Apple Users, Please Justify Your Loyalty Here: [NSFW Rant!]
Feb 23, 11:48 AM
I get it, back in the day Apple was the counter-culture radical to Microsoft’s suits. But how do you justify loyalty to a company that is now the worst Big Brother in the history of digital media?
Way back when, Apple was edgy, cool, out there. This was a company that made computers for the rest of us. They were out there beating back the bad guys. Here’s a semi-fictional video from Pirates of Silicon Valley of something that happened in real life, Jobs asking potential employees when they lost their virginity.
Yeah, Steve Jobs used to be a badass mothaf*cka. Check out those bare hippie feet and cut-off jeans. Back in the day Apple was the king of cool while the rest of computing culture stagnated in IBM-type stolid-ness.
They capitalized on that image of radicalism and cool when they launched the iPod. Steve Jobs was back and Apple was the outsider sticking it to the man again, right?
Wrong!
I understand that Apple USED to be the product for the academic looking to change the world or the leftist trying to cut together a video of his protest, but what about the present? How do you justify your loyalty to a company that is the biggest Big Brother in online media?
Starting off, Apple holds an iron grip on it’s products, controlling everything from the minutiae of hardware to the code in the software. The reason there are so many fewer programs for Apple’s OS is because it is a closed platform with a pay-to-play SDK.
Now there is the iPhone, where Apple has really shown it’s true colors. First it was a no-go if you dared to somehow duplicate the functionality of the ALMIGHTY APPLE. Then, if there might be some graphic violence in a comic reader, that’s got to go. Now, if your app even hints at the possibility of being used for something that might be sexual, it gets banned. God forbid parents should monitor their 8-year-old’s iPhone use, so anything that could offend them is gone.
To quote Gizmodo: “Today we have a company that has baby music in its commercials, like we're all 10 year old idiots who have never heard the word fuck—let alone have fucked—and need to be protected from little programs that may have breasts in them.”
By some ridiculous justification, anything that might be used to display porn should get banned. Of course this doesn’t count regular photo viewers from Microsoft of Apple’s own web-browser, which can just as easily do the same thing. Why don’t you just copy protect MY OWN PHOTOS in case they might be porn because they are photos. That’s what they do with music anyway right?
Of course, this sudden responsibility towards idiots doesn’t extend to suckling at the corporate teat. Apps that don’t have anything unsafe in them but can be used for photo manipulation that might end in pornography have gotten the chop. On the other hand Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit App and FHM’s App stays alive in the store.
Oh and all that is ignoring the fact that they killed the hope of reasonably priced eBooks thereby screwing over every single Kindle user. Also the fact that their hard-core DRM is pretty much the antithesis of the mentality of the edgy cool leftist community they are selling to. Then there is the fact that iTunes songs are overpriced, sent to you through bloated software, and covered by DRM straight from THE MAN.
What sort of hypocritical, speech-oppressive bullshit is this? I only get to put a possibility titillating app on the iPhone if I have enough money to pay off Apple or sue them?
Ignoring the fact that Apple’s products can no longer provide any measurable performance advantage over similar products on the market. How can you justify paying money to a company or producing content for the iPhone when Apple pulls this sort of nasty practices on their community?
At least Microsoft lets you install whatever the hell you want on their products. Apple has become the complete antithesis of what it used to stand for, ultra-corporate, trying to make nice to everyone, censorship left and right, and all the worst business practices.
Ok, this is the show down. Loyal Apple users, justify for me here, how the hell you can even think of paying money to these idiots?
posted by: Aram
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Hello, my name is Aram. I pretty much built this blog to rant about things. The opinions here in no way represent my employer(s) or even reality. Don't worry about it.
Hey Aram,
I’m not a radical mac-ist, I mean I’ve been loyal since my conversion about 6 years ago, but I don’t go out of my way to convert others.
That said, the reason I’m a loyal Apple user is because they work – I do a lot of video and graphics work, I’m working on a well maintained PC at work and an Apple at home, and my Apple just works better. I have fewer crashes, fewer glitches at home then I do at work.
I like my Apple accessories too – I don’t care that there are fewer options, because the options that I have are overall good, and I know they’re going to work, and I can be lazy about it and not go look for solutions and work-arounds.
The bottom line for me is that I want to focus on my art and my product, My Apple stuff lets me think about my art, my PC makes me think about computing.
— Lori · Feb 23, 05:33 PM · #
Lots of errors in here. Not sure if they’re intentional or you’re just not clear on these things.
1) “The reason there are so many fewer programs for Apple’s OS is because it is a closed platform with a pay-to-play SDK.”
You’re not entirely clear here but I THINK you’re talking about Macs. (Since you say “Now there is the iPhone” in the next paragraph AND you say “fewer programs.” That must mean Macs, not iPhones.) So if that’s the case, this sentence is simply wrong. No way around it. Just flat out wrong. Starting out with an outright lie is not a great way to make your point. It really casts doubt over everything that follows.
2) “Also the fact that their hard-core DRM is pretty much the antithesis of the mentality of the edgy cool leftist community they are selling to.”
DRM that is required by the movie studios. How is that unique to Apple? Your second point is to criticize something that affects all companies that sell digital media? (The music doesn’t have DRM any more, so it’s not an issue on that side.) The way you try to make this look like an Apple-only problem makes this look more like a witch hunt than anything else at this point.
And anyway, who cares? I buy MP3s from Amazon and DVDs from Best Buy and put ALL of that on my Mac and my iPhone. So what does this have to do with liking Apple hardware or not? Don’t like iTune’s digital media store? Then buy it all somewhere else. What does ANY of this have to do with liking Apple products? You’re just throwing out random stuff that doesn’t even apply to many Apple hardware users. No one forces us to buy that stuff.
3) “Oh and all that is ignoring the fact that they killed the hope of reasonably priced eBooks thereby screwing over every single Kindle user.”
This is still ongoing and, frankly, has a lot more to do with the publishers than Apple. I honestly don’t feel comfortable saying much about it, though, since nothing is set in stone. We’ll know more soon.
4) [Everything about the iPhone app Store]
Now, finally, the issue with the App-store approval process: HERE I agree with you. It’s a mess. I don’t need to repeat it all, you said it all.
So you have one good point. This means you should have written an article about that. But instead you took your one good point and pumped it up with a bunch of irrelevant (or false) issues in order to turn this into a much bigger article. If you’d stuck to the actual problem I’d be here congratulating you instead of writing this long reply pointing out all your mistakes.
— Jeff · Feb 25, 09:09 AM · #