It’s that time of the year again. You know, that time when Microsoft releases another operating system or other high-profile product, and Apple breaks out their douchebag license in order to be first in line with the water balloons to spoil the party. In other words, it’s time for another Apple-related rant.
Dear Apple Inc.
Why do you feel the need to be such a dick? Where i come from, people who are so violently obsessed with proving their own self worth typically do so because they suffer from some sort of inferiority complex, or simply weren’t brought up right. There’s probably something freudian in there as well. I’m confused, Apple, because i remember a time when you were a legitimate underdog, and all of us who were faithful to you were so far and few between that we had to congregate in the universities and labs where you were available due to your prohibitive cost, and were absolutely stunned and delighted to meet another private owner of a Mac. I remember some of the most tightly knit communities around, because we all felt like underdogs right alongside you. Everyone, literally everyone had some nasty opinion of the Mac, of the OS or the lack of a perceived SOMETHING, and we had to stand up for you and fight for you, and in the end it made us all brothers of a sort. It felt good, you know? It felt good to believe in being right about something that others were wrong about. Even when you fucked us over again and again with worse and worse design decisions, we still believed you were the better choice. And you were!
I grew up a Mac user. The first computer in our home was a Mac IIsi, which was as much as my dad could afford, and it eventually became mine. From Crystal Quest and on, it’s where i got into computer games. Ambrosia had me covered for years; Avara, Maelstrom.. God knows how many adventure games. I had friends running 486DX2s, playing Duke 3D and Doom, laughing as i forced a 20mhz 3mb ram 10mb hd to run Marathon in a tiny, tiny interlaced window at 10fps. But my god i loved it. It’s how i got into the mod community, it’s where i cut my teeth on Photoshop, Director, Micrologic, it’s where i got into resource level modding with ResEdit. It was a damn fine computer, and i get soft around the heart when i think of it and what it gave me. Damn the commoners with their PCs. This machine was a tool. All through my childhood and early teens, i was fighting for the validity of this system, and i never once regretted a word i said. Some of my favorite tween memories are sneaking into the computer lab at my dad’s job to play networked Marathon games on their Powermacs. I still remember my Marathon serial number by heart from all the times i had to reinstall it on various machines. ZS8KN J7RN MYGUGD6. I’ll probably remember that until age takes my memory.
Getting my very own Mac when i was 14 was astonishing, and it was a pretty big leap in how much of a flagbearer i became for you as a company. I got a Performa 5320CD, you know those with the built-in monitor? It looked like an absolute beast, but holy CRAP did it feel next gen. Every single bit of it was an absolute dream. At this point i was firmly embedded in the Marathon community, along the Marathon Map Makers Guild, one of the finest online communities i have ever seen, and another that makes me soft around the heart to recall. Finally i was on a system of my own that i could really dedicate to this work. I wanted to work with music, i wanted to work with art, and i wanted to make worlds in Marathon 2. At this point, my Mac wasn’t a mere computer. It was where i did my thing. Pretty much every fulfilling activity took place on the Performa, and i took the utmost measures in customizing my OS9 experience. That machine was MINE, and woe to the man who thought to try and invalidate it.
Magazines at the time reflected this attitude. We were fierce about our computers, because we were constantly under attack. While bigger names like MacFormat still tried to stay professional, others like MacAddict joined us in our ferocious counterattacks against this overwhelming offense from The PC Community (a nebulous and somewhat imaginary enemy). MacAddict cover CDs typically contained a video of a PC being destroyed in some way such as being hit by a car, “walking the plank” etc, and it was absolutely delicious.
But all good things must end. The end for me came when my Performa died, its warranty no longer valid, and my nonexistent teenager economy promptly ended my hopes of picking up a new Apple machine. This was before Stevie Jobs had returned, and machines were still, even at their cheapest, prohibitively expensive. You can imagine the dark night of the soul i went through when i found myself forced to accept a secondhand Windows 98 box with a busted HD on which to keep making music.
Windows 98 was an aberration of a system, and at this time, Apple was with all its warts and flaws by far the superior option. But you do what you got to do, and with time, i learned to live with a PC. Eventually, i learned to love it. Perhaps it’s the tinkerer in me that previously loved customizing the OS itself that led me to so fully embrace the through and through customization of a PC? Taking it from a hand-me-down piece of junk to something outperforming anything i’d ever owned was thrilling, and it blew my mind that i could not have done this, scrounging machines for parts and putting together better ones, on my old Mac. Of course the OS was still terrible and there was nothing like a sense of community spirit surrounding it, but for me, the 16 year old, the broken hated hand-me-down PC soon became just as valued a companion as my Performa had ever been.
