I’ve spent the better part of the last decade railing against Apple and its cult-like following, but now that Steve Jobs has died I feel nothing but sorrow.
I didn’t always dislike Apple. In 1983 I was the proud owner of an Apple IIe, which put me at the leading edge of personal computing at the time. Almost nobody in my high school was handing in essays in a neat, fully justified, dot-matrix format. I was even able to access The Internet in those days, though it was a command-prompt maze of scientific research that held zero interest for a 16-year-old.
That Apple IIe is still alive and well, though it hasn’t been turned on in years.
It was after Steve Jobs returned in 1997 that the company really found its mojo, and became insufferable in the process. Maybe Steve Jobs’ larger-than-life personality was somehow passed on through the many products he invented, but suddenly Mac owners were becoming technology experts all to ready to proselytize about their superiority.
If I had a nickel for each time I’ve heard the refrain “Macs are just better,” I’d be writing this from a sandy beach in the Caribbean.
I didn’t matter that Macs could be just as crash-prone as Windows PCs. It didn’t matter that Steve Jobs periodically made bizarre decisions (keyboards without arrow keys, now you see it now you don’t Firewire and USB ports). It didn’t matter that PCs have almost always given users better bang for the buck in computing power. It didn’t matter that the Mac user lecturing me had just picked their beloved (and dead) machine up from the Apple repair store. Macs were just better.
Then there was the sight of people camping out overnight so they could get their hands on an iPad 2, when they already had an iPad. Or the latest version of the iPhone, which was a lot like the earlier version but had features added that really should already have been there in the first place.
And don’t get me started on the prison-like obsession with proprietary technology. The thought of having to use iTunes every day makes me cringe. As Charlie Brooker wrote a while back in the Guardian:
“Microsoft gets a lot of stick for producing clunky software. But even during the dark days of the animated paperclip, or the infuriating ‘.docx’ Word extension, they never shat out anything as abominable as iTunes – a hideous binary turd that transforms the sparkling world of music and entertainment into a stark, unintuitive spreadsheet.”
None of this seems to matter. Part of Steve Jobs’ genius was making technology an end in itself, not a means to that end. My Samsung Galaxy S Android phone is faster, but it’s not an iPhone 4. It has a bigger, brighter and better screen, but it’s not an iPhone. That kind of conviction isn’t open to disagreement. It’s on the same plane as religious belief.
And it drives me crazy. Why wouldn’t you want a device that is more capable, or faster, or by most real measurable tests superior? Yeah, I know, it’s not an iPhone.
The irony is that there are millions of Apple devotees who behave in a way that’s the polar opposite of Steve Jobs. A creative, independent thinker, Jobs gave rise to a legion of consumers who remind me of a Far Side cartoon from years ago. A sheep in a large flock, standing on his hind legs, proclaiming: “Wait! Wait! Listen to me! . . . We don’t HAVE to be just sheep!”
So I’m surprised to find myself feeling as sad about Steve Jobs’ death as I do. Even a skeptic like me can appreciate that Jobs helped usher out the dreadful era of big, grey computers and create a market for legitimate digital music. He brought beauty to a field that was largely governed by pragmatism. He will be missed.
But I still won’t buy a Mac.
