The ridiculous cult of Apple

I haven't regularly used an Apple product in over 30 years when my college newspaper used Mac Classics for compositing. Even by then, I didn't like Apple's closed architecture, having built at least one Windows box from scratch. If you agree with Freddie DeBoer, turns out my instincts were right:

There exists, in the digital ether and in the physical world, a peculiar kind of human organization that has no name, no leader, and no stated charter, yet which operates with the ideological precision of the most passionate and conformist political groups. I am speaking, of course, about the unthinking, unwavering supporters of Apple. These are the people who (by their own account!) are not simply consumers, but rather members of what has long been accurately labeled the Apple Cult. They are the iSheep, to use an earlier pejorative, the fanboys. Their devotion is a fascinating and disturbing case study in the dynamics of modern brand loyalty, a phenomenon where rational thought and technical specification are subordinate to an emotional, almost spiritual, attachment to a corporate logo.

What follows is not, obviously, a neutral analysis of product history, but a pedantic walk down memory lane for the faithful, coming from a lifelong Apple hater, a polemical catalog of intellectual contortions and breathtaking ideological pivots, demonstrating that the most impressive product Apple has ever created is not a piece of hardware but a collective psychology. This psychology allows its adherents to embrace the very things they once mocked and dismissed as inelegant, superfluous, or a matter of feature creep. To truly appreciate the breathtaking scope of these mental gymnastics, we must observe the various contradictions.

Remember the one-button mouse? Small iPhones? Motorola chips? Yeah, neither do Apple's customers.

Wow, what an obtuse pile of horseshit. I know *exactly* why our house went all-Apple years ago: I was spending hours *every week* updating security on my Windows machine... and I still got hacked. When I switched to Apple, those security updates evaporated. I got back entire days versus all the cybersecurity efforts I had to make just to try to keep up. Mac just doesn't get hacked because it's such a relatively tiny market share. iPhones, OTOH, are prime targets -- but I've never had a problem there, either. Do I like iPhone? Hell no. Wildly overpriced and underpowered... but it syncs nicely to my Mac Studio, my watch, my iPad. I stopped screwing around with expanding desktop machines 25 years ago and don't miss it one bit. Now, I don't program and I don't f*ck around with complicated changes to my OS settings, so I'm not the ideal Windows user. But this "cult"? Maybe it's people who are sick of getting butt-f*cked by hackers for decades. Maybe. Oh, and I love Logic Pro, the ridiculously powerful audio app I bought for just $200 many years ago and gets even more OP with every upgrade -- free. Apple may be evilly greedy capitalistic wankers but Logic is soooo much fun to play with. You can have Pro Tools. I'm perfectly happy with my setup, tyvm.

It's possible to appreciate the ease of use of many Apple products without drinking too deeply from the Kool-Aid. In my job as a DBA/developer/sysadmin working in a predominantly Linux-based environment, I find that my macOS (i.e. UNIX) based Mac laptop integrates seamlessly with the Linux back-end systems that I manage, particularly at the command-line level which I use for the majority of my daily tasks. Some of my colleagues use Windows laptops, and they complain endlessly at the difficulty in integrating with the Linux back-end systems. But my institute allows all employees the choice of Windows or Mac, and most of my software developer and sysadmin colleagues use Mac laptops. That said, I have (and have always had!) an Android cellphone, plus a 64-bit Intel-based Linux desktop and a personal MacBook for my own software development projects.