Why I hate Apple (part IV)

Part Four: I Should Probably Stop Writing About Apple Now


I should probably stop writing about Apple now. One of the things that irritates me most about Apple is the excessive volume of comment they attract; and here am I, adding my tiny falsetto of a diatribe to the vast, deafening chorus that echoes around the internet every single day. Some days it seems like every second technology news item is about the A word. 


Everything there is to say about Apple has already been said. It is not a company that inspires silent indifference. People who love Apple love saying so. And here am I, illustrating that the opposite is also true. 


After four days of staying up till the small hours writing about Apple, I'm still not entirely sure what I really think about them. For many people, they seem to exist at the absolute centre of a sprawling venn diagram where the primary obsessions of our contemporary lives overlap - technology, design, commerce, information, newness, fashion, communication. They're not just selling gadgets, they're offering a golden ticket to modernity itself....


They're the ultimate symbol of an urban, restless, permanently distracted generation. Their success has enthralled everyone who owns a computer, music player or mobile phone into a state of unthinking, burbling approbation; the trademark Apple sheen, that enticing, polished, perfectly-packaged, one-touch, swipey, pinchy immediacy has seduced us all; and spread around the globe like a virulent plague, like necrotising fasciitis, relentlessly eating away at all that used to be good and holy in the world.


Ignore the above sixth form essay crap and just read this list


OK, I may have got a little carried away there. Here's a handy bullet-pointed list of why I don't like Apple:

• that business in the Apple store (see previous posts)
• the Apple store (it's just a fucking shop; it is not hallowed ground, or a portal into a future dimension)
• the "genius bar" (see above. I don't care if it's deliberately a little tongue-in-cheek, any shop that calls its customer care people 'geniuses' should be forcibly converted into a Costa Coffee or Primark)
• iTunes
• iPods sounding crap, but being so ubiquitous that no-one cares about sound quality any more
• non-universal, proprietary cables to charge and connect Apple stuff (because it's all so special it couldn't possibly be tainted with USB)
• that ridiculous hype about The Beatles being available via iTunes (wow, forty year old music that everyone already owns coming to your online store and you think that's something to jump up and down about?)
• "Just avoid holding it that way" - remember the stuff about the iPhone losing signal when you held it incorrectly (using your stupid peasant thumbs or something), and the Stalinist way Apple didn't acknowledge there was a problem for rather a while, or then seem to give much of a shit when they grudgingly owned up.
• The Bumper - a glorified plastic/rubber band that was hastily invented by Apple's top boffins to solve the above problem - available for ONLY £26 here in a range of colours. 
• Flash. Sure, it may be a bit wanky, but the 'we know what's best for you, and also for the internet, so stop whining proles' attitude wasn't exactly very endearing
• all those people who queue up overnight outside new Apple stores so they can be the first person inside, race in whooping, grab their FREE t-shirt (yee-haw, free Apple merch) and then feel a bit twattish when they realise they're just in a fucking shop
• all the Apple store employees who jump around whooping when the above happens
• the iPad costing the same as a small family car, but hey - you can POKE the internet on it and make it jiggle about. And also - who the hell needs a USB port? You can just transfer data onto it using the power of your OWN THOUGHTS.
• it also has apps that tell you when the next tube train is due. Whoop-de-fucking-do
• people live-blogging from every Apple press conference as if it's the sermon on the mount or something actually news-worthy, like Diana's zombie corpse landing on the moon
• Stephen Fry
• gleaming white cubes masquerading as computers; it's not the future, so leave that shit alone
• the iPad telly ads - "sequences have been shortened". Errm, isn't that cheating? I thought your stuff was super intuitive and quick, so why the need to sex it up and lie about it just for TV?
• ONE BUTTON. That was just showing off. What was that, a bet at Apple five years ago - reckon we can make a device with just the one button? It felt like you were trying to prove a point more than anything.
• Multi-tasking on smart phones. Welcome to the party, guys. The rest of us have been here a while
• Wanky iPod telly and poster ads for years. U2? I rest my case.
• Socks. Honestly. Why not just use an actual sock? Fold it over twice and bingo, instant protection for no cost.
• The shuffle. It's way too fucking small.
• That git in the Apple store. Oh, I've done this one already. He deserves to be mentioned twice, because he started this.

