It could be argued that, with his innovative 2000s products, Jobs helped create the world in which we now exist.
Of course, it's a much different company now, with interests in many fields besides computers, but it's always centered itself as being on the cutting edge of the technology of its time, even if its' innovation has stagnated a bit under Cook.
I think 2 things were embedded in the early Jobs/Woz mixture: a rebellious undercurrent, and a belief that they could do things so much better. I'm certain the latter is still prevalent in the company, and it has become THE central tenet, whereas the "against the grain" thing has become conformity.
I wrote a Harry Potter fanfic called The Highest Value where one of the characters, Florence, a Muggle born witch, builds an Altair 8800 during her summer break in 1976 before she, Snape, and the Marauders start their sixth year that fall.
Florence had gotten the last of the eight installments of her computer kit back in October of last year, when she had just started her fifth year at Hogwarts. She'd read about it in her January issue of Popular Electronics and by February had convinced her folks to provide the £286, plus shipping, from America, in eight easy payments. But she hadn't finished putting it together until the spring holidays and hadn't done any programming until this summer.
The plain rectangle, about the size of a breadbox, had toggle switches to input the program and rows of red lights to display the results. Not much of a computer, really. Her Sinclair Oxford scientific calculator could add, subtract, multiply and divide and display up to eight digits on its LED display. Still, she couldn't program her calculator. But what if she connected the display from her calculator to the computer chip in the Altair 8800? And used the number pad from the calculator for input? Florence started sketching a diagram.
She couldn't do magic over the hols, but Muggles had their own kinds of magic.
Well, I started with punch cards, but I skipped the Altair and the Apple's myself. My first PC was a Columbia PC (no, it wasn't an Apple or an IBM, and it didn't last). I remember the Apple's, but my first Apple was a Mac.
I guess it would have been 77-78, if my math is right. A friend and I wrote a few games in Basic. We got a green screen terminal at some point, which made it a lot easier.
My next computer was a C64 in '87 or so, after I was in the Army and stationed in Germany. I was stationed in a relatively remote location, the PX only got one copy of each game, so I learned how to hack copy protection and ended up learning how to code.
Noice. You know about the Jacquard Loom, right? Just thinking about all those punch cards, and how the software interface was pretty much 150 year old tech at that point... wow.
After I graduated, I was an officer the Air Force assigned to JSC. We used 300 baud acoustic couplers to start with. Then I think they went up to 900. I remember how fast the 2400 seemed, but that was after I got out, and I don't think they were acoustic anymore. It's been so long ago, and I've gone through so much hardware and software.
It's such a weird idea to think about how sound actually encoded programs and the like, but that's just how it was. I bet I can mimic that screeching, loading sound pretty well now!
Yes. I used punch cards to program the (I think it was a mainframe) computer in the basement of the Physics building. I wasn't in computer science at all. I was a Physics major. Started college in 1976.
My mom and dad both became teachers, and they both used punch cards in the early 70s at their universities too! I enjoyed hearing the stories of cautious tedium.
You can't imagine how amazing it was when I first used a PC in a computer course while I was in Houston. Imagine being able to type your program in and then just run it! In the Physics department, I wrote the program, made the punch cards, and then fed them through to run the cards on the mainframe. And I thought I was really cool. For my Fortran course (the only computer course I took in college), I had to hand my punch cards in at the window in the computer building, and then the paper clock would show when I could expect to get my program printout back. I recall the wait being on the order of an hour at least.
Apple gave up any remaining claims to “antiestablishment“ when they became the industry leader in DRM for music. They *are* the establishment.
They’ve also slipped immensely in the quality department. Both macOS and iOS are unstable messes, rapidly catching up to Windows in bugs and technical debt while Apple struts about bragging how you can get the latest phone in Yellow.
I say this as a regular Apple user. I used to be a loyal Apple user, but I just think of myself as regular. Life is too short for Windows, and I don’t trust Google to not decide that their latest phone stops getting updates this week.
Can you elaborate on "life is too short for Windows"? Do you mean it's an inelegant interface, so not worth spending time on it? I have very little context; every time I've used a Mac it has been incredibly frustrating for me. The keyboard and mouse don't make sense to my poor fingers and brain.
Yes, the interface is inelegant. Microsoft has always been terrible at UI.
