Some time back, I wrote a blog post describing Apple as “The Evil Empire”. Now a nationally known figure is adding her voice to the chorus. In this CNet Buzz Report, Molly Wood describes Apple as her “bad boyfriend”. They The guy who forces her to look good, tell her what cell phone carrier to use, etc without caring about her.
I thought that was a pretty apt description, and it really helps delineate the differences between the Apple philosophy and everyone else. Apple keeps tight control over their domain. Who cares if the new Air only has 1 USB, no firewire, no internet, no optical drive, no media card reader, and no expansion slots? Hey it LOOKS good. And those pretty new i-Phones? Oh, you can only use the carrier THEY pick out for you. Third party apps? Only if they give their blessing, which they still haven’t done. But hey, it LOOKS good.
Contrast that with both Windows and Linux. You can run the OS on any machine you wish. Windows Mobile? sure, any company who wants to license it for their device or carrier great with them. Heck Microsoft was even so open they let the i-Phone work with Exchange. But people complain that Microsoft isn’t open enough? And after Apple’s latest stunt of trying to force Safari down everyone’s throats via the iTunes update, I’d better not hear any Mac-Head deride the Windows Update process as “sneaky”.
It’s no wonder people are resorting to installing Windows on their MacBooks, it’s the only way they can get the freedom to get any work done!
Arcane Code 
Great article!
Ahem you dimwit… it’s called ‘satire’
and ‘Heck Microsoft was even so open they let the i-Phone work with Exchange’ !! Let? Apple licensed Exchange for big $$
More like MS sees themselves(Windows Mobile) being swept away and decides to get a cut of the action.
Admit it, the world is moving too fast for you to get a clue…
Yes, I used the word “let”. Obviously Apple had to pay for the licensing, but Microsoft clearly could have said “no, you’re a competitor, not gonna happen”. And, Apple only pursued the Exchange licensing at the clamor of the customers. They originally stated the iPhone would never be a “business phone”.
As to Ms. Wood, did you even see her video? If her presentation was ‘satire’ as you claim, she did too good a job as her points are very valid. Apple has a long shown it’s main concern is form over function. Have you asked why can’t you replace the battery in your iPhone? It would have spoiled the sleek design of the case.
Finally, I’ll point out that instead of being able to construct a rational argument you resorted to name calling. I shall leave it up to my regular readers to discern who needs the ‘clue’.
“Molly Wood describes Apple as her “bad boyfriend”. They guy who forces her to look good”
THEY guy who forces her…? Is that some new L337-talk?
Don’t you have some MacSux T-shirts to press? Some patches to install? Some aliens to kill? Some geeks to hang with?
“Who cares if the new Air only has 1 USB, no firewire, no internet, no optical drive, no media card reader, and no expansion slots?”
Who cares if the Eee PC has no USB, no firewire, no optical drive, no media card reader and no expansion slots? It’s soo cool… Obviously, those idiots who bought Eee PCs are pathetic brainwashed morons.
I’ll agree that I’m not a big fan of the MacBook Air. Yeah, it’s super thin, but I don’t really care about thin. I like the 3 pounds. I don’t like the non-upgradeable RAM.
So you know what I did? I didn’t buy one!
Much like the Eee PC, there are those who are fine with the limitations. There are those who’d rather carry around a 3 pound laptop computer instead of a 5-7 pound “desktop replacement” laptop computer.
I’m not one of those. Sounds like you’re not, either.
In regards to the carrier issue, I can’t seem to get a Samsung Juke for use on Sprint. I won’t be able to get a Samsung Upstage for use on Verizon’s network. I won’t be able to get the Nokia 6650 for use on anyone’s network but T-Mobile.
Where’s your anger at Samsung and Nokia? How dare they provide cool phones exclusively to network providers!?
It’s a free world out there, if Molly doesn’t like her boy friend she can run back to her old one. It says a lot about her person who loves being dictated to.
No one ask her to use a Mac or Safari, there are choices and if she can’t decide and don’t know what she wants so is she suitable for her boy friend Mac?
Get a life.