I'm sure there are dozens of other reasons to hate Apple I've forgotten about. But it feels good to have got all that off my chest.

And the best part is, now I've purged myself of all that, I never have to write about Apple ever again.

Until part V, tomorrow, obviously.

Why I hate Apple (part III)

Part Three: Your Multi-Billion Dollar Global Corporation is Only As Good As Your Worst Employee


This is a story about customer service. This is a story about how to lose one customer with one bad employee. 


Six months after I bought my iPod Touch, it went wrong. By this point, I had more or less filled up its 32 gig hard drive with all the music I owned. For several weeks after purchasing it, I spent my evenings in the study (I call it a "study", but it's more of a junk room with a computer) sat amidst several towering stacks of CDs, taking each CD in turn and copying it into iTunes, before synching it to the iPod.


I learned several things doing this:

• It's depressing how few CDs are to be found in their proper case
• There is no formula yet discovered to determine, when a CD case is empty, where the disk is most likely to be found. For example, Discography:Greatest Hits of the Pet Shop Boys was now living in Script for a Jester's Tear by Marillion, which in turn had usurped Moby
• It's depressing how much truly shit music I own

I also developed a kind of fearful awe of the "synchronization" process - connecting up the iPod to the PC with the special cable, so that the iTunes library magically aligns itself with that of its desktop parent. The iPod screen went blank except for a single animated icon, some time passed, and then it would suddenly reload itself back to normal... but with extra music. Every time I did this, and I did it a lot, I couldn't help but watch anxiously while the icon span round as it transferred the music. I felt like an early pagan who watched every Winter turn to Spring from the mouth of his cave, terrified that if just one year his fertility dance was slightly displeasing to the Gods, then it would remain Winter forever. It was transcendental voodoo magic, and I respected it. It was my own form of cargo cult.


So, eventually, I had an iPod stuffed full of music. And then it went wrong. What happened was this:


I was at work, and I wanted to load a new CD that had arrived that morning from Amazon onto my iPod. I had a second iTunes music library on my work computer specifically for this reason, and had successfully copied over a number of CDs this way previously. So, I knew what I was doing. But on this particular morning, I'd forgotten to bring my cable, the special proprietary Apple cable that makes the magic happen. 


No worries. I happened to know that a considerable number of my colleagues would own a cable I could borrow, as the entire company had been given Apple vouchers several months before; Apple products were everywhere in my company. We were awash with them, like a tiny Pacific island clogged with rubber ducks after a Chinese cargo ship capsizes offshore.


I quickly located a cable, ripped the CD to iTunes, and connected up my iPod.


Uh oh. My worst nightmare. Eternal winter descended. Almost instantly, some kind of error message appeared and MY MUSIC WAS ALL GONE. I knew, the moment the familiar spinning synch icon didn't appear that something was horribly wrong. I looked at the memory bar on my iPod. It was showing that no memory was in use. I'd gone from over 30 gigs of music to 0 gigs of anything in less than a second.


I was distressed. To be honest, I was slightly traumatised. My half-joking awe of the mystical synchronization process was now full blown anger at a cruel and vengeful god. But I'm a resourceful guy. I reckoned I could probably find a fix. I spent the rest of the day on Google seeking assistance.... but for once, not even Google could come to my aid.


Something was fishy. I may not be the most technically knowledgeable software development employee in the world, but I knew that it took more than a half-second to delete 30 gigs of files. So, I was suspicious that the music was still in there somewhere; it was just hidden from me. It was maddeningly out of my grasp, a modern day Tantalus's tree of juicy musical fruit, never to be picked again.