The Mac tends to be more consistent between apps, although toolkits like Electron have made it easier for developers to make their apps equally crappy on all operating systems by writing a s***ty web app and wrapping it in Chrome. And, of course, vendors are still free to do things like give their apps two menus, like Office on the Mac. Word has two view menus and a "design" and a "layout" because, as I said, MS is hilariously inept at UI.
Apple is hardware is better. I've yet to find a PC laptop with a trackpad as good as a MacBook. I hate that they've made them impossible to upgrade, and that may finally drive me to 100% Linux, but I'd be giving up better screens, battery life, heat management, and trackpads. It's not an easy call.
(It's also bunk that Apple is more expensive. A more accurate statement is there are not cheap Macs. A $2k Apple laptop is at least as good as a $2k PC.)
Apple spies on their users and uses the data internally. MS spies on their users and sells the data and uses it for OpenAI.
I think that's a good way to put it: Apple doesn't really try to cater to folks who don't have money. I know, I know...there are first world folks here who have iPhones. I'm just saying that you can get an Android tablet for like $100, whereas the cheapest iPad is probably closer to $350. Still... I think the prices are slowly converging. I remember when you couldn't get an iPad for less than $500, and when I bought one for my small business it was even more than that.
As far as the higher end models, you may be right about the Apple products not being any more expensive than the high end products of other companies. I'm thinking about the new VR headset, too - Apple just refused to compete with the Oculus, instead carving out something totally new.
I think that's still a strong suit for Apple, to be able to roll out entirely new products (or existing products like the iWatch that aren't yet popular).
You can get an MacBook Air for less than $1k, and it will blow the doors off any other >$1k laptop in terms of speed and battery life. (I wasn't aware of iPad prices. I only use an e-paper Android tablet.)
For stuff like the VR headset and the Mac Pro Apple clearly is expensive, but I see that as niche stuff.
AFAIK, the Apple Watch has about 33% of the smart watch market at more than 150 million sold. (I wear a Timex Expedition or a Victorinox Maverick.)
1/3 of the smart watch market is pretty incredible. A lot of folks kind of assumed the innovation was going to disappear when Jobs left the world... what do you think? Obviously Cook is more of a logistics-based leader, but he also seems to be keen on rolling out new products and entering new markets.
Sure the VR headset is niche, but I think it's Apple's attempt to stay.... relevant? paradigmatic? in the face of transforming computing paradigms. They're not exactly all in on AI, but they seem to be slowly turning the USS AAPL.
I don't mean niche as a pejorative. I mean as a product they don't expect to sell in the millions, or maybe even tens of thousands. I think one of the key differences between Google and Apple is that Apple is willing to introduce a product as an experiment and take a loss on it, while Google is quick to pull the plug on nearly anything (and redirect the resources to another chat app, but I digress.) Neither approach is particularly consumer friendly, but with Apple there's a greater chance that it will turn into something in the future.
I cannot and wouldn’t speak for Eric but ironically the one device I used to go outside Apple for was PCs. I use a Chromebook now but I remember windows as big, ponderous, buggy, finicky and often opaque. I came up in a DOS environment and felt much more in control. Windows seemed to remove a lot of that control and I didn’t like that. I got used to it but I’ve never totally trusted it. There was an old joke:
*How do you crash Windows 1.0?
Type ‘start’ at the command prompt.*
They did improve stability, but the overall buggy-ness remained. And it got more expensive for that hot mess as time went on. Security was also an ongoing issue (the bugs again) and Microsoft didn’t really seem to like supporting older versions. I don’t know if any of these things have changed though, since I left.
I think it's a lot better, and probably closer to the experience Mac users have today (IMO, iPhones and Androids have also gotten less divergent over time). That being said, Apple seems like the extreme version of what you're saying WIndows does: it takes all the choice away from users, making them famously easier to use. I wonder if this "we'll think of everything, don't worry" core aspect works for Apple because they go all in, whereas Windows is like a hybrid, so it frustrates folks who want agency, but also frustrates folks who want the simplest interface possible.
You raise a valid point. It may just be that Apple went all in and that worked, especially for new users. If you’re not used to tinkering with your os and you just want to do stuff, Apple was there and easy. I’m often frustrated with iOS too but in today’s culture people just don’t seem to “care” as long as it works. I do the vast majority of what would’ve been considered PC tasks a generation ago, on my iPhone. I’m typing this on it.
I'm an Android / Google guy myself, and once you're locked into an ecosystem these days, the switch is painful. So I never really use Apple products.
At the same time, I have nothing but respect for Apple's consistent ability to push the envelope and also appeal to the mass market with the whole "It just works" approach. Because, as long as you're sticking to Apple products, it just does.
