Apple Is Entering Its Slop Era

Nice to hear from an unapologetic hater. Apple snobbery is real and the hype never ends.

Way back I had used an Apple II. It was cool. Woz was a whizz!

Then in 2008 I was persuaded to replace my aging ThinkPad with a Macbook Air. "We're all using them. It's Linux under the hood!" said my boss. (It wasn't.)

I hated the way that OSX coerced users into doing things one specific way. I hated needing an Apple account to get extensions and updates. I hated the prioritization of form over function: the lack of an ethernet port, the passive cooling that caused thermal throttling under any kind of load. I hated that my shiny metal laptop got too hot to use on my lap. I hated sending it away for 2 weeks to replace the battery. I hated the $70 charger, the proprietary connectors, the inability to buy spare parts. I hated that the Apple store calls their salespeople "geniuses". I hated fanboys and Steve-Jobs-worship. Steve Jobs was an asshole.

It was such a relief to get back to using ThinkPads.

I didn't start using a smartphone until it became difficult not to, but Apple phones did not impress. Siri was next to useless. Navigating with Apple maps led my father-in-law and me into the far corner of an orchard. My in-laws wanted to FaceTime, but couldn't because only Apple devices were supported. To me, that was an intentional defect. To them, it was a reason that we should buy in. Nope.

I backslid one time and got an iPod Shuffle for jogging. Then I found out you can only upload tracks. You can't download them. It was a pricey flash memory stick that iTunes wouldn't let me use. Fuck that. I gave it to my kids. They don't use it either.

I gradually realized that Apple is not a tech company but a marketing machine for high-margin consumer gadgets that lock users in and squeeze every last dollar out of them. Now they have a billion dollar HQ and no ideas.