I may sound flippant about this (some would say flippancy is my only style of communication) but I was genuinely upset. So, I did what anyone would do. I took it back to the place where I bought it from, for help. I took a special trip into town to pay the Apple store a visit, the treacherous music-less music player shoved in my pocket.


In the Apple store


I had a bad feeling about how things were going to turn out in the Apple store when, after briefly explaining my predicament to one of their staff, I was told "you'll need to arrange an appointment with one of the guys at the genius bar and come back."


Whaaat? Book an appointment? With a genius? In a shop that sells a handful of computers and music players? I don't want root canal or a heart bypass operation. Also, why are you hiring people to work in your shop who don't know enough to help the customers? Can't you just do something radical like you know train them about your products or something?


I explained to the guy that I didn't have the time to come back. I was still annoyed about my AWOL music. So, I concede that part of what follows was my own fault for being stubborn and refusing the offer of wiser "genius" counsel at a later date. I was also trying to make a point that if I enter the shop that sold me a device and ask for help with said device, at the very least I expect some attempt to assist me from ANY of their assistants. 


What followed was a conversation that went along these lines (this is not word for word what either of us said, but this how I remember the tone of the exchange in my mind) :


All the music has been wiped from my iPod
- Oh (immediately not interested. I wasn't here to buy anything)
I just plugged in the cable to synch the music to my computer and it all disappeared instantly. I'd spent ages putting all my music on there. I think it might be a fault of some kind.
- OK
It happened so quickly that I think the music is still actually on the hard disk somewhere. I had a look on Google and some people said they could recover their music when that happened. Is there a way to recover my music?
- Let's have a look.
(I hand over iPod. He takes it, checks its status very briefly, confirms that there is indeed no music on there then hands it back)
- You'll need to resynch it to your iTunes library at home
Oh. OK. But I've got two libraries. And I don't think that'll work because I don't think there is any memory free.
- Wait... You've got another iTunes library? Well, that's what's happened then.
What do you mean?
- You can't have more than one library. So it will have deleted your music.
What? You can have multiple libraries. You can set one to manually synch.
- No. No you can't. If you try to synchronize to another library it will remove your music. That's what it's supposed to do.
I've been using two libraries for months, and I've never had a problem before.
- It doesn't support more than one iTunes library. That's why you've lost your music.
Yes it does. I've been using two libraries for months. So how I have been using two libraries then?
- It will remove your music if you try and synchronize to another library. (by now he seems to be getting impatient with me)
It doesn't. And it hasn't. Anyway, I don't think what happened has got anything at all to do with synching to two libraries.
- You can't synch to more than one library
Yes. You. Can.
- No you can't.


By now, I was getting really annoyed. Not only did this guy have no fucking clue how his own product worked, he also seemed much more determined to argue with me in a bored-with-a-slight-edge-of-hostile manner than deign to offer any help or advice whatsoever, or show the least bit of concern. What pissed me off the most was that he made it perfectly plain that he simply didn't care, and that by talking to him I was wasting his time. I was an idiot, who didn't know how the iPod worked, and as a consequence had wiped all my music - and he didn't give a shit.


Is there any way for you to check the hard drive, to see if the music is still there somewhere?
- No
Can't you hook it up to a diagnostic computer or something?
- No
So, is there anything I can do to inspect the hard drive? Any software you can give me?
- You need to take it to a hard drive repair specialist
Oh, right. Do you have one here I can talk to?
- We don't do that. You'd need to take it to a third-party.
Sigh. OK. Where?
- I suggest you use the Yellow Pages to look up hard drive repair companies and use one of them.


At this point I left. I couldn't quite believe what had just happened. I had taken a £300 gadget back to the store where I'd bought it, because it had developed a serious fault - and I was being told to go away, look up a company on the Yellow Pages and take it to them instead. The way I'd been treated equated in my mind to a raspberry being blown in my face and the Apple store sticking two fingers up at me. They may as well have taken my iPod and jumped up and down on it while laughing for all the interest they showed in my situation.


