Guest Post by James the Deplorable Wanderer
Background article: https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/12/in-apple-case-feds-green-light-corporate-discrimination-against-conservatives/
This is making me somewhat sad, and not a little depressed.
I like Apple computers. They are simpler, easier and work better than nearly any IBM / Lenovo computers on the market. Not always, not in every department (Apple mainframes are woefully under-represented in quantum computing, engineering workstations outside the creative arts, weather forecasting). But what they do, they do really, really well.
And this is not an empty complaint: I still have (in storage at the moment) my original Apple IIe. Which I bought NEW, in 1981. Along with my Performa, Imac G4 (in designer violet case) and now a recent-vintage all-in-one (a gift from my father-in-law, who used it for genealogy research mostly. It wandered from my son (the original giftee) to my daughter (who gamed on it) to me.
In general, Apple products did things better. I plugged in a printer to my IIe when I bought it, an Epson model, which it instantly recognized and worked with – without a thousand drivers, CDs of software patches and diagnostics. It just saw it, said to itself, “Oh, a printer” and sent it print files, which printed out – properly, the first time. Did I mention the printer was an early dot-matix type? (For you children, they used ribbon cartridges, sort of like that old manual typewriter you saw in the museum).
But now Apple has fallen into the trap of “wokeness”, that has driven several firms out of business. You cannot just decide that you will offend a large part of the public and expect no impact. Making whole subpopulations reject your products because of your company’s adoption of public politics – SJW nonsense, for example – will break you.
It just makes no business sense to go out of your way to reject customers. It hasn’t worked for the Boy Scouts, Think Progress or Gillette. It’s driving J. C. Penney into the economic dustbin, and the Star Wars franchise seems headed that way. It’s claimed the Miss America pageant and Telltale Games, among others. A lengthy list is found at https://www.oneangrygamer.net/get-woke-go-broke-the-master-list/ for many entities who found out what their customers DIDN’T want from them, the hard way.
I don’t want this to happen to Apple! I remember the first time I “popped the top” on my IIe; such a mystery of cables, cards and ICs! Installing an 80-column card took me, a total novice at physical electronics, all of ten minutes. It went in according to the instructions that came with the card (from Applied Engineering) and worked, the first time. I was hooked, and bought games, AppleWorks, accessories. I got online with Genie, the General Electric Network Information Exchange (someone had the bright idea of renting off-peak computer time from GE, and reselling it for applications online. What does that sound like, again?) I found the American Airlines app that sold tickets, and bought a trip to Nashville in my pajamas – no cameras back then, thank goodness! On a computer that didn’t have a color monitor, even.
But it seems they have lost Steve Jobs, and with him the wisdom not to get politically in-your-face with their customers. Oh well, I will mourn your journey back into Chapter 11, Apple; but maybe someone with customer intelligence will buy your ashes, and rejuvenate Apple like a phoenix – a fitting fate for a once-great company.
It is my sincere desire to provide readers of this site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal
-----------------------------------------------------
To donate via Stripe, click here.
-----------------------------------------------------
Use promo code ILMF2, and save up to 66% on all MyPillow purchases. (The Burning Platform benefits when you use this promo code.)
Apple is ruin by a queer. It makes an outrageous amount of money selling over priced products to tech phobic people – the artsy crowd.
Having a gay leader use the company’s funds to support the causes of every freak in the society is to be expected.
This analysis of a Tim Cook speech by Jonathan Pageau is what turned me against Apple:
link to video on youtube
Interesting, thanks for that. This woke/SJW horseshit is infecting everything. In the last year I’ve been called into two hotel romeo investigations as a witness. The latest one was over an asian calling someone fat. No really…they called someone fat and a pregnant woman “big”. Someone was overheard talking about this and a manager turned it in. Hearsay of hearsay.
I am experiencing despair as the level of this shit has reached kindergarten’esk levels. This is how you kill companies. Think I’ll ever say something critical of some of the diversity hires that should never have been hired? Nope…fuck it. Let them screw shit up. Trying to counsel them on their ignorance may make me a racist.
Hotel Romeo. Love it.
I must remember that one for the Human Resources department. I have told
people that HR is NOT your friend. Stay away from them. They work for
management and they are in place to defend management.
Since I’m semi-retired, I don’t give a fat rat’s rear end of “muh career” any longer.
It’s in the rear view mirror. About 5 years ago, some 20-something year old chick
in Hotel Romeo asked me, “Where do you see yourself 10 years from now?” Since
friends of mine have fallen over dead, I reply, “I hope I am still alive doing what I do
now.” Not a good answer but why sweat over a job 50% over minimum wage? Like
I’m gonna lick their floors with my tongue because they are so great. Geeeez.
One more thing. I have noted over the years: Should you see a glaring problem that
a blind donkey could see at a company, and report it,….YOU are the problem. Not
the problem is the problem. YOU are the problem for pointing it out. True.