Did Apple really pay anything for iPhone link to Exchange or is it a part of the agreement that Microsoft made with Apple, so that Apple won’t sue them for stealing Mac stuff for use in Windows?
Gee zato, I’m sorry my simple typo so confused you that you were unable to derive it’s meaning from context and instead gave you the delusion I was creating some new form of “L337” talk.
Viswakarma – I know of no such agreement, perhaps you have a copy of it you can share?
I’m torn. I empathize with your point, but, man, I’ve had my iPhone for around 8 months now and still am impressed with how beautiful its user experience is. As a .Net developer, I suppose Apple is my “bad girlfriend”.
Defending proprietary computing in general is lame. MS or Apple, but Apple does take computer fascism to a higher level than MS. Go to baceman007.blogspot.com, there you will find a post called iFascist about how an Apple store actually censored a private e-mail list that some of its employees were on. They are so worried about “image contamination” that they really don’t seem to care what they do to keep their image “clean”. They have even tried to sue bloggers, and for what? Apple is like using real UNIX in the same way that using a sheep skin condom is like using a real condom. It could have been totally open source and cool, but Apple only sort of did that as long as they had to to save their ass financially and then started to lock it down like crazy. Just look at the iPhone, not only did they drop the price rapidly on original buyers and announce a better phone withing a period of 11 months after gouging original iPhone buyers, not only did the original phone have a 3G card in it, and the 32GB touch come out only a few months after the phone meaning that they probably had the technology just to release a 32GB phone initially, not only did they give their consumers that paid the original phone a $100 gift card that was limited in what it could be used to purchase, they also are charging developers that want to release free applications, let me say that again free applications, $100 bucks to do so on the iPhone. How open source is that, sure the SDK is free but to release free applications you have to pay…. charging your developers is always a bad idea since they make your system more functional in general. At any rate I’ve written a ton about Apple’s hypocritical green stance on digg and their occasional attacks on the rights of people there as well and in some other places so I won’t go nuts here and expand more since this is getting to be a really long post. All I’ll say is that MS and Apple have both done some very disagreeable things, but Apple really takes the cake. The sad truth is that 90% of people can switch to Linux at this point. I mean look at Ubuntu, it’s easy to install, stable, runs on inexpensive hardware, has good support, is free, and there are tons of free applications available right through the updater. Let’s start switching before the next 30 years is included in the last 30 years historically as “the dark age of computing when consumers just weren’t smart enough to switch to good, free operating systems and encoded their data in risky proprietary formats.” I mean both MS and Apple “creatively borrowed” the GUI from Xerox to start, and then down the road Apple used tons of open source aps, but then they price gouge for their own distributions. Just look at Apple Remote Desktop, it’s basically just polished VNC, but it’s hundreds of dollars depending on your license, Leopard wasn’t cheap either, and broken to this day (current version being 10.5.4), but how much of that was given back to the open source community that saved Apple’s ass when they needed an OS when their company was failing and MS just gave them $100 million? Apple has always been a scumbag company that usually takes better work from other people and then forgets to mention to the public that they kind of got it for free and then modified it. I’m sure there are some exceptions, but the fact that their OS is over $70 is disgusting. I mean what are you paying them for? As was already stated, it’s not like you are allowed to run OSX on anything but a MAC….. On a scale of 1 to lame Apple is a lame plus served with a side of big corporate abuse and piracy. Oh I should say in my opinion in case they try to violate our first amendment rights and sue bloggers again. Again, we don’t have to tolerate this crap, we can just switch to GNU/Linux. Sometimes just because something looks good isn’t a good enough reason to get it. The boyfriend analogy is awesome for Apple. You can also imagine Apple from the other end like a girlfriend that is really hot, so you let her move in, but once she moves in she takes over the house, spends all of your money on art you don’t even like without asking, and puts locks on all of your cool stuff that require you to pay her and then enter a code to use it, and if you get the code wrong 5 times she refuses you sex until you start over or get it right. Well built machines don’t need to hide behind proprietary BS. If something is really good you can tell everyone how it is built and people will still buy it because it saves them time to do so.
Fine work, I need to hear more from you.Are you working in a Group that you can make such a great Blog?