I suspect that I'd been talking to a salesman, possibly one in a bad mood, and I'd upset him by declining the offer of an appointment with a genius, choosing instead to badger him.  I didn't think my complaint was a trivial one, but he demonstrated zero empathy and treated me as an irritant.


I was so disgusted at the indifferent, supercilious manner in which I'd been treated that I submitted a complaint on the Apple web site describing my experiences in detail.


I never got a response.


I eventually found out what had happened to my iPod. When I'd borrowed a cable from my colleague at work, the cable I'd taken was quite an old one and not compatible with the iPod Touch. When I connected up the iPod to the PC, it basically barfed. I did also find some software that could recover the music files from the iPod. Yes, surprise surprise, the files were still all in memory, despite the iPod claiming no knowledge of them. 


So, what had happened was in essence very simple. I'd used a duff cable and the iPod had thrown a hissy fit. In my idealised world of good customer service, what would have happened in the Apple store is this:


All the music has been wiped from my iPod
- Oh dear. I'm really sorry about that, sir. I realise you must be pretty upset. Let's see if we can get to the bottom of this. Have you by any chance used a different connector cable or borrowed a cable from someone recently to use when synchronizing?
Yes, actually I have. Someone lent me their cable yesterday to use.
- Ahh. This is a known issue with this device I'm afraid, Sir. It doesn't support some older cables, and can crash as a result, removing access to all your music. There is some software out there than can recover your music. I'll print you out a list. Try downloading one of those and following the instructions. You should restore most of your files. Come back if you have any problems.
Thank you.


If that, or something like that, had happened, I wouldn't be writing this blog. And that would have saved us all a lot of time. I don't think that an exchange along those lines was too much to expect, was it? 


Maybe I've over-reacted. Maybe I've taken this whole experience too personally. Maybe feeling a shudder of revulsion whenever I walk past the Apple store is stupid and immature. I should just put it down to bad luck, and give them a second chance. The problem is, when the rest of the world is constantly eulogizing about everything Apple does, it exacerbates my own negative feelings towards them. The rest of the world has veneration. I have resentment. 


Everything about the Apple store disturbs me. The clinical, futuristic, minimalistic design, the reverent ambience, the identikit youthful t-shirted employees who circulate with their debit machines among the customers like acolytes in a temple to hi-tech desire, beneath the high altar of the "Genius Bar". I feel like I'm entering a dystopian future world where everyone has been lobotomized and stares dead-eyed at shiny screens that batter them remorselessly into subconscious obedience with a relentless succession of music videos and cutesy video games.


But yeah, maybe I'm over-thinking it. My problem with Apple is essentially a mild form of PTSD following one unsatisfactory customer service experience. But I cherish my hostility, because it reminds me that there are cracks in the all-powerful monolith.


"Oh my god, it's full of stars." Yes, and also at least one douchebag who lost you a customer for life.


Post-script
I've been looking forward to writing this part of the blog for a while, because when I think about Apple I mostly think about what happened to me on this particular occasion. Parts one and two were basically a long-winded introduction; an overture... that bit at the start of the musical when the orchestra runs through a musical mash up of all the tunes that will come later in the main show. 


In part IV, I try and make sense of all this, survey the current situation, and draw some pithy conclusions.

Why I hate Apple (part II)

Part Two: Creative Differences, Mosh Pits and the Limbic System


I used to own a Creative Zen music player. It was great. It was black and shiny, with a touch pad control and a bright, vivid screen, and it played all my music. There were two things in particular I liked about it:


1. I could transfer music to and from it using the standard file system on my PC. Once connected to my computer, I just copied MP3 files (or pretty much any other format) across, and it loaded them into its library.


2. The music it played sounded fantastic. 


I was very happy with my Zen. But sadly, I lost it. I was at a gig at Brixton Academy, and my friend persuaded me to accompany her down to the front, to the mosh pit. I can't remember what band was playing, but the front was a rather lively place to be, and sure enough, when the gig was over I was not only bruised and covered in beer, but also missing one music player (and without my phone, which I later discovered had been used to make four hours of calls that night to Algeria).