It's literally an analog dog bed, but every fiber stitch is made at precisely 90 degrees. The color is an oddly specific grey that literally nobody can find, and literally nobody cares about.
My first product was the Mac Classic, and I still remember the near panic buying of the first iPod. Since Jobs there have been missteps, particularly, I think, with Apple Music – not user-friendly and heavy on the big-corporation efforts to suck you in and drive Spotify to the wall. In general, I still admire the tech and design, but it seems the quantum leaps in innovation from Apple have now run out…
I wouldn't say I'm a fan per se, but I do admire what Apple (and Jobs especially) accomplished, including their more recent focus on logistical excellence. I might consider counting iWatch up there since it kind of enabled Fitbit and other competitors, in the same way that iPhone wasn't first, but it completely opened the smartphone market up.
I guess I'm more of an historian than a fan, truth be told.
Considering I was also working with NCR card readers (punch cards to program) and IBM assembly (machine language) coding at the time, pretty mind blowing. Something like “dang, ain’t never seen anything like this before”.
I've never used a Lisa (at least as far as I remember), but having read a ton about it, it sounds like it was just a class above everything else at the time and kind of shocking.
Great point. I think most folks draw mediocre conclusions from this event. Woz's reaction should tell you exactly what you concluded here, not so much that Jobs was a dick (okay sure, he was, but that's just sort his personality), or that Woz wasn't treated fairly. People think Woz should be mad, but instead, they should be more like Woz!
The story of Apple is one of innovation, adapting to time, and attention to detail. They have a beginner's mind, reseting everything from scratch. I love how Apple has morphed over time and maintaining their own path with no competition to match.
I learned recently (on Behind the Bastards) that Jobs tricked Woz out of the first big fee they earned. Luckily, Wozniak is an easygoing guy as well as utterly brilliant. That said, I've been an Android gal from the day it became an option.
I'm not sure I have an opinion about whether Apple has become a status symbol for the rich or a company with an undercurrent of anti-establishment ideas. But I have an opinion on Jobs. He transformed the way billions of people live. He belongs right there with the greatest thinkers the world has produced.
You may be interested in checking out this documentary called "The Co-Founder"about Ronald Wayne, the forgotten third partner at the start of Apple. He left early on but was key in the original tech and business decisions like making it more user friendly, It's free on Tubi. Not great, but interesting.
Thanks! You're right about Wayne, who has to be one of the most neglected business founders in history. Any major takeaways from the documentary on Tubi?
Not really. It's not that great of a doc. I just never knew about him and found his story interesting enough. I didn't really do much thinking about it.
Status symbol? No. It can’t be because I have an iPhone and I’m poor. Rebellious? Again no. As you say they *are* the establishment now. I use their products because they work and I like the interface. I think they’re overpriced but I shop at the lower end of their price range. You will never see me camping out in line to get the newest device. And once I do get one I tend to hold onto it until it’s no longer realistically useful.
And again, once you get into an “ecosystem” it’s a PITA to switch. Certainly doable but who wants an extra headache.
The story of Apple is one of innovation, adapting to time, and attention to detail. They have a beginner's mind, reseting everything from scratch. I love how Apple has morphed over time and maintaining their own path with no competition to match.
The story of Apple is one of innovation, adapting to time, and attention to detail. They have a beginner's mind, reseting everything from scratch. I love how Apple has morphed over time and maintaining their own path with no competition to match.
It could be argued that, with his innovative 2000s products, Jobs helped create the world in which we now exist.
Of course, it's a much different company now, with interests in many fields besides computers, but it's always centered itself as being on the cutting edge of the technology of its time, even if its' innovation has stagnated a bit under Cook.
I think 2 things were embedded in the early Jobs/Woz mixture: a rebellious undercurrent, and a belief that they could do things so much better. I'm certain the latter is still prevalent in the company, and it has become THE central tenet, whereas the "against the grain" thing has become conformity.
I wrote a Harry Potter fanfic called The Highest Value where one of the characters, Florence, a Muggle born witch, builds an Altair 8800 during her summer break in 1976 before she, Snape, and the Marauders start their sixth year that fall.
From https://www.fanfiction.net/s/7253145/34/The-Highest-Value
--
The lights on the Altair 8800 were flashing.
