Why I dislike Apple products

Okay, fine, I do not dislike Apple products that much (but it was an eye-catching title, wasn't it?), but I do dislike Apple.

First, as the people in this video here, point out, apple has invented almost nothing, ever.

For those of you too lazy to watch the whole video, I will give you the premise right here:  This youtuber asked his audience to send him something, anything Apple made that was original.  Let me run down the things their users brought up, in the order of recognizability.

iPod- the first commercialy successful mp3 player with a screen was the Diamond Rio, 1998 (iPod was released late 2001)
iPad - 1989 GridPad, a DOS based tablet (and several windows tablets after that) beat Apple to the tablet market
iPhone - Linksys put out the first iPhones, when Apple released the same product, they sent Linksys tons of money not to make a fuss about it
iOS and Mac OS- both are simply UNIX BSD with a custom kernel (kernels are easy to make)
         EXCEPTION OS9 was completely original, and it was absolutely unambiguously terrible
App Store - Ubuntu Software Center came two years earlier
Firewire- combined effort from Texas Instruments, Sony, DEC, IBM, Intel, SNS, and Thompson
MagSafe (magnetically connected power cables) - used on Oriental rice cookers for decades, but noone bothered to patent it before Apple
30 pin dock (on the bottom of every Apple mobile device) - Motorola 1963
AppleTV - Microsoft beat them with MediaCenter tv
Inductive charging (charging a battery without a hard wire connection) - Nikola Tesla ran ALL of his electronics with induction.
Mini display port - a regular VGA display port shrunk down to fit on a laptop
Thunderbolt expansion port - invented by intel, Apple pays them to put it on their machines
First laptop with a handle - DataView 25 from 1985.  It even had a wireless keyboard.
Apple Pippin (game console) - Bandai made the software and IBM made the hardware, Apple only marketed
Newton (Apple's PDA from back when those were popular) - PDAs were invented long before then
Apple QuickTake (digital camera) - Kodak had the first digital cameras, Kodak thought it was just a fad, so Kodak went back to the tried and true market of regular photographs (and we all know how that turned out for them)
Ample 2E card - Wosniak's machine with a different shape connector
Apple logo - in Genesis 3:6, Eve took a bite out of an apple, thereby making the first Apple logo.

Of course, there is no problem with selling products that are not original, but there is a problem with marketing them as original, and then suing the people they ripped the idea from.  Right now there are lawsuits in motion concerning electronic devices with rounded corners, and laptop computers shaped like a wedge.  I feel that there is something wrong with a business when they sue somebody because "I made a rectangular product, so now you have to find a different shape".

Another issue I have with Apple is this:  their computers are very user-unfriendly.  I don't mean in the sense of the interface being inadequate, the mac and iOS interfaces are excellent (but not original), but in the ammount of power their users have over their own systems.  Do you want to make an app or program that will run on iOS and Mac?  You had better be prepared to dish out a good quantity of money and a very long waiting period to get the certification sub-program so that you can test your app, much less put it on the app store.  Windows, Linux, and Android (basically the same as Linux), require no such certification, so you can install and run any programs and apps you want, or write your own programs and provide them for free on the internet.

There is a huge community for such "Open Source" software, and for any of your software needs, there is an opensource version of the leading software that will work just as well, sometimes even better.  For example, you just bought a new computer, but you don't want to pay another $100 to get the Microsoft Office suite.  You can visit OpenOffice, and get essentially the same programs for free.  Is Paint not enough photo editing power, but you don't want to spend $200 on Photoshop? Download GIMP, a free software that can perform the same tasks.  But good luck, if you own a mac.

Same thing applies to mobile devices.  Unless an app has a huge demand from a large group of followers, developers do not want to go through all the hoops set up by apple to get their product to run on an apple device.  As a result, small communities who could use an app with a very specific function cannot get it.  Three-dimensional chess?  Tengwar Transliterator? Starcraft 2 Build Orders?  These things are found aplenty on the Android app store, but do not exist at all on iOS.