So, I bought another one, second-hand, from the internet. 

the lovely Zen:Vision (to be honest, the touch pad took a bit of getting used to, and it was about four inches thick)

Around the same time, though, the company where I work treated all its staff to £300 of vouchers for the Apple store as a reward for hitting a revenue target. No sooner had my replacement Creative Zen arrived in the mail than I found myself inside the local Apple store, purchasing an iPod Touch.


My first reaction to owning an iPod Touch was "ooooh, shiny". My second was "shit, how am I going to get all my music onto it?"  And my third, on listening to some tunes after transferring an album or two, was "Jesus, the sound quality is nowhere near as good as that on the Creative."


I googled and found that yes, there was a consensus view among those who had used both the Apple and Creative products that the sound emerging from an iPod - any model, not just the Touch - was distinctly inferior to that from the Zen. 


It turned out that no-one really cared.


Unless you'd used an alternative, it wasn't obvious how tinny and mediocre the sound from an iPod was. 99% of iPod users were blissfully unaware that what they were listening to would actually sound considerably better on another device. Interestingly, the Zen was launched around the same time as the iPod Video (the first iPod that could play movies), so a lot of the reviews focused more on screen resolution and quality of video playback than music performance; and here again, the majority opinion was that the Zen was better.


That wasn't what the game was all about. Apple won the day on design and usability. It always seemed strange to me that a device whose main purpose was to play music wasn't actually very good at it; but I guess that was a valuable lesson. Make it simple, make it desirable, make it just work... and then your users will overlook:

• the crappy sound
• the proprietary interfaces and leads
• the non-universal file format
• the range of ridiculously expensive knitted accessories (OK, so that's not a biggie but really, those 'socks'...)

and of course...

• the appalling bloody software you HAVE to use to get music on and off the thing

Oh god, iTunes. My abiding memory of iTunes is the time I was visiting my friend who'd just bought a new laptop. Coincidentally, this was the same friend who'd dragged me into a violently dancing mob at Brixton a few years earlier. 


She is not a technophile. She only uses her computer to store music and check her hotmail - and has NO CLUE what else it can do. For years, she actually sent all the new CDs she bought with her iPod to a friend by post, who would load the tracks onto the iPod for her and send it back by mail.


The new laptop was, therefore, something of a trial for her. She'd downloaded iTunes already, which was a start. But now she was telling me that she couldn't just plug her iPod into the new computer because it would wipe all her music from the device.


"I'm sure it won't" I said, trying to disguise the tone of condescension in my voice. "Connect it up and you can just synch it to the library on your new install of iTunes."


"No. It doesn't work like that," she insisted. "If I did that, it would synch with the empty library and delete all my music. I know. I've done that before."


"Whaaaaaat?! That can't be true."


But it was. 


No doubt Apple experts could explain why this was of course the desired behaviour and a sensible thing to do, and point out that my friend should have done x, y or z when setting up her new computer. All I can offer as a riposte is that This Would Not Have Happened With the Creative. 


It took my friend the next three weeks to load all her music back into iTunes. (She owns a lot of CDs). Yes, she's not particularly techno-literate - she has a habit of losing all the channels on her telly by pressing the wrong button on the remote and then waiting two months until I visit to fix it - and no doubt she could have avoided the situation she found herself in. But I remember thinking at the time that, for all their user-friendly, slick and marvellous technology, Apple had managed to force my friend to stay in her flat for the best part of a month loading CDs into her computer.


Of course, once I bought my own iPod, I could experience all the joys of iTunes for myself. Almost every music track I own now lives in two places on my PC - where I'd originally ripped it to from the disk, and where Apple stored its own files when I imported it using iTunes.  Suffice it to say that I think it's bloated from years of feature creep, and long overdue for a radical redesign. I haven't even updated my version for the last three years because every time the reminder window pops up advising me of a newer version, I look at the size of the download and sigh....   


