apple is pure evil

let me start this out by saying i think windows is a piece of garbage and pretty much every piece of microsoft software borders the limits of taste and usability. i think microsoft is the personification of banality, rule by status quo, macho capitalistic hedonism, the american quest for mediocrity, etc. i have never owned a "pc", only macs, with the exception of a coleco adam and commodore pet with cash register keyboard and tape drive way back in the early-mid 1980s. that said, i am anything but an apple fanboy. in fact, i despise the company and everything that it stands for as well - corporate elitism, unwavering brand loyalty, macho capitalistic hedonism, cultish behavior, etc.

it annoys me to no end that so many mactards think steve jobs is some kind of saint. he is simply a showman, peddling the latest tonic for those who can only feel their lives fulfilled through the accumulation of overpriced gadgets manufactured by the secretive behemoth known as apple computer. having been what could be considered "a mac person" for many years, i have personally witnessed mac folk who honestly think that buying apple over microsoft is a moral decision. the white wizard, steve jobs is on the side of good, fighting the evil dragon that is microsoft. these are the kinds of people who will never let mind controlling cults go out of style. mr. jobs knows he has so many nerds wrapped around his little finger and that when he shits out the next big thing, his army will immediately head to the nearest apple store and shell out their hard earned dollars for the latest piece of overpriced, future landfill and when someone slags apple on a comment or message board, that his troops will be there to tell it like it is. bill gates may have been a demon in his earlier years, but at least he's turned out to be the reincarnation of andrew carnegie. it's almost like he's playing the mad magazine board game, where the winner is the one who finishes with no money - the exact opposite of monopoly.

now i've been pretty lucky with apple's hardware until i bought my current computer. it is a lemon. it's a macbook pro, top of the line. i bought it almost a year ago. it has so many problems, i can't remember all of them at the same time. recently i had to have a "genius" check it out because i couldn't take it anymore. now, about a week before i brought it in, i dropped on it's side and it made about a 1/2" wide and 1/10" deep dent in the side. it is a blemish, a noticeable one, but a blemish nonetheless. i don't care about aesthetics, i just want it to work. the trackpad button had been kind of sticking for month, but it was intermittent and i couldn't bring it in and have it not stick, so i had to wait until it was unusable. in addition to the trackpad problem, i alerted him to the fact that the computer had crashed in one form or another - through kernel panics, restarting on it's own, shutting down on it's own - on a weekly basis, since the day i bought it a year earlier.

first, i tried to him the trackpad issue, but the button decided that this was going to be the 1/2 hour a day when it doesn't stick, so i couldn't prove that it was actually a problem. he saw the dent and basically figured that i was trying to get a new case for the machine as apparently, they are connected now, somehow.

next, i showed him how the battery was misbehaving. it would go from 30% charge to 0% and stay there for an hour, when unplugged. he gave me a new battery.

then i told him about the crashing and showed him the logs from all the kernel panics. he refused to do anything about this. he tried to tell me that it had something to do with my airport, which he and i knew was total bullshit as my previous ibook hadn't crashed once in the 2 years that i had used it with the same airport. this is what really pissed me off. after shooting down everything he hypothesized, he told me to reinstall the original version of the operating system, which i had upgraded from in the hopes that the upgrade would solve my problems. there was nothing i could do. he wouldn't budge. in an effort to stop having him waste my time, i picked up the computer and walked out. he was wasting my valuable, new york time.

i dislike and distrust apple as a company, but my disdain is not directly tied to this event. i distrust any multinational, publicly traded corporation. this event has only proven my distrust. truth is, i disdain microsoft and apple equally, i only prefer apple's operating system. everybody's got to use one, right? and everybody has to decide which one(s) they are going to use, right? so i made my decision based on a few personal requirements. the fact that i use the operating system is simply a matter of choice and necessity. i don't endorse osx with one ounce of my vigor and think that people who take the choice of their operating system too seriously should be sterilized. as my good friend akash goyal so sagely put it, "choosing an operating system is like choosing a hammer. you get the same result with whatever hammer you choose, so who the fuck cares?" yet, if one goes online and reads any tech related posting that allows comments, and i mean any posting - it could be about toner, all discussions eventually lead to the apple vs. microsoft brawl. the amount of energy people save for these discussions is startling and down-right frightening. we have a president who everyone knows is a liar and crook, took us to war for nothing and continues to get our "heroes" killed on a regular basis, we have global warming, the drug war, our country is sliding into theocracy and these little toads are more concerned about right clicking vs. option clicking.