The final reason I do not like apple products is this: the boxes containing apple devices have no screws.  I mean this mostly figuratively, of course.  I like the aesthetic of not having screws, but what I like even more is the ability to alter and improve the thing that I own.  If you're a Mac user, and Skyrim will not run on medium settings on your system, too bad!! Go buy another computer for $15,000.  When I purchased Skyrim and found my system inadequate, I went to my local Frys Electronics, bought a video card for $100, and now I can play on High settings, Ultra when I am willing to let framerate drop a bit.  I have also added USB ports and ports for a 7.1 surround sound system.  My machine is arguably better and a $15,000 Mac, and cost me a total of $700 (not including my second monitor, which I kept from my last computer).

Apple makes a good product, but because of their business policies and unnecessary expense, I prefer not to buy from them.


DISCLAIMER: Before the flaming starts, I want everyone to know that I do in fact own an apple product, namely and iPad that was given to me as part of a scholarship.  I like having it, and I use it often, but I do not cherish it nearly as much as my customized desktop PC or my Android phone with a custom OS.

The Meaning of Life

    What is the meaning of life? This is the classic ultimate question asked by philosophers. Many different groups have their own answers. Many high school students who have never read "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" will say "42" and think they're nerdy and hilarious. (for the last time, its the ultimate question of life the universe and everything, not the meaning of life! NERDRAGE)

     I'm okay. Really. But before we can talk about the meaning of life, we need to think about what we mean by the question. Most of the question is obvious, except for that essential middle word, "meaning". What is a "meaning"? Is it a goal (or as a philosopher would say, an end?) is it a completion? Is it a point of fulfillment? Is it a cause? Merriam Webster says that meaning is "an end; purpose" so we're going to run with that.

     My goal here is to find an answer that is acceptable to people of all customs and creeds. Here we go.

     So, the meaning of life is the purpose for which we live life. Obviously, different people have different purposes for living, let us examine some of them.

1. Material Gain

     Family movies and Democrats would like us to know that all businesspeople live for the sake of money. I can accept this, its a pattern observed since the ancients that there are those who live and breathe for the sake of another buck. But Why do people want to have money? To understand this we need to look back on the origin of money.

     Aristotle in his "Politics" declares that money is a construct of society made to facilitate simpler trade. If I am a home builder and you are a corn farmer, how much Corn is a house worth? We can both put months of work into a single project, and you produce many products that you can take to market, and I produce only one immobile product. But you need a house, and I need corn. Are you really going to give me a season's worth of corn for building you a house? What am I going to do with all that corn? I don't want to take it to market, I know nothing about corn and I cannot sell it. This is an extreme yet plausible example of why a simple trade system does not work. When one product is much more intensive than another, an even trade gets more and more difficult.

The solution is money. We need a good that we measure all other goods by. A way to take that house and split it apart, or that corn and combine it together into one lump of property. This good needs to be worthless by itself, and thus immune to market forces. We want the market to move around our standard, not the standard to move around the market. Hey, I know, lets take this shiny stuff, flatten it, and print its value on it. And thus money was born.

     Okay, so money was invented to make trade easier, but it does so by being an artificial good. Something that people want because it gives them the power to trade other things for it. Which leads me to my next point

2. Power

     Power is a powerful thing. Tautologies are also tautologies, and statistics show that they make the opening sentence of a paragraph more appealing to a reader. There are different types of power. We could talk about political power, physical power, mental power, electrical power. We don't need to talk about these individually though, because they all share some things in common. The most obvious of them is the word "power". Power is the ability to control, or to act with impunity. Honestly, who does not want control and free action? It seems like something ingrained in human nature.

     People who are very powerful also tend to have

3. Fame

     Every child's dream is to be famous like that fifteen-year-old pop star who is utterly full of himself and will be utterly lost to the history of bad decisions and tabloids. Don't get the wrong idea, one of my lifelong dreams is to have fame. I used to do weekly performances in front of a crowd of about a thousand students, and there is something really appealing to being called by name by someone whom I have never met before.