So, yes, this is just my own personal, subjective experience of Apple, and yours may -and probably does - vary. (And I haven't even got to what really tipped me over the edge yet, my anti-Apple apotheosis - I've saved that for part 3).


Coincidentally, Channel 4 news this evening had a report on Microsoft versus Apple. An industry expert attempted to explain why Apple's share price had shot up 80% in the same period that Microsoft's had risen by only 2%, despite the fact that MS is still more profitable.


The gist of his analysis was that Microsoft have great technology but they haven't been able to market that technology anywhere near as successfully as Apple. I gave a wry smile at this, because it put me in mind of yesterday's blog post. The piece concluded with some shameless PR puffery; a few folksy Redmond employees showed the lucky journalist round their colossal R&D division and let him play with a bunch of super cool prototype tech that looked like it had all been built immediately after the dev team had had a pizza night watching Minority Report. Kinect bowling - "developed right here, in this very facility" - looked a bit shit, though.


Maybe Microsoft are waking up to smell the (fancier, Jobs-blend) coffee. They're opening a pilot "Microsoft store" in Seattle in the same mall as the Apple Store, to show off their own new breed of sexy gadgets. It looks identical to the Apple Store, complete with robotically cheerful assistant in branded t-shirt welcoming every customer through the door.


But "Microsoft Store" just sounds wrong, doesn't it? You can't steal the success of your competitor by stealing the layout of his shop. It smacks a little of desperation. If I buy a guitar and a wig, that still doesn't make me Jimi Hendrix...


On the advice of a very kind commenter on the blog yesterday, I watched Simon Sinek's TED talk. Among other things, Sinek attempts to explain why Apple are such a great company. It was very interesting. His conclusion is something deceptively simple to explain:


People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it.


In his view, Apple starts where most companies end, with an answer to the question: "why are we doing this?" For Apple, the why is to be a company that challenges the status quo. How they do that is by designing great products.... and the what, which is where most other organisations would start, is that they just happen to make computers. And music players. And phones...


Sinek claims that people buy Apple products because they can sense a company that shares their own beliefs. Apple appeals to the part of their brain, the limbic system, that controls decision making. So, Apple products just "feel" right because Apple as an organization embodies something that its customers also hold to be true about themselves. Sinek summarizes this as follows:


"Sell to people who believe what you believe."


Perhaps that's why the idea of a Microsoft store sounds so incongruous. What do they as an organisation believe in that can rival Apple's core (no pun intended) motivation to always challenge the status quo? Microsoft just sell computer stuff. Apple encourage a form of tribal loyalty among its customers because they have a gut feeling that Apple feels the same way about things as they do. It's not exactly scientific, but that's his proposition. Buying Apple products is a very personal statement about who you are, whereas buying Microsoft is a more rational, less instinctive thing.


Hmm. Maybe. Maybe it's not just the branding and Jobs's black polo necks. Maybe it's the experience of using something and thinking "wow, that did exactly what I thought it should do; that's how I would have done it; it matched my way of thinking precisely" and consequently forming a powerful affiliation with that company. It's not just that we like stuff that's easy to use, goes the argument; we get warm deep-rooted fuzzies towards organizations that make the stuff that's easy for us to use.


But, for me, it's all gone wrong. I'm on the outside looking in. I'm peering through the restaurant window at the romantic couple eating their oysters by candlelight. I'm Michael York in Logan's Run who starts to doubt the very concept of Renewal. I've left the dome.


In the next part, I describe the moment when I finally fell out of love with Apple, and how it's all the fault of one man whose name I can't even remember.

Why I hate Apple (part I)

Part One: Apple, Bees, Hammers and Shorts

Of course I don't really hate Apple. That would be ridiculous. They're a technology corporation. I could no more hate them than I could resent gravity, or despise characters in a soap opera, or take against bees for being fat and buzzing in my ear all Summer. I hate Apple in the same way I hate Marmite...

The mere thought of Marmite makes me nauseous.

