Apple: Making 2009 just like 1984.
Apple is skillfully misdirecting it's customers. Some Apple customers even seem to enjoy lying to themselves about their Macs. I hear users praise macs as never having problems, even as I am in the process of fixing a problem on their machine. They see themselves as rebels, and revolutionaries. They proclaim the excellence of Apple products, and talk about how everyone would be so much better off with a Mac. Not all Mac users think this way, but there are enough for it to be eerie.
Apple has always touted itself as a company of fresh ideas and revolutionary products. Their Superbowl ad in 1984 showed lines of boring gray men marching along gray and white tunnels. They are on their way to view gray conformist propaganda. Suddenly, a rebellious woman in bright colors evades the way of conformity and lack of choice, dodging the black-clothed security forces trying to stop her. She smashes the conformist propaganda in an effort to wake up the gray masses. Since then, Apple has persistently moved to make its users conform to the Apple way of doing things. Once the masses believed Apple was the woman with they hammer, they could focus on forcing everyone to be the same. Apple will only let OS X run on their hardware legally. They monitor and police applications in the App store, and constantly try to prevent users from using their iPhones and iPod touches with anything not Apple Approved. They attempt to silence critics and satirists with law suits. They constantly talk about how much better their software is, and how it has always been better. They partner up with Microsoft, praising their software. When the partnership breaks down, they talk about how awful PCs and Microsoft are.
We are allied with Microsoft! We have always been!
We are at war with Microsoft! We have always been!
Doublethink is just as useful for Apple as it is for Big Brother.
Apple's attempt to make users conform has a very real physical representation too. Watch that 1984 ad again, and tell me which group Apple seems to match today. The brightly colored rebellious woman? Not anymore. How about the conformist masses in black and gray and white, with silvery skin? Put a MacBook Pro in front of one of those guys, and it would blend right in. Apple isn't the bright woman smashing conformity. Apple is the propaganda spewing leader on the screen, encouraging unity through conformity.
Apple has become exactly what they said they were claiming to slay in 1984, and they are just as Orwellian in their practices as Big Brother's government.
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November 21st, 2009 - 21:32
Yes, it’s creepy, but it’s not like M$ is a bunch of saints either on the Orwellian front. Still what’s funny about all of this is that Apple users wanted Steve Jobs back. Years ago when good old dead beat dad Jobs was finally canned by some guys that weren’t totally Looney Tunes, Apple behaved much more like they seemed to suggest they would in their 1984 commercial. They had an arguably better processor (Power PC) and now they just use Intel and over charge you for it. They had mini-towers, now their only tower is the Mac Pro, otherwise get an iMac, or Mac Mini, or fuck off when it comes to desktops. I’m sorry but the iMacs may be able to do the work of a mini-tower, but take it from someone who knows, if you do film or audio work your very pretty iMac starts to look like a sick octopus as you try to get external interfaces to do what internal cards would do better. Too bad you have no real desktop choices anymore. Apple used to allow clones. Yes they weren’t great, but that was a long time ago. Now I can build a machine with AMD opteron’s in it for less than a Mac Pro. Plus AMD makes an arguably better processor. It would be awesome if I could have the choice to run OSX on the hardware I wanted to. This leads me to say, and why not? Apple is obviously focused more on their phone and MP3 players than their computers. Why not just let us buy your software and run it on whatever we want? I know, you don’t want to support all of that different hardware. That’s fine, Sun open sourced Solaris, and the community takes care of drivers, etc. not always well but they do. You can still buy a machine from Sun if you don’t want to deal with that. Companies like Dell could start to write the drivers, etc. for OSX on the aforementioned hardware and we could actually have choice. That’s what real choice is. In the computer world I would run what OS I wanted to, with the hardware I wanted to and use the software I wanted to period. This idea is actually what scares proprietary software makers. Even though they can close source their stuff if they released it say on and open platform, they like the whole, you have to buy this, this and this to get any work done scenario and Apple is the best at screwing you along these lines. For Example, you have to buy an Apple with OS 10.5 on it to run the latest Final Cut that we have out. This seems simple on the surface, but it means that they’re forcing you to buy a new machine, sometimes just to run new software and charging you again for both. It’s what we call, they’ve got you by the balls and you put them in their hands. Even if open source stuff wasn’t good, and most of it is so good that M$ and Apple steal ideas from the open source community all of the time, even if it wasn’t this is why it needs to be supported. Simply it comes down to choice. Crapple and M$, at some level, will never be happy just to give you something good and make a huge profit on it. Sure, they might every once in a while, like how Apple proudly advertised their UNIX roots when OSX first came out, but later they’ll start to lock the OS down again (see OS 10.5), and screw you again. The only 2 ways out of this trap is are very tricky, expensive, prohibitive legal regulation, or simply to use an Open Source OS and use free software when you want, and buy other software and hardware when you want to because 3rd party vendors wouldn’t help M$ and Crapple screw you. It is the only total control scenario for the user and in the end I’d rather have control of my experience than Big Brother Apple. The really messed up thing here is that they’re doing all of this to you after, let me say again after you reward them by buying stuff from them. I mean really, how stupid are we for even doing business with M$ and Crapple?! Sigh, anyway, I’ve said what is relevant here and will stop before I just rant out of anger. In the end it goes like this. People use Applications, not operating systems. The OS is supposed to be solid and transparent yet it becomes the core argument even before applications. This is stupid, 3rd party companies should not side with Apple, M$, or even Linux. They should develop software and hardware equally for every platform and let you choose. If they don’t, you shouldn’t buy their products because they are helping force your hand. Apple is the most Orwellian since they try to control the whole experience from start to finish.
November 21st, 2009 - 23:47
I should also note that there used to be more Apple software on Windows as well. Does anyone remember Final Cut for Windows?