way of what I wanted to do. Also, part XYZ didn’t really make a noticeable difference in performance anyway. And as another bonus I no longer have an unsightly pile of computer parts stacked in the corner.

    To each his own, I guess.

  6. I was disappointed by the overall lack of carnage, was hoping that the phone would just be a mangled piece of metal and plastic. but the slow-mo footage more than makes up for it.

  8. It really comes down to simplicity. If you want an operating system that you intuitively know how to use and don’t have to fiddle with all the time to avoid the blue screen, you go apple. You pay a premium for this simplicity. Or graphic/video editing.

    PCs are for people who know their way around computers and who do heavy data crunching like engineers etc. These people write their own stuff and can fix any problem a PC will have

    Of course these are broad generalities. You will find they’re not always true.

    • “If you want an operating system that you intuitively know how to use and don’t have to fiddle with all the time to avoid the blue screen, you go apple.”

      You’re kidding, right? I have more people with iPhone’s ask me “how do you do X?” because the interface for many things (such as deleting emails / messages) is NOT intuitive at all. Then with OS X there’s that brilliant idea that closing a program doesn’t actually close it and full screening a program doesn’t actually full screen it (though they’ve finally changed that in the latest version).

  9. You Apple fanboys (and girls) are living in the past. There hasn’t been a blue screen of death issue with Windows for 10 years. While I agree that Apple products are often works of art their so-called technological superiority is bunk. Apple PCs are the same Intel driven machines as Windows boxes except they give you less for more. If you don’t like Windows you can use free Ubuntu Linux on your HP or Dell.

    The iPhone 4S is two generations behind the latest Android devices and is not 4G. Its very marginal improvements are copies of existing Android and RIM applications. I understand that Apple went for the incremental upgrade because most of their customers are only halfway through their two year contracts and didn’t want too much differentiation between the 4 and 4S. The plan is to do “something” radical next year. At that point they will be 3 or maybe even 4 generations behind Android devices.

    • What’s remarkable is how stable Windows XP, 2003, 7 and Server 2008 are, considering all the different hardware they support.

    • Regarding Windows: Try actually doing something with it. Say, run SQL Server on Server 2008 and bounce a few thousand connections off a single system. Even with a plethora of firewalls and QoS tricks to filter out the garbage, the software itself is still a joke if left to its own devices. The only way people actually deploy Windows in a remotely usable way is to cluster the snot out of it and simply swap machines out when they barf.

      On the desktop, it has indeed improved a great deal overall, however to call the UI “unintuitive” would be similar to suggesting that Stalin had a few interpersonal issues. I swear someone is getting paid on a per-radio-button basis to design configuration layouts.

      As to the iPhone, you’re missing a pretty significant metric: The majority of people who use a smartphone don’t really care what kind of processor it has in it, what kind of air interface it has, or what have you. They care that it works, is intuitive, and helps them work with the information they need to work with. The Android UI is laughable by comparison.

      I hung on to my blackberry for some time while the iPhone was stuck on GSM with laughable data speeds, as I need my phone to actually do work, SSH and RDC into servers and what have you. But even then I pined for the browser experience and overall UI of the iPhone, because it was quite simply lightyears ahead of anything anyone else was doing. With the phone now on a network that actually works, I’ve had a significant increase in productivity moving to an iPhone. That means more money in my pocket to blow on things that go boom, so everyone’s happy.

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