Florence had gotten the last of the eight installments of her computer kit back in October of last year, when she had just started her fifth year at Hogwarts. She'd read about it in her January issue of Popular Electronics and by February had convinced her folks to provide the £286, plus shipping, from America, in eight easy payments. But she hadn't finished putting it together until the spring holidays and hadn't done any programming until this summer.
The plain rectangle, about the size of a breadbox, had toggle switches to input the program and rows of red lights to display the results. Not much of a computer, really. Her Sinclair Oxford scientific calculator could add, subtract, multiply and divide and display up to eight digits on its LED display. Still, she couldn't program her calculator. But what if she connected the display from her calculator to the computer chip in the Altair 8800? And used the number pad from the calculator for input? Florence started sketching a diagram.
She couldn't do magic over the hols, but Muggles had their own kinds of magic.
---
Nice! I think folks who don't know better just kind of imagine that we leapt from punch cards to PCs. Not true at all!
Well, I started with punch cards, but I skipped the Altair and the Apple's myself. My first PC was a Columbia PC (no, it wasn't an Apple or an IBM, and it didn't last). I remember the Apple's, but my first Apple was a Mac.
I started with punch cards and a teletype in the 8th grade. The HS school had a mini and middle school had terminals and acoustic coupler modems.
I "graduated" to radars in the army that you could enter commands into via a backdoor by entering binary words with the lamp test button.
What year was 8th grade for you? I love remembering what I can, and hearing new stories.
I guess it would have been 77-78, if my math is right. A friend and I wrote a few games in Basic. We got a green screen terminal at some point, which made it a lot easier.
My next computer was a C64 in '87 or so, after I was in the Army and stationed in Germany. I was stationed in a relatively remote location, the PX only got one copy of each game, so I learned how to hack copy protection and ended up learning how to code.
Noice. You know about the Jacquard Loom, right? Just thinking about all those punch cards, and how the software interface was pretty much 150 year old tech at that point... wow.
I wrote a little about those old looms a while back: https://goatfury.substack.com/p/is-this-a-jacquard-loom-moment
After I graduated, I was an officer the Air Force assigned to JSC. We used 300 baud acoustic couplers to start with. Then I think they went up to 900. I remember how fast the 2400 seemed, but that was after I got out, and I don't think they were acoustic anymore. It's been so long ago, and I've gone through so much hardware and software.
It's such a weird idea to think about how sound actually encoded programs and the like, but that's just how it was. I bet I can mimic that screeching, loading sound pretty well now!
I know I used to be able to tell how things were going by the sound.
Were you using punch cards at a university?
Yes. I used punch cards to program the (I think it was a mainframe) computer in the basement of the Physics building. I wasn't in computer science at all. I was a Physics major. Started college in 1976.
My mom and dad both became teachers, and they both used punch cards in the early 70s at their universities too! I enjoyed hearing the stories of cautious tedium.
You can't imagine how amazing it was when I first used a PC in a computer course while I was in Houston. Imagine being able to type your program in and then just run it! In the Physics department, I wrote the program, made the punch cards, and then fed them through to run the cards on the mainframe. And I thought I was really cool. For my Fortran course (the only computer course I took in college), I had to hand my punch cards in at the window in the computer building, and then the paper clock would show when I could expect to get my program printout back. I recall the wait being on the order of an hour at least.
Apple gave up any remaining claims to “antiestablishment“ when they became the industry leader in DRM for music. They *are* the establishment.
They’ve also slipped immensely in the quality department. Both macOS and iOS are unstable messes, rapidly catching up to Windows in bugs and technical debt while Apple struts about bragging how you can get the latest phone in Yellow.
I say this as a regular Apple user. I used to be a loyal Apple user, but I just think of myself as regular. Life is too short for Windows, and I don’t trust Google to not decide that their latest phone stops getting updates this week.
Can you elaborate on "life is too short for Windows"? Do you mean it's an inelegant interface, so not worth spending time on it? I have very little context; every time I've used a Mac it has been incredibly frustrating for me. The keyboard and mouse don't make sense to my poor fingers and brain.
Sure.
Yes, the interface is inelegant. Microsoft has always been terrible at UI.
The Mac tends to be more consistent between apps, although toolkits like Electron have made it easier for developers to make their apps equally crappy on all operating systems by writing a s***ty web app and wrapping it in Chrome. And, of course, vendors are still free to do things like give their apps two menus, like Office on the Mac. Word has two view menus and a "design" and a "layout" because, as I said, MS is hilariously inept at UI.
