When I edited my workplace's old company newsletter, I once wrote a column entitled "I HATE MACS".
No, it wasn't about my bias against plastic rainwear, and whilst I might have called it a column, it was actually an unbroken 800-word rant against Steve Jobs. I claimed they were "glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy-cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work."
And so this went on: "The better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them ... I don't care if every iPad comes with a magic button on the side that makes it vomit 24-carat gold coins, styles my hair for me and plays Elvis Presley songs on the bongos. I'm not buying one”. And so on and so forth.
They supposedly make you feel good, Apple products. The little touches: the brushed aluminium finish, the rounded corners, the strokeable screens, the satisfying clunk as you fold a Macbook shut - it's serene. Untroubled. A bit like being on Valium.
Until, that is, you try to do something Apple doesn't want you to do. At which point you realise your shiny chum isn't on your side. It doesn't even understand sides. Only Apple: always Apple.
Here's a scenario: you've got a spanking, shiny new iPhone with loads of music on it. And you've got a laptop with a new album on it. You want to put the new album on your new phone. But you can't just hook them up and simply drag-and-drop the files like you could with, ooh, almost any other software and device in the known bloody universe.
Instead, Apple insists you go through iTunes.
Microsoft gets a lot of stick these days for producing clunky software. But even during the dark days of that annoying animated paperclip, they never hurled out anything as abominable as iTunes - a hideous online binary carbuncle that really takes the jam out of my doughnut, transforming the sparkling world of music into a bleak, stark, un-cooperative spreadsheet.
Plug your old Apple iPhone into your new Apple Macbook for the first time, and because the two machines haven't been formally introduced, iTunes will babble about "syncing" one with the other. It claims it simply MUST delete everything from the old phone before putting any new stuff on it.
Why ?? It won't tell you. It'll just cheerfully ask if you want to proceed, like a robot butler that can't understand why you're crying more than a “Britain’s Got Talent” contestant. No one uses terms like "sync" in real life. Not even C3PO or the Daleks. If I sync my DVD collection with yours, what will I end up with, two copies of “Santa Claus the Movie” ??
Using iTunes is like trying to fire a piece of limp spaghetti through a keyhole from a cannon whilst wearing a pair of boxing gloves and listening to white noise though headphones.
The "sync" malarkey is a deception, which pretends to be making your life easier, when it's actually all about wresting control from you. If you could freely transfer any file you wanted onto your gadget, Apple might conceivably lose out on a few molecules of money. So rather than risk that, they'll choose - every single time - to restrict your options, without so much as blinking.
Sure, you can get around the irritating sync-issue by using third-party software, but doing so requires a degree-level knowledge of faff and brainwork akin to solving that famous children’s logic problem about a farmer ferrying a load of grain, a fox and a chicken across a river without it all ending in blood, feathers and death.
And even if you find it easy, it's a problem Apple doesn’t want you to solve. They want you to give up and go back to dumbly stroking that shiny screen, pausing intermittently to remember to breathe.
Every Apple commercial makes a huge play of how user-friendly their devices are. But it's a superficial friendship. They won't even give you a lead long enough to use your phone while it's charging, so if it rings you have to crawl on your hands and knees like a dog. This is why I have a Samsung MP3 player, a Sagem mobile phone (which BTW is so old it runs on coal and is charges via means of fossil fuel and an old brass boiler called “Bessie”) and a Windows PC.
Sure, I could easily have an iPhone or a MacBook Pro, and could very easily love them. But I would never feel like actually I own them. More like I'm renting them, from Skynet ....