That “woke” crap is going to turn into an anvil around the neck of many companies. TV shows, the movies, Gillette,etc, people are sick of the crap and it is hurting sales. How many genius level Negros and transfibbion freaks are in commercials and TV shows, Arrrrgggh. Green used to be the only color that mattered but shoving a rainbow flag in your face is all that matters. It’s boring and insipid.
But, they continue to double down on all this garbage. It makes no sense other than their ideology trumps everything else. It truly is a mental disorder of epic magnitudes.
I hate having inter-racial shit shoved down my TV viewing throat.
And once all companies go woke….?
Reckon I don’t understand a down vote for asking an obvious, legitimate question.
Easiest explanation is trolls. Government trolls human or AI are something the spooks must have invested our tax money on by now. Congress blessed propagandizing us. Cf. Smith-Mundt Act.
Economic implosion.
The Roman empire did not implode when the Republic was a running joke or a forgotten memory. We are replaceable. ‘Economic implosion’ for us would be getting off lightly.
I did not read OP except skimming the beginning. Have we not read much of this shit over and over? Donkey, I will give credit when credit is due. You said succinctly what I would have said in triple the words, but I want to answer the question my way for all the lurkers who love me.
It’s not our system. Boycotts will not work. The solutions are obvious. The granularity of this culling filter is the organism, is the human (such as passes for one). Use whatever means are at hand to win as an individual. You can’t help your team if you are dead, unless Jebus. Here is a debt instrument, redeemable once you are completely dead. What great (((propaganda))). iphones have no personal favorites. Defeat the fucking enemy! Take the means you can. Too late for squeaky clean living. You fucks still give charity to the enemy and wonder why no good deed goes unpunished. You happily admixed this population, as least by saying thank you for your service. You debased the social norms white men had, not me. And ye still do. If you must boycott on principle, I think that’s great. You will die sooner. Natural selection is finally turning its worm, you pretentious placaters. You will choose to be fully mealy-mouthed or you will weed yourself out. Thanks for these great choices. Harangue off.
I always thought their and other makers laptops too delicate,tis why I like the Lenovo with a linux OS,tis fairly tough and I am tough on laptops carrying em around ect. even when cased.
I will admit have not used thier first run laptops but newer ones seem to have weak screen hinges and don’t take bumps well.
Screw Apple. I carried a Windows PC around Iraq in a backpack for at least four years through multiple assignments. Bought it in 2006 and it was still working when I came home in 2010.
For some reason or other I agreed to allow the wife to give me an older generation iPhone she got in a cheap trade. It only took a couple of hours for me to figure out I had to pay for apps and music found free elsewhere. No MP3/MP4 files could be converted, downloaded or played through proprietary iTunes. In a fit of rage I threw the POS against a wall and I’ve refused to use another Apple product ever since.
Their computers are overrated and I could build a comparably superior PC myself at a better price from stuff bought from show vendors. Did it once and I can do it again.
YES. this is the Apple business plan, to capitalize on stoopid people, the same folks who went out and re-purchased their entire record collection, once the system converted to CDs, and then again, when the system converted to MP3.
any normie can figure out how to make an mp3 file from any source (vinyl, cd, radio, etc)
but you can’t play your own mp3 on apple crap, you need to pay to listen.
stooopid shit for stooopid people.(oh, and they all like rainbows and unicorns and Bernie)
Apple products are for bugmen.
You can play your own MP3 on Apple. I do it on all my devices. So that is false.
Funny how all dedicated Apple users tell this same story. “… They are simpler, easier and work better than nearly any [PC]…”
I have used PCs and Apple products interchangeably for the last 40 years – starting with the pedigree of the PC. My education and career forced me to be fluent in all things Apple as well as all things PC.
I have experienced the same amount of frustration using Apple products as I have with PCs. No more No less. The biggest problem I have faced is the limited use of Apple products. I have been stonewalled with lack of capability dozens of times over the years [from apple] – basically not able to do what I needed to do on a computer.
Now, I really don’t like Apple or their products. Their stance of ‘using only what we allow you to use’ was the deal breaker – ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’.
I recently dropped IOS smartphones because they removed an App (that I had been using for more than 5 years) purely for political reasons. Also, ‘the straw that broke the camels back’ I had many more issues, the worst being that you pay way to much for a phone that is a very poor phone.
Done Gone
Don’t get me wrong – I do know that Microsoft is evil also.
Also funny how nobody ever tells the opposite side.
Over the decades I had three adverse user experiences with Apple computers, let me list them:
1. About 22 years ago, must have been on IIe or something like that: “Here is the computer, let me open the Finder for you, here is the diskette: copy those files onto the diskette and with it get back to me.” OK, after copying done, how do I get the diskette out of the floppy drive? (which has no eject button) Searching in menus til I’m blue in the face, but no “Eject floppy” anywhere to be found. Owner comes back “you have to drag the floppy symbol onto the trashcan!” WTF? I would expect that to format the diskette or something, but eject??
