I’d much rather eat iVomit

30 June 2010

EDITORS NOTE: Please read this post before referring me to a shrink.

It made me retch. I’m not even sure why I do it. It’s like checking your bank-balance after getting wrecked in town the night before (something I also did today).

What am I talking about? John Gruber. He’s a blogger apparently, which doesn’t shine him in the best light. I’m a blogger after all, but I can barely string a sentence together. So I see him more as a journalist/writer, because it makes him sound more like a writer. What I really want to say is, he’s good at writing, and he writes a blog.

He writes for his blog called Daring Fireball, which is mainly about Apple products. Anyone who knows me will know where this is going now.

He’s a self-confessed Apple zealot. I’m sure he get’s off most nights by stroking Apple logos and preying to a picture of Steve Jobs. He really loves it.

The other day he wrote a piece on the new iPhone, and how it has re-defined perfection, again. It reads like an up-market soft-core porn film. He is expressing his arousal with every word.

Now. I’ve recently signed up for a HTC Desire phone. No-one is hiding the fact that it’s an iPhone clone. On few occasions, I’ve even called it an iPhone when showing it to others. I then go home, find a razor, and add another slit to my wrists.

It’s amazing, but it’s fundamentally different. The concept is similar. You have a huge narrow screen and you touch it with your fingers to navigate through screens using menus and icons. It’s a simple idea. The difference is the approach. The software is open to all manufacturers to use and modify. Users can add their own applications to it. Of course, they’re not called applications anymore, because Steve Jobs has amended the OED and added a clause whereby if you use a mobile phone you have to call it an app. Because it’s trendy.

John Gruber is amazing at writing. The issue my stomach contents has is his absolute belief in all Apple products being beautiful and usable and without flaw. I’ll give him the first two, but there’s a shit-load wrong with that company. It’s attitude towards being exclusive sucks. I’m not sure if Steve Jobs has a complex because it’s products lack the market-share acquired by Microsoft based machines, or if he feels that Macs are unsung because kids want to use MSN on their laptops or they consider it broken, or if he was bullied as a child for being so water-tourtureingly irritating, or whatever. It hurts me, because it’s a belief that hates diversity. It lives in a world where everything has an Apple logo embedded. It’s like the Aryan race in electronics form. A hundred years from now we’ll be teaching kids about a holocaust where everything Microsoft or Linux or Android or unlucky enough to not be pre-fixed with the lowercase-letter “i” got obliterated because it wasn’t good enough, because it dared to be different.

Every time I hear about Apple suing companies for daring to stand up to the hype, or Steve Jobs bragging about an innovation that’s been doing the rounds for the best part of a decade but it wasn’t relevant then because it didn’t have an Apple sticker on it, or see someone on the train telling me how their existence beats mine because they have an iBag or an iSock, my stomach goes again. I just know with a chilling certainty that in a few years I’ll have to conform and be affiliated with the rest of them whilst pledging my allegiance to Mr Jobs or be stripped and gassed to death, then my body ejected into space with all the porn and Adobe Flash software boxes where we all belong.

So yes. Apple have amazing products. They’re beautiful and flawless if you don’t care about doing things the same way that Jobs preaches. I understand. I’m just scared. Plus I have a compulsion to spend my money on alcohol and take-aways, so at the end of the month when the next new “iPhone 6.5G LS mkIII” comes out I can’t afford to fork out another grand to pay to the Apple-tax man. A crime that will surely be punishable by instant decapitation this time next year.

So John, as much as you dis-prove every little point that people try to make against your deity, and do it so well, I hate you. I don’t care if you’re right. When I wake up in the morning, my HTC Desire, a piece of unique electronic/plastic hybrid that is truly mine, that I customised, where I chose how it works or which hand I can hold it in, gives me so much joy and happiness. You give me so much pain and hate by rubbing in my face how wrong I should be. You give me so much pain and hate, that I had to compose a pie-chart to vent it all out.

If a hadn’t already written a million words I’d continue to explain every point. But I can’t. For now, I’ve ran out of hate.

And to make things clear, I copied that idea from this wicked cool website. If I was Apple, I would call it an iChart and patent it and then sue that guy instead. And he would sue me back and the world would be full of hate.

Disclaimer: Not everyone with an iFinger or iHairbrush is a twat. Some folks that use them are genuinely nice and have human feelings that don’t represent the Borg collective mind. My girlfriend has an iLaptop, and she’s very nice :).