Or maybe I hate Apple in the same way that people who love Apple actually love Apple, which is, rather stupidly. Whatever the reality of my emotions, it is, after all, just a company who make lots of stuff that lots of people like, and so maybe I should just get over it. 

Once upon a time I actually liked Apple. It was 1984, when Ridley Scott directed that magnificent advert for the Apple Mac, the one where the woman with impressive norks and tight orange shorts runs towards a screen and flings a hammer at it to stop some rambling old git from oppressing a load of dusty, brainwashed proles. Yeah, that was cool.

For me, that sums Apple up. The best thing about them was a glossy, sexy, and very expensive advert that didn't make a whole lot of sense when you stopped to think about it, and certainly didn't actually, you know, tell you anything about their product. Luckily, in those days I was far too young to buy a home computer (£1 a week spending money doesn't get you much more than sweets, and I didn't have a whole lot of use for a PC running just MacWrite), so for me Apple was just an advert off the telly. It may well have been Battle of the Planets for all that I cared.

Fast forward 25 years, and really, has all that much changed? Instead of the woman with the tight orange shorts wielding a hammer, we now have Steve Jobs in a black polo neck waving an iPad. Instead of a telly ad (first aired during the Superbowl, according to Wikipedia - plus ca change), we have live streaming conferences over the internet. And instead of the Apple Mac coming to revolutionize our lives, it's the iPad. Same hype, different products.

And yes, they are rather nice products. I'm not disputing that Apple have a knack for making things that people really seem to want (and will hand over silly amounts of money for); it would be churlish to insist that everyone is wrong and actually Apple stuff is clunky, amateurish crap. It clearly isn't.

But there's this other thing. Despite my own, personal reasons for disliking Apple, which I'll come on to in future posts... (see, I've already watered it down from "hate" to "dislike").... it just pisses me off that you can't have a sensible discussion about Apple without people taking sides as if it was the French bloody Revolution all over again. Why do they inspire such tribalism? Why do people who use Macs feel the need to go all Big-endian about it? Is it not enough to just own Apple hardware, without it having to be absorbed into your sense of identity?  Why are you Apple users forever evangelising about their products? 

Is it because, deep down, behind that mesmerising glowing-white apple logo, you feel the slightest nagging sense that you may have been conned? Not in the snake oil / homeopathy / Nigerian bank draft sense, but in the same way that as a small child I thought the 1984 ad was just the coolest thing ever?  You've not just chosen a brand. You've embraced a lifestyle. And that's kind of embarrassing, isn't it? You seek reassurance among your fellow Apple tribe that all this fancy, sexy hardware is genuinely amazing, and you have all collectively chosen most wisely; such a choice therefore identifies you as a discerning, knowledgeable member of the cognoscenti. And that means... if Apple tells you that this next new thing is what you need, then that is, by definition, what you need. And if it looks great, feels oh so perfect in your hand and has only one button, then all the better. It must be the best thing out there.

Did we ever get so moist and religious about Microsoft? Why have Microsoft never inspired loyalty and affection and slavish devotion?  How did they end up as the uncool playground bully while Apple was the trendy hipster kid with a satchel full of achingly hip vinyl and next-week's-trousers?

Well, maybe this has something to do with it... I don't remember any Microsoft ads. Where was the MS woman with the tight shorts and jiggly babylons? Nah, Bill Gates was too busy sitting in his little nerd-pod writing a billion lines of code to care about ads. He'd probably never even heard of Ridley Scott. 

Perhaps this was deliberate. Maybe Bill saw that ad and snorted in derision, scoffing that people weren't going to fall for a flashy 2 minute video. Let Apple appeal to the trend-setters, while Microsoft would focus on writing great, boring software and conquering the world, one geek at a time.

Trouble is, in the modern era, we're all about the image. Yes, the geeks have inherited the earth, but now they want to be hip too. 

--------------------------------------

None of this is the reason why I really hate Apple, by the way. I'm coming to that later. This is just some mood music, to set the scene for the events that truly set me on the path to enlightenment. But it's bedtime now.