I have bought and used Apple products. I have done so in excess. In an somewhat sadomasochist seizure, I calculated the total amount I had spent on Apple products over the last ten years: it’s been more than $ 5000.
About a year ago I sold my iPhone. Three months ago, I sold my iPad. And most recently, filling myself with regret as I watched it go, I got rid of my shiny MacBook Pro Retina.
I would like to explain why I did so, because I am curious if others feel the same way. There has been around enough criticism on Apple, you might feel, and quite possibly you’re right. Maybe the following won’t add anything new to those, maybe it’s just an exercise of explaining myself to myself, why I rid myself of anything Apple.
Apple designs freakishly good hardware. The MacBook Pro Retina, in my opinion, is the pinnacle of it all: it’s an unbelievably well crafted notebook, with so much perfection in detail, sporting so much processing power, all comforted in a light and thin body, with enough battery life to get you through the day and enough power for about any computational task. With a screen that makes me feel like the whole rest of the noteboook industry has gone obsolete over night. And compared to all standards available, it isn’t even Apple-priced: what you pay, I think, stands in fair enough relation to what you get.
The problem is that Apple doesn’t stop there. They try to match their standards of hardware design in software design. What looks to be a a more than legitimate, even applaudable approach, is based on a hell of misconception: that the look and feel of hardware can be evenly paralleled by the look and feel of software. Take a look at the hardware, feel, it touch it, and you stay in the real world: there is a block of aluminium in front of you, solid, a near-perfect mixture of soft slopes and hard edges. They way you think of God’s breakfast dish.
There can never be a directly equivalent counterpart to that in software. When performing any task of value on a computer, you’re in the realm of of your imagination. Now, imagination can’t be designed. Imagination is design. Yet, Apple does try to do so. Their emphasis on software design is on “user experience”. They try to *design your imagination*, what it should look and feel like. They try to design the emotions one experiences while using it. That’s an overreach, if there has ever been one. It’s a reach into the users mind and soul, ultimately dictating the terms of how one should proceed in the world of one own’s imagination. Saurik, the famous front-liner of the iPhone jailbreak, put it like this: “They try to lock you into the garden of ideal forms.”
Apple can’t think of everything that can be imagined or any kind of creative process might proceed. That is just plain impossible. But they try to engineer as much of it as they can, thereby limiting and locking your world of imagination in the boundaries of theirs.
The ultimate word for this is fascism. In trying to engineer a realm of user experience, they end up close to dictating one’s process of thought. Now, Apple isn’t a fascist company. But they’re rowing a boat in the direction. Life is all about your individuality and the experience of it. I don’t wanna be thought for, I don’t wanna be confined to some other persons imagination, I don’t wanna be locked into precogitated patterns.
Now, you don’t have to follow if you don’t want to. You can install software not designed by Apple. But as you go, you will always be affected to some degree, at least, you’re using their OS. To err on the side of caution, you may wanna consider abandoning anything Apple.