By Greg Mills
Those of us who have been Apple fans for over 20 years are struggling to grasp the fact that the little fruity company we grew comfortable with over all those years is suddenly poised to become the most valuable company in the entire world. While the grasping, self serving, "dumb as a bag of hammers" Microsoft path to wealth through the dark side of the force is well known and despised, Apple has a much better reputation for customer satisfaction.
Recently, the stellar success of Apple has bred some rabid hatred from the declining ranks of the PC world and its fan boys. The tongue-in-cheek, (or tongue sticking out rudely) Pope of Anti-Mac, spouts mindless dribble about Malcrosoft being early in launching Windows Vista 7 and its smart phones. Meanwhile, Apple has been racking up billions of dollars and steadily wearing down the barriers to the Mac and iOS platforms, taking over the various niches in business and the consumer markets that the PC crowd has advocated to Apple. Slate computers are the most visible PC technological void right now.
The cult popularity of Steve Jobs as the CEO and undisputed leader of the Apple revolution has made him a target for the PC leaning side of the press. Well know for secrecy (privacy), Jobs works with his staff to stay a few years ahead of the baying industrial hounds following behind. Every slight misstep -- and there have been a few -- are bandied about as disasters of Biblical proportions.
Take the iPhone 4 "Antennagate" flap. While the press -- and even "Consumer Reports" -- pans iPhone 4, Apple can't make enough of them for months on end to keep up with demand. At the end of the day, one has to ask; had the antenna problem not occurred, how many more iPhone 4 units would have been sold? I am thinking it is surely just a rounding-error-sized deficiency.
The arduous and aggravating anti-piracy system where users of Microsoft products have to "authenticate" the software so Bill Gates can sleep at night is not likely to happen at Apple. The thoughtful details of Apple software when a unique situation comes up is so delightful. We muse, "gee, they thought about this situation and included an elegant solution," instead of the computer crashing and the consumer having to pay someone to reload a major chunk of software. In 25 years of running at least a dozen Apple computers I have never had to re-format my hard drive and start completely over. Mac OS X is so stable I hardly ever have to reboot it, unless I load some new software that requires a reboot.
Our family owns two Macs, three iPhones and an iPad. Everything just works and interfaces very well with each other and reasonably well with the dark side of the force whenever we have to open a document from a PC user. For the life of me, I can't find anything evil to write about Apple. What's wrong with making money hand-over-fist from clever and compelling products that are years ahead of the competition?
As I wandered through the electronics department of Walmart this morning, I noticed the little "me, too" junk tablets that hope to fill the gap for those who can't pony up for an iPad. The "iPad killers" (that aren't) are little cheesy devices that don't even come close to the real thing.
The evil side of Apple is better than the best side of their competitors. The most recent news of interest on the iPhone killer Microsoft Mobile Vista 7 is that if you innocently put a standard SD memory card into the slot on one of the Windows phones that sports such a slot, the phone will start smoking. I don't mean work really fast, I mean actually smoke, as in hot melting silicon memory. It seems it takes a special kind of SD memory card to not get burned to a crisp. A new sort of memory card that is now available yet. How Microsoft, a standard SD memory card slot that eats flash memory for lunch. Now, that's evil.
That's Greg's bite for today.
(Greg Mills, is a Faux Artist in Kansas City. Formerly a new product R&D man for the paint sundry market, he holds 11 US patents. He's working on a solar energy startup, www.CottageIndustrySolar.com using a patent pending process of turning waste dual pane glass into thermal solar panels used to heat water. Greg writes for intellectual web sites and Mac related issues. See Greg's art web site at www.gregmills.info ; his email is gregmills@mac.com )
