I’ve been involved with technology since the early 80s and in all this time I’ve never owned an Apple product except for an iPod, which I admit I really liked. While I appreciate and admire the elegance and usability built into their products, I have deep-seated philosophical differences with Apple and its founder Steve Jobs. Apple touts the integration between platform, software and hardware as its chief design difference; the elegant and artful way it approaches the user experience from the machine’s curves to the smooth fonts; and indeed, it has led the world in innovations that no one can deny has changed our lives for the better, in so much that technology is a mainstay of our lives.

But as a former technologist, IT professional, software solutions salesman and all around technophile, this current revelation gets to the heart of my distrust and antipathy towards the company and its products.

There was a reason Job was fired from Apple by Skelley and the Apple board, and those of us in the industry at the time have read through the lines of Isaacson’s excellent biography and the subsequent movie from it. In truth, Jobs suffered from the same personality disorder that our current Oval Office occupant suffers from: megalomania and narcissistic disorder and these qualities were built into every product he built: just ask Steve Wozniak. Attendant upon this was the culture of paranoia and class-ism that fueled Silicon Valley then and continues today. There’s certainly a hagiography and mythos of the driven tech visionary that sees beyond the horizon of mere mortals and God knows SV was built on just that. But this is no longer the 80s and it is evident that we are now in full assessment mode of what’s behind power and how it can be abused. And where better to start than that square of glass and metal in your pocket.

Jobs was essentially an elitist masquerading as everyman and underneath his supposed “everyman” design spec was nothing more than complete control ceded over to him by all those that fell in line with his products. The products offered to set your creative engines free but what it did instead was built a class structure of creative elites that willingly followed him like a pied piper to whatever end he chose, using the tools that he designed to reflect the control he needed to have. You can fault Bill Gates and Microsoft for a variety of dicey business moves, have antipathy towards the weaknesses of his OS and consider Microsoft some sort of evil empire, but I believe Gates had the right business/technology idea from the beginning, which in a weird way, reflected a sense of humility: don’t control the whole experience, create the platform and allow the agnosticism of the hardware to drive the market adoption. He didn’t care who built the machine and together, he and the hardware manufactures would create a shared experience that allowed market diversification and cost control. That is the essence of the egalitarian “machine for everyone” that could connect the world, not the high-priced “brand” that allowed only the moneyed cognoscenti to revel in its simplicity and elegance of design. There’s many reasons business adopted the PC model and not the Mac and one of them was more transparency. It made the PC more rife to intrusion than the closed shop of Apple, but it also gave the user the freedom to control their own experience as opposed to the other way around. In the end, I’d much rather deal with someone’s ineptitude than be complicit in their subjugation of me.

This current revelation of forced battery life is the last thread of Jobs’ legacy that needs to undo the fabric. He lied to you and you bought into it, because it tickled a thing that you needed to have tickled, in just the same way SCROTUS lied to his “constituency” in order to get elected. When someone’s stroking our bellies, we don’t really notice the hand in our pockets and the sucking out of our souls. Remember the “1984” commercial introducing the Macintosh? That’s Jobs’ face up on the screen.

Fuck these guys and the Apple cart they rode in on