In hindsight, i loved the community spirit, and i still miss it. The Windows platform has never been more than a platform, and most likely won’t be. It’s a place to do work, and whatever communities build must be built around the programs written for it. So why did we have this fierce community spirit? This absolutely ferocious urge to prove that what we had was amazing? Because what we had was amazing, and so few people got it.
So how come now, Apple, that pretty much everybody gets it, do you think you still have the right to any of this ferocity?
I’ll be frank with you. I’m heartbroken. When you were weak we fought for you, and you just stood there, gray faced, and took the abuse. We shielded you, because you weren’t the sort to fight. We’d be your frontline; you just keep being awesome. In this storm of peril and doom, you’ll survive. We’ll be your shield.
It’s hard to say that Steve Jobs hasn’t been good for you. My god he’s made you nearly unstoppable. You’ve gone from being the quiet nerdy kid in the corner to this enormous juggernaut. You have all the money, you have all the technology. You push the limits, you break new ground.
And you’ve become a friggin’ douchebag.
It’s a known constant of the universe that the underdog has an undisputed license to be an asshole. The worse your odds, the more shit you can get away with. Your odds are pretty good right now. In fact, i’ll say you’re doing damn good for yourselves. Why do you feel such a need to fight so hard? Too much.
I think your tone is wrong, and too much. You’re no longer something like an upstart fighting for survival. You’re one of the big boys, and one of the loudest and most visible. Where you are now, there is no need for this kind of adolescent behavior. You’re past that now. Watching you jump gleefully at any chance to attack the public image of your opposition has gone from being a funny sort of quirk to approaching full-on sociopathy. Your public willingness to be thoroughly idiosyncratic, while essentially a boon as a company, is beginning to look desperate.
You have become a company that is incapable of giving credit unless it reflects back onto you. You’ve become a company so obsessed with innovation that you fail to repair the fundamental issues with your product. The Finder of today is barely improved from the Finder i was using under System 8, yet your claims of OS supremacy remain furious as ever. I have no beef with your product. OSX is a wonderful system. It’s just odd that to make full use of it you must change its fundamentals, which is a feature you share uncannily with your foremost competitor. Until you have actually solved the problems you so vehemently accuse your opposition of having failed at, it seems odd to hear your cries of supremacy.
You have a history of assimilating fledgling technologies and giving them a serious facelift. You adore the notion that you brought multitouch to the world, yet forget that the technology was not yours. You have joined a worldwide initiative to bring touch driven interfaces to the forefront, but you give little back for what you take. The end result is a company that is not a good citizen. You don’t care about the city you live in. You’re more of a rabble-rouser. You seek conflict, and where there is none you create it.
Until you have a right to fight so viciously, it’d be nice if you held your tongue a bit. You’ve entered the company of others, and it’s time to be polite.
The “idio” in idiosyncratic stems from the Greek “idios”, meaning “one’s own”. It also means “private”. There is more to this game than merely standing out. Another more common word stems from idios, and i think you’re coming real close to its meaning.
It’s what the competition always does though. It’s how business supposedly works. Propaganda. They do in politics too. Gotta make the other guy look bad at any cost, especially if you’re behind in polls or sales in regards to business. Gotta try to pass them up or you’ll lose or not gain anymore ground. Gotta be more “aggressive” than the competition. Or so the mentality goes and in some cases that mentality does in fact work out. I’d say in a lot of cases it really does.
It’s that, or buying the competition out. Which happens all too often and is really anti-progressive. It’s also no fun… no pushing the bar a bit more higher than the other or mastering this before the other can etc etc.
Apple will have to up their game now, now that Windows 7 is out, and is actually not a piece of shit like Vista was. Competition begins again… regardless whether Microsoft believes/recognizes them as one or not.
The only reason why Microsoft doesn’t come out with commercials belittling Apple’s machines is due to the fact they’d be giving them exposure. They’d actually be “recognizing” them as competition, rather than leaving them out in the cold corner where they impatiently are shouting: “LOOK AT ME I AM A SLUTTY APPLE COMPUTER. I LOOK DAMN GOOD IN A MICROSKIRT AND YOU LOOK BORING AS FUCK. DO ME INSTEAD!” Any good exposure is good exposure for the “underdog”, which Apple still actually is (PCs/Windows are still #1 in sales) and will remain as such for years to come… unless drastic changes happen, of course. Whatever they may be. Although, judging by the fact that Apple’s recent endless quest is in the name of vanity over usability… it won’t happen any time soon.
It’s a game. Not necessarily a pretty one or for the better but eh, I still use OS X and don’t plan to return to Microsoft any time soon… not after the constant BSOD’s i kept receiving off Vista. I’m traumatized. No joke.