     Is this only a child's dream? I do not think so. I think there are many people who would try very hard for a bit of public recognition. Tabloids, politicians, reality shows, and photo bombers prove this. People like to be known and recognized by a lot of other people, and they are willing to do scandalous, degenerate things to do so (think the balloon boy story)

     Then there are those who live for

4. Righteousness

     These are generally religious people, but not always. Someone who craves righteousness just wants to lead a moral and productive life, and help others on the way. Ever since birth, we are told to "be good", and there are some, such as charity volunteers, emergency responders, and evangelists who seriously want to spend their time just being a good person and a benefit to society. It is a respected way of life.

5. Pleasure

There are others who just want to feel good all the time. Its pretty much a fact that these people end up at the bottom of society, but it is easy to recognize that they did so for the fun they got on the way. Drug users, party animals, low-class college students all fit into this category. They are called shallow, foolish, badly raised, but the fact is that they value bodily pleasure above all else.

What is it about pleasure that makes it so desirable? I think the reason people give up so much to please themselves is a need to be happy, and a faulty idea of where happiness comes from. Most people have gone through a phase where they valued pleasure above all else, and when I look back on that time, I realized that my problem was caused by faulty logic. The logic that leads to a life of pleasure is this: Happiness feels good, when I am happy, I am also pleased, therefore, if I find a way to please myself on demand, I will feel happy. These people soon find that they are wrong, but it does not take long before they don't care, the happiness isn't important anymore, all they want is to feel good.

6. Someone

     There are those who live their lives for the sake of another human being. We have all heard stories about them, and I have met a few. Everyone knows one old couple who love each other so much, that, upon hearing the news of a spouse's sudden death, the other will waste away and die in a matter of days, because their whole life revolved around that one person. Mothers will gladly give their lives for their children, lovers for their beloved, and friend for friend.

7. Creation

     There are many people in the world who get the greatest joy out of the act of making things. I am talking about artists, writers, musicians, architects, people who like to create for the sake of creating. I count myself in this group as a writer of short stories, poems, and essays, and as a musician.

NOTE: I am not at all talking about those sleazy pop-stars whose income is in the millions. No, I call those people entrepreneurs, and thus they fit in category #1. Maybe I will write my opinion on them in a future post.

     A good artist makes art because he enjoys creating art, and being better and better at replicating the natural world in his images. Writers want to make a better story than any every before, and musicians want to capture beauty and emotion in the complex interactions of pitches in time. There is a moment of ecstasy when you look back on something that you have made, and you see that it is beautiful, everything you could have wanted it to be and more, and these people feel that joy and keep creating to experience it more and more.

     So now we have identified seven different reasons that people live their lives, seven commonly held opinions for the meaning of life. But what do these things have in common? What is the singular meaning of life? Are you ready?

     The answer is God. WAIT!!!!!! Before you close the browser and never come back to my blog again, just hear me out. I am not specifically talking about the Christian God. I am talking about what Aristotle calls "The Unmoved Mover", the single omnipotent entity that all but a few world religions believe exists, whether it is YHWH, Shiva, Allah, or Eru Illuvatar. Since I am a christian and I live in America, I will use the word God from here on out, but let the reader understand that I mean any singular omnipotent creator deity.

     I will explain. Remember the definition we set for "meaning"? It is the end, the goal, the purpose for which something exists. The meaning of life is ingrained in human nature: a desire to be/be like God.

1. Material gain

     Who has more possessions than the one who rules the entire universe? People who want things do so out of a desire to be like the one who has everything.

2. Power

     God is all-powerful. He created the universe, each individual life, and he destroys with the power of nature. We established the power is the ability to do anything one desires, and is there anything God cannot do? People who desire power want this freedom, the strength to do anything, just like the one who created the universe.

3. Fame

     God is known to all those who believe in him, and receives their constant worship. People who want to be known and worshiped do so to be like the one who revealed himself to the world and demands their worship.

4. Righteousness

     God is just and fair and good, and those people who live to be good do so to be like the best one that ever was.

