A lot of people know that I’m not too fond of Apple as a company. I’ll often joke about it with a lot of my friends who are Apple fans, but I’ll occasionally get a question from someone I know who isn’t quite familiar with why I can be so down on them sometimes, and I usually do not have a short, simple answer for them that’s easy to understand [other than "Apple hates freedom", but even that requires a lot more explanation for most people 
].
For right now, I think I’ll just point them to this recent article by Mark Pilgrim, which neatly summarizes most of what I don’t like about how Apple operates.
I don’t understand this continuing obsession with buying things that you need to break before they do what you want. It’s not just the iPhone; people did the exact same thing with the AppleTV too. Primarily to add support for other video codecs, like DivX and XviD. Why? [...] I thought the big draw for Apple hardware was that “It Just Works.” By breaking it, you must know you’re giving up the “Just Works” factor, so what’s left? Rounded corners?
My current theory is that it’s some twisted form of wish fulfillment. “I wish this company understood the value of openness, but they don’t, so I’m going to keep buying their closed, crippled shit until they get it.” Yeah, let me know how that works out for you. And while you were waiting breathlessly for them to “get it,” Apple locked out third-party videos. And third-party hardware. And third-party ringtones, applications, and carriers.
ProsperityOpenness is just around the corner!
3 Comments
So that goes for every apple consumer, right? Because I don’t think that would work for Martha and her want for an iPhone.
Well, this post is about my personal opinion of Apple as a company, so by definition, it really only “goes for” me.
However, if you’re asking whether I would discourage everyone who buys Apple products from doing so, I’d say yes, but with varying degrees.
For the general consumer, I think in many cases Apple devices are the most logical choice at the moment, given their combination of desires and abilities.
Let’s assume for the sake of this point that Apple devices are usually easier to use than the more open (or “free” as in freedom) alternatives. I wouldn’t necessarily agree with that statement across the board, but it’s an adequate generalization for the basis of my next statement.
I usually tend to give a lot more grief to the people who are smart (in the technical sense) enough to make the non-proprietary alternatives work for them (just as well or better), because part of me feels like they’re just being lazy and feeding into the proprietary model in the way that Mark describes in the last paragraph quoted above.
I’m not trying to make a big deal about it, or really accuse anyone of anything. I’m just saying that as a general rule, I feel that as people who are more familiar with both the technology and the potential consequences of enabling a non-free or proprietary platform to gain a monopoly share of a particular emerging market (think early 90’s Windows), it is our obligation to look towards the future and try to guide things (as much as we are able) in the direction that we feel is better for society in the long run.
Of course, all that being said, it’s never my intention to impose my opinion on someone else - only to share why I feel the way that I do about it.
Other people (Martha included), are more than welcome to not share those opinions, and I don’t expect that everyone will.
Most people aren’t really interested enough in the technology itself or its history and/or future implications, and I’m not putting anyone down for that.
Just don’t blame me when those matrix robots (running proprietary software) eventually take over the world.