Styles

Apple Computer has had a strange hold on me.

It has been years now since I routinely used one of their products, the last of my Apples are now dying a slow death.  Obviously, I am not going to replace them with the current batch of overpriced eye candy that is the lifeblood of Apple

I'm kinda wondering how this will play out.  I watched Apple barf up a lung and almost go under before. Steve Jobs brought them into play, and later saved them from certain death before.  I am not certain that a flim-flam man of his astonishing ability to create style is available to make something from nothing again.

It was BSD with a pretty picture.  It thrived by cheapening and atomizing an already commodity product (American Music) and enhancing the self absorption of its users.  The astounding construction of an eighty billion dollar war chest and concomitant awarding to its CEO eight billion dollars was done on the twin pillars of Chinese slave labor and American fatuousness.

But they were always gorgeous things.  Sleek.  Sexy.  Cool.  I owned them for that reason alone.  The image that they allowed me was one that I craved.  But at the end of the day, they never really did the job that well.  The image did not fulfill the real world needs, just the imaginary and self referential desires that I held.

They were always just outside of fully-functional, substituting cool for that final, ugly little bit of something that allowed them to become yours.  My four year old Compaq running Ubuntu is capable of anything I need to do.  Android is looking preferable to the iPhone and iPod.  Amazon Fire is staring at iPad.   All of these options are open to everyone, without stepping into the Victorian High Tea that Apple worked so hard to create.

Apple was always about creating something that you wanted to be seen with.  What you did with it was secondary that driving purpose