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while apple and it's overpriced proprietary hard/soft-ware schema floundered in the 1990s, microsoft saw it's opportunity and seized the advantage to dominate through all sorts of means, means only possible in the realm of a market too new for regulators to comprehend and regulate. after all, bill gates was the first to become the richest human in the world through means that weren't tied to a natural resource. the means that finally got microsoft into trouble was that the company bundled it's own software with it's operating system that came installed on all new windows computers, which just happened to be 95% of all computers sold. all the software one would need for the internet age - a browser and streaming media player were pre-installed on every machine, in a calculated effort to eliminate existing and potential competition. downloading a competitor's software could take hours, depending on one's modem speed, damning netscape out of existence and removing real-player from top slot in the streaming market. eventually there were lawsuits, including, oddly, apple's vs. microsoft for supposedly stealing the g.u.i. operating system idea that apple stole from xerox. the domestic lawsuits against microsoft brought vague rulings until the theatre was moved to europe. the e.u. high court ruling against microsoft was the first ruling against microsoft that forced microsoft to alter it's business practices in the name of fair competition. microsoft was a monopoly and stifled both competition and innovation through it's oblique business practices. they had to change the way they do business if they wanted to do it in europe. it would seem ironic that the european union would be the entity to force change and openness when republitards love to rail on europe for being far too socialist and backward.

under the rule of gil amelio, apple licensed it's operating system to several pc manufacturers in a desperate attempt to stop itself from becoming irrelevant. the results were quite simultaneously disastrous and telling. mac fans stopped buying apple macs and instead, bought mac clones. folks weren't interested in apple's slow, overpriced hardware, but it's operating system. this presented a major problem for apple. apple's hardware generates the bulk of it's revenue. an operating system that receives a major update every few years and costs $129 doesn't pay the bills for a multi-billion dollar corporation. after mr. amelio used what was left over of apple's shrinking revenues to purchase next and steve jobs, apple(under steve job's leadership) immediately screwed all the clone makers(including motorola - the company that had manufactured apple's cpus from day one, no wonder the g4 was so late in coming)by revoking their licenses.

during apple's dark days one can only imagine how loudly bill gates' teeth clattered at the thought of apple computer going under, it was apple's very existence that provided any sort of potential legal footing for proving that microsoft was not a monopoly.

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the thing that mac worshippers either don't realize, refuse to admit, or can't put their iphones down for long enough to think long and hard about is that while everyone points the finger at microsoft for being smelly and evil, apple is in reality as much worse than microsoft ever was. microsoft is a software company(with a few random hardware products thrown in). apple is so much more. oddly, apple is a company which has more than one monopoly. one being it's refusal to allow other pc manufacturers to be able to run osx and another, it's itunes/ipod/fairplay schema, which has gotten them into a bit of trouble in europe, of course.

in the early days of osx, apple appealed to disenchanted linux users with ads touting it's *nix roots and open source foundations. in reality, this is nothing but a ploy. apple learned from it's previous mistake of alienating it's advocates and developers, so it threw a bone in the hopes of getting them to return to the platform. it knew the value of having an army of know it all slashdotters, who are notoriously evangelistic and since slashdot is rife with former os 9 users and anti-microsofters, they were already half-way there anyway. as soon as they took the bait, apple closed major aspects of it's open source program in the name of "security".

a recent look into it's jackassery with the iphone is the latest proof of it's malevolent intent. not only will you void your warranty, but apple will render your newly purchased $600 cell phone unusable if you do not use it according to apple's guidelines, a product for which a lot of cultists sheepishly stood in line for for days and then watched helplessly as apple slashed it's price, proving that the product was overpriced to begin with, without any warning, apology, or compensation until threatened with lawsuits.

the number of recent lawsuits against apple is pretty amazing. we have: the iphone price drop; bricking the iphone; problems with 17" lcd displays; the fairplay/itunes/ipod monopoly; the ipod battery being defective; the iphone battery being defective; failure to fully honor service contracts and warranties, didn't get repair and service businesses properly licensed, stole trade secrets from its own resellers, and sold used computer equipment as new; false advertising; iphone technology theft; violating securities laws; the list goes on.

remember now, apple is the good company.

we have evidence on 3 monopolies here - ipod/itunes/fairplay, iphone/at&t(locking phones is monopolistic, that is why europeans hate them and the iphone will never conquer europe), and it's proprietary hard/software schema. this is the part that pisses me off. the fact that i am forced into buying apple hardware to run it's operating system is longest standing, the most obvious and annoying of apple's monopolies, but no-one is talking about this. now, one could argue that, if i don't like the company, don't use the product, microsoft is no better a company and linux is unusable. after my problems with my current laptop, all i want to do is be able to install osx on a dell. gasp!!! why can't i do that? the part of the fairplay/itunes/ipod lawsuit that has a parallel is ipods have the ability to play windows media files, but apple purposefully disables the user's ability to play them. the apple operating system runs natively on x86 chips, but apple purposefully disables my ability to run it on another piece of hardware.

now, can someone tell me how to file a class action lawsuit?

link | rss | share | posted: 2007-12-28 11:08:27