The Geek Side

I don't own an iPhone and am not interested in the iPad, despite all the recent hype and over-the-top enthusiasm, but I was intrigued by an interview on Search Engine from April 26/10.

In the interview, the interviewee made the claim that Apple had become worse than Microsoft in it's controlling and exclusionary behaviour. The basis of his argument was that Apple products, the two mentioned here, specifically, were designed to prevent the use of applications (apps) not written and/or approved by Apple. He likened this lack of user control to having to go to a professional to get the batteries changed in some device that you own. Some might remember the image of Apple throwing the hammer into the screen where Big Brother was speaking. The contention is that Apple has become Big Brother.

The short podcast (18 minutes) was pretty interesting to me, especially considering my lack of interest in the devices being discussed. I guess this was because of my bias against Apple products in general (excluding the iPod - I love my iPod). This started quite a few years ago as I began to see how controlling the Apple MAC's hardware and operating system was. My experience grew up with computers since about 1980 and it bothered me when the OS in a machine (like Apples) would just put stuff where it wanted to. I like to be able to control that myself. There just seemed to be so much about Apple MACs that wasn't open to user control. I know several MAC users and I know they will disagree with this totally and I will admit that I have very, very limited experience with MACs and other Apple devices. However, the story is what caught my interest and I was surprised to hear a point of view on Apple products that seemed to agree with my own, for once.