Apple is hardware is better. I've yet to find a PC laptop with a trackpad as good as a MacBook. I hate that they've made them impossible to upgrade, and that may finally drive me to 100% Linux, but I'd be giving up better screens, battery life, heat management, and trackpads. It's not an easy call.
(It's also bunk that Apple is more expensive. A more accurate statement is there are not cheap Macs. A $2k Apple laptop is at least as good as a $2k PC.)
Apple spies on their users and uses the data internally. MS spies on their users and sells the data and uses it for OpenAI.
I think that's a good way to put it: Apple doesn't really try to cater to folks who don't have money. I know, I know...there are first world folks here who have iPhones. I'm just saying that you can get an Android tablet for like $100, whereas the cheapest iPad is probably closer to $350. Still... I think the prices are slowly converging. I remember when you couldn't get an iPad for less than $500, and when I bought one for my small business it was even more than that.
As far as the higher end models, you may be right about the Apple products not being any more expensive than the high end products of other companies. I'm thinking about the new VR headset, too - Apple just refused to compete with the Oculus, instead carving out something totally new.
I think that's still a strong suit for Apple, to be able to roll out entirely new products (or existing products like the iWatch that aren't yet popular).
Yes, things are converging.
You can get an MacBook Air for less than $1k, and it will blow the doors off any other >$1k laptop in terms of speed and battery life. (I wasn't aware of iPad prices. I only use an e-paper Android tablet.)
For stuff like the VR headset and the Mac Pro Apple clearly is expensive, but I see that as niche stuff.
AFAIK, the Apple Watch has about 33% of the smart watch market at more than 150 million sold. (I wear a Timex Expedition or a Victorinox Maverick.)
1/3 of the smart watch market is pretty incredible. A lot of folks kind of assumed the innovation was going to disappear when Jobs left the world... what do you think? Obviously Cook is more of a logistics-based leader, but he also seems to be keen on rolling out new products and entering new markets.
Sure the VR headset is niche, but I think it's Apple's attempt to stay.... relevant? paradigmatic? in the face of transforming computing paradigms. They're not exactly all in on AI, but they seem to be slowly turning the USS AAPL.
I don't mean niche as a pejorative. I mean as a product they don't expect to sell in the millions, or maybe even tens of thousands. I think one of the key differences between Google and Apple is that Apple is willing to introduce a product as an experiment and take a loss on it, while Google is quick to pull the plug on nearly anything (and redirect the resources to another chat app, but I digress.) Neither approach is particularly consumer friendly, but with Apple there's a greater chance that it will turn into something in the future.
I cannot and wouldn’t speak for Eric but ironically the one device I used to go outside Apple for was PCs. I use a Chromebook now but I remember windows as big, ponderous, buggy, finicky and often opaque. I came up in a DOS environment and felt much more in control. Windows seemed to remove a lot of that control and I didn’t like that. I got used to it but I’ve never totally trusted it. There was an old joke:
*How do you crash Windows 1.0?
Type ‘start’ at the command prompt.*
They did improve stability, but the overall buggy-ness remained. And it got more expensive for that hot mess as time went on. Security was also an ongoing issue (the bugs again) and Microsoft didn’t really seem to like supporting older versions. I don’t know if any of these things have changed though, since I left.
I think it's a lot better, and probably closer to the experience Mac users have today (IMO, iPhones and Androids have also gotten less divergent over time). That being said, Apple seems like the extreme version of what you're saying WIndows does: it takes all the choice away from users, making them famously easier to use. I wonder if this "we'll think of everything, don't worry" core aspect works for Apple because they go all in, whereas Windows is like a hybrid, so it frustrates folks who want agency, but also frustrates folks who want the simplest interface possible.
You raise a valid point. It may just be that Apple went all in and that worked, especially for new users. If you’re not used to tinkering with your os and you just want to do stuff, Apple was there and easy. I’m often frustrated with iOS too but in today’s culture people just don’t seem to “care” as long as it works. I do the vast majority of what would’ve been considered PC tasks a generation ago, on my iPhone. I’m typing this on it.
Interesting conversation you started.
Thanks, Lee! Stick around and hopefully we get a lot more little conversations like this one going. There's plenty to think about.
I'm an Android / Google guy myself, and once you're locked into an ecosystem these days, the switch is painful. So I never really use Apple products.
At the same time, I have nothing but respect for Apple's consistent ability to push the envelope and also appeal to the mass market with the whole "It just works" approach. Because, as long as you're sticking to Apple products, it just does.
