rotten to the core

apple’s done it again.

heaven knows i'm no fan of apple. i can't stand the fanboys. i can't stand the smugness, the elitism. i can't stand the culture.

i went to the mall recently and literally saw a velvet rope set up in front of it's apple store for all the morons waiting to buy the ipad. it was pathetic. i mean, a red velvet rope. please, like it's some kind of privilege to buy something anyone can buy.

another thing i can't stand is apple's support for it's legacy products.

i remember back in the day, apple released it's last non-power pc laptop, the powerbook 190. it was the last apple product to use motorola's 6800x0 risc processors. what i remember about the powerbook 190 was that about a year after they stopped selling the thing, they made an announcement, stating that it would no longer be including support for pre-power pc macs in future operating system releases, thus instantly rendering all 0x0 macs irrelevant and useless, including this powerbook, barely past warranty. people had just shelled out $2,200 a year ago and now they were being made to shell out another few grand on new hardware they shouldn’t have to buy just to stay current.

i've seen the company do this with their operating system time and time again. they rush out a new version of the operating system every few years and refuse to support the previous version, often making some excuse that the features of new software are incompatible with the older operating system. i am still running os 10.4.11, because i don't want to give the bozos any money. i am told i must upgrade the operating system all the time. but meanwhile, every time i open itunes i am asked if i want to upgrade to the latest version. the reason is obvious -- itunes is a cash cow. they will support itunes because it brings in revenue no matter what version of os x you are running and simultaneously not support anything else, forcing you to spend $$$ on an os upgrade and possibly a hardware upgrade.

apple doesn't bring in anywhere near the revenue from it's software offerings as it does it's hardware. so, the more often a user is required to upgrade software, the more opportunity apple has to peddle it's pricey hardware. the operating system is the ruse and it's a good one. i've said it before and i will say it again. os x is better than anything else, period. but the apple's hardware just plain sucks, period. it looks neat, but is consistently overpriced and underpowered, which is why my next mac will be a pc.

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i have a 2nd generation ipod touch that is a little over a year old. i was thrilled to hear about how i was going to be able to use my ipod as a dedicated skype phone, with the impending release of iphone os 4 and it's addition of multitasking, but guess what? multitasking isn't available for 2nd generation ipods, so my new ipod is useless.

this means that apple wants me to go out and shell out at least another $200 for a new piece of gear i don't need, because the company won't even support hardware that is barely out of warranty, again. 1st generation ipod touch owners can't even upgrade to the new operating system.

apple had the balls to charge me $10 to upgrade to os 3. os 2 could barely be passed off as a beta and they wanted to charge me to put an os on the thing that should have been it's 1.0 release.

funny thing is that apple tends to screw it's early adopters. anybody remember the iphone price reduction fiasco? all the fanboys camping out got royally screwed by apple. my old boss was one of those people. his reward for camping out in front of an apple store was for apple to stick it in his ass and laugh about it all the way to the bank. only after getting called on it in the media did apple do anything about it.

i'm anxious to see how apple screws it's first gen ipad owners.

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apple's revenues are always sky high, come it's quarterly earnings reports. excessively high revenues mean that a company is charging way more for it's products than it costs to make them.

a few months back, someone opened an ipad and summed up the cost of manufacturing for each unit. apparently apple is charging around twice what it costs to make an ipad. being as companies tend to have consistent revenue philosophies across their product line, i would gather that all of their products have the same cost/revenue ratio.

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i mean, duh. apple wants money, just like every other asshole multi-national corporation. there is nothing inherently wrong with that. but, beyond the fact that apple is perpetually trying to squeeze money out of it's user base and overcharge them for the "privilege" of using it's products, the thing that irks me the most and the point i've finally made it to is that while this "genius" laden company has the image as being some kind of enlightened, smart, hip company, apple's planned-obsolescense-revenue-generating-tactics do little more than create landfill, which is the opposite of smart. this is not enlightened. this is not smart. this is destructive and ignorant.

i'm not buying another ipod, apple. you can go fuck yourself.

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