OSNews

If the thinking of the Mac fanatics were applied to the political process in the Western Democracies, we would have one party rule with a Dear Leader who would be in place for life, and the only books allowed would be those not on the Index. They would be the only ones you could read with the special viewers the State publishing company supplied, or buy with the local State currency.

Surely however, all this is just the supporters club? Surely this has nothing to do with the company or its products? Alas, no. I am saying that there is a close connection between Apple and the wilder shores of OSViews. Apple is like an extreme right wing political party, that denies racism, while condoning the expression of extreme racist attitudes in its supporters as understandable. The extremism of Apple's supporters is only its own marketing line taken to absurd and offensive lengths. Apple more or less gently mocks the buyers of other products. Its supporters abuse them as low class redneck idiots and talk about 'Windoze' and 'Micro$oft. Apple says nothing.

I am also saying that the alienating tone of the Apple marketing materials and their use by the fanatics is a deliberate choice on the part of the company. Apple knows it is alienating people who are not members of the cult, and accepts, perhaps even welcomes it. Their aim is to foster a sense of being a persecuted superior minority among their users. They are happy for the faithful to proselytize in a manner calculated to offend, because the point of the proselytizing is not to gain converts, but to retain those you already have, by making them suffer abuse for their beliefs. Cognitive Dissonance will do the rest.

While it may seem to many rather unreasonable to base one's choice of computers on the antics of other buyers, this is why refusing to buy anything made by Apple has come to seem to me almost a moral issue. It is not just that the products have come to put lifestyle marketing ahead of performance. It is not just that they are overpriced. It is that Apple as a company behaves in ways that are morally questionable. It encourages its most frenzied adherents in offensive utterances and behaviour, and in the expression of abusive snobbery. Like all totalitarians, it believes it needs to control us and limit our choice for our own good. If the Apple model were to come to predominate in our industry, it would be an end of consumer choice, and shortly after that, would bring sharp limits on intellectual freedom. Its marketing stance, and the attitudes it seeks to foster in both adherents and opponents, are actually an abuse of its adherents. The fanatics are mad. But who has encouraged and exploited them in their madness?

From being a company that introduced products which freed many of us from the restrictions on usability that the early command line imposed, it has come to be a company which is in spirit and practice opposed to almost all of the freedoms that have since come to define our industry and our society.

And so, I probably will never buy another Mac again.

--alcibiades