2. About 16 years ago, my sister buys my mom an iMac. Next time I’m there I try to setup IMAP to her email account, as the webmail interface she uses often times out while she -very slowly- writes an email, with the result her losing all she had written. Three hours later I give up: the MacOS included mail program IMAP implementation is so buggy I cannot get it to work (offline storage, Drafts folder etc.) And at that time I had been using IMAP on my Windows (SeaMonkey) exlusively for 5 years without a hitch! WTF!!
3. About 12 years ago, I use my sister’s iMac while visiting her for 3 weeks. First action as to install Firefox. OK, but the freaking Apple mouse has only one button! How do I get to the context-menu, which I’m using permanently to open a link in a new (background) tab? (Keyboard shortcuts cannot do that, as I need to click on the link to select it.) Asking my sister, and intense research with Google etc. finds me no solution. Two weeks later I (left button) click on a link and get a “wait a second” thought, so I keep the button depressed while thinking, and when I look at the screen again a context-menu had popped up! In disbelief I learn you’d need to press the left (and only) mouse button for 3 seconds to have the context menu open up. Forearmed with this new knowledge I research Google etc. again, and even now cannot find a single mention of that functionality anywhere!! Fuck me.
Apple has always thought they knew better than the customer, and weren’t they right? I mean, Apple dropped the floppy drive because they knew better than their customers, they dropped the CD drive because they knew better, they dropped standard USB connectors because they knew better, they dropped the headphone port on the iPhone because they knew better, they drop support for previous operating systems so you’re forced to buy a new computer because they know better …
I don’t use Apple products because they annoy the hell out of me and I can easily do everything I need to do on a Linux machine (desktop or laptop), but I have absolutely no patience for Apple fans who on one hand love how Apple makes things “so simple” and “intuitive” and then get their panties in a bunch when Apple’s management starts behaving like the control-freaks they are. Cry me a river, Jimbo.
In the early days when I was using them more, Apple made its own chips, such as the 65C02 that powered the Apple IIe. I date their downfall to the decision to use Intel chips, which made them essentially the same computer as all the rest.
Intel chips are fine, but introduce common vulnerabilities to all the models that use them. I’m sure nowadays there are backdoors built in at the chip level, so all the alphabet agencies can get in without a trace. Aren’t near-monopolies great?
Apple machines worked with everyone else’s accessories and equipment back then also. I mentioned the Epson printer that seamlessly plugged in and worked. That was another bad decision, probably post-Jobs / Wozniak as well – making a closed ecosystem for Apple products. Now they want to control what you run on your Apple as well – who wants that?
I loved them back when they were sane. Nowadays, you’d have to be suicidal to want in on their terms, their equipment, their software, and no one else’s. THIS is what will lead to their demise – not enough market share to support a company that bureaucratic, overbearing and control-freakish on their own.
I still think they could revive and be a phoenix, but an awful lot would have to change.
Actually, Apple has never made any of the IC chips used in any of their systems. Motorola made the processors and Texas Instruments made the support ICs. Motorola also made the display and memory management ICs used on the pre-Intel systems.
Ahh, that’s right. Still, the decision to adopt Intel chips made Apple products less distinguishable from the competition, and subject to the same vulnerabilities. It was a strategic failure in my opinion.
You like the OS?
Get a Hackintosh. That’s a PC fudged with to run Mac OS.
You have to be able to write to the ROMs, so you need a build it yourself machine, for which you can get hints at Gamer sites & such. So there’s a learning curve, but you wind up w/ a machine you know how to fix yourself & save money.
My old cheese grater is still fine, but my plan is to build one myself one of these days.
https://www.tonymacx86.com/
https://amd-osx.com/
My first PC interface occurred on an early 1980’s Kaypro – an IBM compatible with a small green phosphor screen. I think the RAM was 64KB = less than a small JPEG today. When I was later asked to take an MS/DOS class, I passed because I hadn’t watered my plants since the day before and it had been a week since I watched my car rust. When my folks got an ACER with a 256 MG hard-drive, I played a game of solitaire and became absolutely convinced that personal computers in homes were a passing fad, like corduroy pants and pet rocks.
Oops.
Thanks for the post, James. I no longer watch late-night comedy and stopped using (and hyper-linking into my articles) Amazon.com after they dropped TBP.
Since I read that the Academy Awards were going to be less political, I let the channel rest for awhile on ABC while surfing Sunday night; mainly out of curiosity. But as soon as Brad Pitt, while accepting his award for “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”, bitched about John Bolton not testifying – I flipped channels and never went back.
Later, when my wife asked me to bring her something from the kitchen to the family room where she was sitting, I did, but wouldn’t look at the TV because she was watching the Oscars. When I handed her what she wanted, she pointed to the TV and asked me the name of an actress. I said: “I’m not looking at it“. When she asked why, I told her. She then asked me: “When are you ever going to grow up?” To which I replied: “Never.” She said: “People can have their opinions too“. I responded: “Yep, and I don’t have to waste my time either“.
Whether its Harrison Ford prattling on about climate change and open borders or Brad Pitt exposing his ignorance during a 45-second acceptance speech or Leoretardo Dicaprio traveling in his private jet and yacht to speak at climate change conferences, it matters not. They’re dead to me.
Better late than never I guess.