Whence the Apple Resurgence?
Apple is one of the most commercially successful American corporations for two main reasons: (1) raw social appeal and perception as a luxury good and (2) willingness to take advantage of the later with ruthless planned obsolescence.
For a while people thought that Windows operating systems would simply be eternally dominant, they still are, but the portion of MacIntosh software on home computing devices has increased precipitously. Originally Apple was successful for its correct diagnosis of the reason for some of the general discontentment with Windows: its apparent lack of user-friendliness. The nineties and naughts were a transformative time in computer culture as more and more people, especially the old, found themselves perplexed yet entranced by the increasingly common art of computing. Apple operating systems aimed to be unbreakable, unchangeable, and uncustomizable, in other words: idiot-proof.
Apple's classic "switch" campaign was derisively filled with ex-Windows users complaining about their disability to move program windows, to load documents and to find the off-switches on their machines (no news as to if they could find them on iPods). Soon however Apple went from the explicit computer for the dim to the computer of the rich, artsy and dim. Apple Macs are notably available in any color so long as it's white; there is good reason for this. A plain white laptop or computer, empty save an apple design on the back is built to look simple, but unmistakeably recognizable. It's not obvious if a computer is made by Lenovo or Dell or Gateway, but Apple computers are meant to be noticed.
It's strange if not ironic that a lot of the momentum towards people switching to Macs was based on an an ambiguous anti-conformism against Windows computing. That nonconformity led many users to embrace an OS that's even more of a mass-produced carbon-copy, without even rudimentary abilities to modify UI, running on an army of identical computers.
Apple's PR Should Qualify as Domestic Abuse
When I think "battered housewives," I think of the people who obsessively and piously go to line up in front of Apple stores to wait for whatever new product they've been told to buy. These poor souls must be subject to the worst of emotional blackmail to need to donate more of their money every several weeks in exchange for a device without any difference from its predecessors. Apple is a withholding master at that: after all, why program flash-compatibility when you can just sell yet another flash upgrade in a month or so? What does it matter if every other device on the market has that already? It doesn't at all because no patriotic Apple user would ever stoop to buying one of those cheap Android things that only peasants buy, or better yet, nothing at all.
At this point I think the psychology of the Mac "community" is to show as much unrelenting religious devotion as possible so that the Internal Revenue Service has absolutely no choice but to classify Apple Inc. as tax-exempt religious organization. I can't quite fully understand the appeal in monthly repurchasing another computing device at twice or thrice the market value.
Apple and Tablet Computing
The tablet PC as outlined by Apple is the epitome of our post-cognitive society in which useless digital infotainment is drained directly into the human brain. Tablets don't need keyboards because users spend 95% of their time passively consuming the headlines of news articles and hundredth-hand memes and the other 5% upvoting and liking said content on their favorite social media sites (which can now be done with direct manual stimulation of the screen). Users never need to worry about introducing their own content to the internet, an activity that might require typing, because they've been so reduced to impotent observers whose only commercial or cultural prerogative on the internet is to accidentally follow advertisements on occasion or to in a manner equally subconscious, post their emotionalized socio-political views often with visual-aid in the comments section of the sites of their choice.
Apple tablets are especially pernicious in that Apple has written quite a deal of code and spilt significant legal blood on inhibiting the capabilities of their computers. In a market with organizations like Google and essentially all other IT companies offering absolutely free services withstanding significant capital costs, it seems strange that Apple somehow manages to sell worthless apps while purposefully limiting the openness of their app market.
The only real imaginable use of a tablet PC is for portable reading in a way more friendly than the laptop. This scarcely is how they are used. I am somewhat upset myself, as the coming of tablet computing seems to have reduced the availability of netbooks to nearly nothing. With netbooks, a consumer could simply buy a computer for $200 that performed every action any desktop could with only a slightly diminished memory capacity. Tablets have somehow "replaced" netbooks while not doing much of anything and all functioning on their own idiosyncratic operating systems. And at this point, with the tepid release of the forgettable "tablet-friendly" Windows 8 OS, I officially declare that Windows systems are practically defunct. Without reform, I don't see it unlikely that Windows 7 will be remembered as "the last real Windows OS." Looks like Microsoft is trying to out-Apple Apple.
Another Thing that Apple/Mac Has Ruined
Music tagging - Thankfully I don't listen to rap music, but if you've seen the iPod or MP3 player of anyone who does, you probably have noticed an artist list looking something like this:
---Lil' Wayne
Lil' Wayne (feat. Birdman)
Lil' Wayne (feat. Drake)
Lil' Wayne (feat. Kanye West)
Lil' Wayne (feat. Kanye West and Drake)
---
This is the fault of Apple/Mac. Back in the pre-Mac days, there was a special tag for the Album Artist of a song and a different tag for the Artist(s) of the song. The idea was that if two artists (more often than not rappers) perform together, they can all be listed in the Artist tag while the Album Artist is reserved for the one artist whose album features the song. This way, the above would simply appear as:
---Lil' Wayne
---
Now with good, old MP3 players, you could organize music however you wanted to preserve the calligraphy of your artist screen, but Apple did away with this. They decided to disallow ordering by Album Artist so you get to see hundreds of disorganized, messy "feat."s while you scroll down your device. The worse part is that iPod caught on and other MP3 players started to emulate them!
I remember my first MP3 player; it could only hold several GB, but I could arrange the music precisely how I wanted and could click and drag music directly onto it in any folder I wanted. An MP3 player was just a flashdrive that emanates sound, as it should be. But with iPods, we have no choice as to how music is categorized and everyone has to run this ridiculous "sync" operation to load music, rather than just clicking and dragging. My only question is, "who is out there that Apple is appealing to that's so stupid as to find iPods easier than classic MP3 players?"
UPDATE: Within the course of a week after writing this angry anti-Apple article, my old iPod was lost. I thought about looking to buy a new superior device, but realized that my phone has the storage space to carry what I want. I have no regrets besides not selling my iPod off earlier.
Oh and do you hear that sound? It's me listening to .FLACs.