For the life of me, trying to figure out the winner of the Beach House Buffoon of the Year (aka BeHoBOTY) in 2007 is a hard job. Two years running it was hands down Steve Jobs, Lord of Sith at Apple. Then last year goofball Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's answer to Crusty the Clown, snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Man all this guy has to do is talk to the press and he embarrasses everyone from his family to mankind. Now Darth Jobs is back in the running. Go to Internet.com and check out why Apple doesn't boast Intel Inside.
Sometime early spring iJobs appeared onstage with Bill Gates for a press conference. Bill has had his moments, but is far more polished and presentable than Darth. He was his normal reserve intelligent self, but iJobs surprised everyone and was actually a pretty decent human being for around thirty minutes. He joked almost amicably with Bill. Then a few weeks later iJobs dissed the record industry and thumbed his nose at them embracing opensource in a weird sort of way as far as downloading music. This actually endeared him to many of us.
If you are a regular reader here then you've probably noticed my attitude towards Apple has changed some over the past years. They are still slow, overblown, and extremely overpriced. But hey, someone held Darth's feet to the fire and made him change two very important features of their computer line that were just not making it - the operating system and the CPU. The beach house water cooler was almost knocked over when Jobs made a statement a few years ago about Apple being the fastest computer. Standing around it saying nothing still will bring tears to the eyes due to laughter if we look at each other just the right way. What a windbag! Or was old iJobs trying to make a joke?
After Apple ripped off the wonderful opensource platform called FreeBSD, reworked it, made it proprietary and called it Apple OSX they finally had a great operating system. Then they switched to Intel CPUs. Low and behold the birth of a pretty decent little graphics and music assist computer. Riding the success of the very average sounding iPod and their multimillion dollar iTunes store, this actually indicated very good thinking on someone's part. But, alas, it is just not enough.
Apple has two enormous problems. Do inquiring minds wanna know? I'll tell you. Absurd cost and constant form factor change. They are so overpriced any PC user is justified in calling the Apple user groups iSuckers. Now for the second problem. Why won't they stop fooling around with their package? C'mon people at the orchard, do you really think people will embrace the throw away computer concept at your prices? Look at the picture above. Would you want to work on that? Now look at the nice case in yesterday's post. Is there some clarity? HP, Dell, Gateway, etc., went through a phase several years ago trying to make stuff more compact with spaceage looks. Today they still shudder when remembering the bitching and nightmares created by service. Apple, take a hint. Quit goofing around and give folks a computer to which they can add memory or change other component parts. Sheesh! This is not rocket science.
One more thing and then I'll retire for the evening. Apple, when are you going to truly embrace mouse technology?
“Inflamed by greed, incensed by hate, confused by delusion, overcome by them, obsessed by mind, a man chooses for his own affliction, for others' affliction, for the affliction of both and experiences pain and grief.”
~Gautama Siddharta Buddha
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