It's a powerful and effective ecosystem, no doubt. I just wonder if anyone who uses Apple today feels like much of an underdog.
They might not right now, but they will soon with the release of "Apple Underdog," the sleeping mat for your canine companion.
It's literally an analog dog bed, but every fiber stitch is made at precisely 90 degrees. The color is an oddly specific grey that literally nobody can find, and literally nobody cares about.
Also, it's never referred to as a "dog bed."
It is a relaxation experience or a comfort-enhancement pod.
iCuddle
My first product was the Mac Classic, and I still remember the near panic buying of the first iPod. Since Jobs there have been missteps, particularly, I think, with Apple Music – not user-friendly and heavy on the big-corporation efforts to suck you in and drive Spotify to the wall. In general, I still admire the tech and design, but it seems the quantum leaps in innovation from Apple have now run out…
Robin, what do you make of the iWatch? Is it a banger along the lines of the iPad?
I’ve come to rely on iWatch for sport and health data. Also works well with the iPhone for answering calls etc. Are you a fan?
I wouldn't say I'm a fan per se, but I do admire what Apple (and Jobs especially) accomplished, including their more recent focus on logistical excellence. I might consider counting iWatch up there since it kind of enabled Fitbit and other competitors, in the same way that iPhone wasn't first, but it completely opened the smartphone market up.
I guess I'm more of an historian than a fan, truth be told.
I got to work with Apple Lisa in 1983. Those early systems were ingenious. I’ve had Macs since then. They work.
How mind blowing was Lisa in '83?
Considering I was also working with NCR card readers (punch cards to program) and IBM assembly (machine language) coding at the time, pretty mind blowing. Something like “dang, ain’t never seen anything like this before”.
I've never used a Lisa (at least as far as I remember), but having read a ton about it, it sounds like it was just a class above everything else at the time and kind of shocking.
Yes.
Right! He didn't learn about it till much later.
I remember Woz's reaction: he wasn't even bothered. What a stoic! He just let everything rolled off his shoulders.
I admire that so much about him. Imagine the happiness and peace he's reaped just by virtue of not being a selfish jerk.
Great point. I think most folks draw mediocre conclusions from this event. Woz's reaction should tell you exactly what you concluded here, not so much that Jobs was a dick (okay sure, he was, but that's just sort his personality), or that Woz wasn't treated fairly. People think Woz should be mad, but instead, they should be more like Woz!
The story of Apple is one of innovation, adapting to time, and attention to detail. They have a beginner's mind, reseting everything from scratch. I love how Apple has morphed over time and maintaining their own path with no competition to match.
I learned recently (on Behind the Bastards) that Jobs tricked Woz out of the first big fee they earned. Luckily, Wozniak is an easygoing guy as well as utterly brilliant. That said, I've been an Android gal from the day it became an option.
Yes! Atari game design, right?
I'm not sure I have an opinion about whether Apple has become a status symbol for the rich or a company with an undercurrent of anti-establishment ideas. But I have an opinion on Jobs. He transformed the way billions of people live. He belongs right there with the greatest thinkers the world has produced.
I agree about Jobs!
You may be interested in checking out this documentary called "The Co-Founder"about Ronald Wayne, the forgotten third partner at the start of Apple. He left early on but was key in the original tech and business decisions like making it more user friendly, It's free on Tubi. Not great, but interesting.
Thanks! You're right about Wayne, who has to be one of the most neglected business founders in history. Any major takeaways from the documentary on Tubi?
Not really. It's not that great of a doc. I just never knew about him and found his story interesting enough. I didn't really do much thinking about it.
Status symbol? No. It can’t be because I have an iPhone and I’m poor. Rebellious? Again no. As you say they *are* the establishment now. I use their products because they work and I like the interface. I think they’re overpriced but I shop at the lower end of their price range. You will never see me camping out in line to get the newest device. And once I do get one I tend to hold onto it until it’s no longer realistically useful.
And again, once you get into an “ecosystem” it’s a PITA to switch. Certainly doable but who wants an extra headache.
The story of Apple is one of innovation, adapting to time, and attention to detail. They have a beginner's mind, reseting everything from scratch. I love how Apple has morphed over time and maintaining their own path with no competition to match.
The story of Apple is one of innovation, adapting to time, and attention to detail. They have a beginner's mind, reseting everything from scratch. I love how Apple has morphed over time and maintaining their own path with no competition to match.