iTrap

I've been a pretty loyal Mac boy for a quarter of a century now.  I can remember paying $2000 for a computer with a 7 inch screen and a memory of 512k, and I'm not talking about the RAM.  And I can tell you about walking seven miles to school in the snow too.  Barefoot.  Yeah, the age is here, but still waiting for the wisdom.

Anyway, there's a certain smugness in feeling superior to the PC geeks, but the truth is I started using that first Mac because it was easy.  Why would anyone learn DOS when you can just point and click?  Well now it's all point and click, sometimes with a finger, but Mac's are still a little bit better for a lot more money.  And yes, prettier too.  Yet my point today is that it just isn't as fun to be a Mac boy anymore.  It's not just that they've lost their underdog charm, it's that in some ways they're becoming a lot like the dreaded Microsoft.  By that I  certainly don't mean the boring, mediocre products of the Gates crew driven solely by marketing and market power.  No, Apple still puts out the best products out there.  Rather, I'm referring to the arrogance and avarice of the modern Apple i-mperium. 

Here's what I mean.  I've got an eMac that's at least 8 years old and has served me well but is showing signs of failing, not to mention the limitations due to modest memory and an outdated operating system (which cannot be simply upgraded but must be replaced at no small cost as is typical of Apple).  So it's time for a new computer.  I see laptops as yesterday's technology, and love the idea of tablets and other convergent devices, especially operating in the cloud, so the iPad is intriguing to me.  But this iPad is still just a toy, a beefed up iPod Touch (which I already own).  It's a shame, because the potential is so great for a tablet that can be productive and entertaining, but having no multi-tasking, inadequate productivity (even with google-docs), the perplexing (and likely spiteful) inability to employ Flash, among other limitations, will make me wait for a generation or two until the iPad is targeted to somebody other than the Nintendo crowd.  So I'll have to pass on the iPad for this round.

Yet the basic point is that Apple's maintenance of too-high price points, planned incremental innovation (keep coming out with newer versions every 10 months), infamously poor product support, grab-every-nickel mentality, and megomaniacal desire for control is getting harder to tolerate.  On that last point, I can appreciate that with control comes quality assurance, and kudos to Apple for defending against shoddy and pernicious developers and hackers.  But while the freedom of developers vs. the security of the system is an interesting and important debate, as a consumer I'm also concerned about freedom of choice.  I don't like being forced to go through AT&T if I were to ever get a cell phone made by Apple. Yes, there are obvious workarounds, but why should anyone have to.  I don't like having to go through i-Tunes for all content.  I don't like having to go through Apple to buy their products (and the Apple stores at third-party locations are really controlled by Apple) at their prices.  I will likely buy another Mac, but I don't think I'll feel as good about it this time.  On the other hand, I feel really, really good about their stock price.