My first computer was an Apple IIe - which, in 1983, was eons superior to the only computer-like device operating in the company I was working for near Santa Barbara, California. That was an IBM word processor which was either mindless, or had a mind of its own, depending on your point of view. The IIe was in production for nearly eleven years – far longer than any other product to come out of Cupertino. It was hellaciously expensive (over $5000 if memory serves), had the most awful word processing program that anyone could ever have devised, and regularly blew a fuse when the NTSC video output socket shorted to ground because of mechanical imperfections.
I completely forget what I did on that computer to justify the enormous expenditure, apart from starting a novel about the assassination of a president in a motel in Santa Barbara: a tome that was, quite rightly, condemned to the circular trash can in its floppy format.
The 6502 processor with a 1.023 MHz clock seemed fast enough at the time, and would probably be fast enough today as well for most things that we normal people do with our computers. The fact that I am sitting in front of a MacBook Pro is more testament to avoiding a life of viruses in the PC world than a huge desire to be at home with the strange Apple symbols that came from that 1980’s era.
I don’t possess an iPod, an iPhone, or an iPad; I never will. My daughter, however, is of that generation where the only MP3 player of note is an iPod, and the only cellular phone is an iPhone. Over the nearly three decades that it has taken for us to go from the IIe to the iPad, we have seen Apple change from being the funky underdog to an organization with a perilously-lacking sense of humor.
The next-generation iPhone incident, where one was left in a lounge bar in Redwood City, for example, seemed to get out of hand for poor Jason Chen from Gizmodo when San Mateo Sheriff’s deputies slapped a search warrant on him at his house. Nor does Apple appear to enjoy satire in its app store, even though the “I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC” advertising was OK when it was being dished out by Apple itself. And don’t let’s get into the spat between Apple and Adobe over Flash use: the technicalities are just too much for this analog engineer.
But now the mean spiritedness seems to be getting personal with them ganging up on poor Ellen DeGeneres -- the talk show host with marketing powers only just a little lower than Oprah. Ellen had the audacity to make a spoof iPhone ad showing how difficult she found it to send a text message on the device. Apple was, apparently, not amused and forced her to apologize (what power do they have over her, do you think?)
"I thought it was funny, a bunch of people thought it was funny," she said. "You know who didn't think it was funny? The people at Apple didn't think it was so funny." She apologized to Steve Jobs and to Mr Macintosh(!) and added, “I love my iPad, I love my iPod, I love IHOP…”
Well hey, Steve, what are you going to do about the iPad we have been using in our kitchen for quite a while. Thanks to the folks at Hatley it has proven to be very useful for us; what can your iPad do? And who used the name first?