5. Pleasure

     God resides in paradise, or heaven, a metaphysical place filled with eternal happiness. As I mentioned before, pleasure comes from happiness and seekers of pleasure strive every day to find pleasure, in the hopes that pleasure will bring them happiness, so that they can be like the one who resides in eternal happiness

6. Someone

     Leaving Jesus Christ out of the equation (because most creator figures do not suffer and die for people), still God put his power into making each of us and the world we inhabit. He gave us everything, and those who would give everything for someone else are trying to be like him who gave us all our very existence

7. Creation

     This one is self explanatory. Artists want to make an image as aesthetically beautiful as the one that God made in nature. Architects want to build a structure that imitates the geometrical perfection of the universe that God created. Musicians strive to replicate the divine music that brings joy to others across time and space, and writers try to be like the one who invented the greatest story of all time.   

     So what does this tell us?  From my christian perspective, this is living proof of the passage in Genesis 1:27 

"So God created human beings in his own image,

in the image of God he created them;"

     Images are imperfect replications of that which the image was taken of.  An image of a beautiful landscape will always lack some aspects that the painter/photographer experienced while there, in the same way our experience as mortal images of God are lacking in some aspects.  However, in this case, we are not simple objects, we are rational creatures, in our deepest heart we feel this discrepancy, the lack, and we have a natural desire to overcome that discrepancy, and thus every human being has an innate desire to be more like god, though the ways that this desire is manifested changes from person to person.

On the Roof

 My dormitory has an outdoor staircase that I must walk up to reach my room every day. The staircase has a landing at each floor, and bridges to each of three buildings. Now, one of these buildings is one floor taller than the other two, and I live in the top floor of one of the shorter buildings.

Today, I had some spare time, so I took the trash out of my room, and on the way back up the stairs, I realized that the staircase goes higher than the roof of my building, I thought maybe I could go up on the roof. I tried it, and when I got to the top of the staircase, there was a metal sun-shade over my head, and a fence secured at the top and bottom that prevented me from going onto the roof. I came back down into my room, and thought to myself, why did I want to get on the roof?

At first I thought, “Because its cool to be on the roof!”.

I'm not an idiot, and I was surprised at myself. Is that really my only reason? I didn't care about the view, or the wind, or the feeling of being physically above the inferior muil below me. I wanted to be on the roof because it is cool to be on the roof.

Now, thoroughly disappointed in myself, I asked why it is cool to be on the roof. I mean, all the coolest characters in fiction spend their time on the roof, right? Lets list a few:

Altair

Katniss Everdeen

Morpheus

James Bond

Sherlock Holmes

Ben Skywalker

The Fiddler

Spider Man

Batman

Agent J

Peter Petrelli

Star Fox

Arnold

The Solomons

Merry Brandybuck

Anakin Skywalker

Gregory House

The Doctor

Mary Poppins' Chimney Sweep

Wow. This whole “on the roof” thing is actually pretty common in fiction. Each of these characters use the roof for different reasons, Altair runs rooftop to rooftop to get the drop on his targets, Katniss sits on the rooftop to have private conversations with her love interest, but, when you really think about it, many of them have no good reason to be up there. Peter Petrelli could have jumped off a park bench to discover that he can fly, Morpheus could have trained Neo by punching him in the face rather than throwing him off a building, the chimney sweep guy could have had any other job, because the fact that he is a chimney sweep had no influence on the story, and The Fiddler is only on the roof because that's the name of the musical. What are the reasons for this?

I think it pretty much breaks down to two things, and they are connected. The first is aesthetic. There is something beautiful about a film shot from the roof of a large building in a city.  You can see the skyline, distant monuments, lights, etc.  The second is the natural desire all humans are born with to do what they are not supposed to do.  When was the last time you stood on the roof of a public building?  Unless you are a construction worker or commercial roofer, the answer is probably never.  Its one of those places that's harmless for most people, but due to our litigious society, has been blocked off.  We cannot help but wonder what we are missing out on, and fiction is our way to experience that.