Conversation

Notices

1. Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Saturday, 23-Mar-2024 08:47:05 JST Charlie Stross

   The foundational tenet of "the Cult of Mac" is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur:

   https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

   This actually says something about cultural continuity because back in 2004, when Apple was a roughly $3Bn (not $Tn) company it really *was* a minority pursuit in a sea of Windows, universally oppressed by corporate IT departments! It only shifted after iPhone ...

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 23-Mar-2024 08:47:03 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     @cstross you can really see this if you watch the vintage tech section of ebay. Apple stuff is sold not for retrotech fans, but for their symbolic meaning.
     People sell pens from Apple, expired company credit cards, all the swag you get from working there, copies of the yearbook from the school Steve Jobs' daughter attended.

     It makes perfect sense if you consider these things relics and icons, not old tech.

   • Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Saturday, 23-Mar-2024 08:47:04 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     Cook took the existing Apple cultishness and advanced simultaneously on all fronts, building out the ecosystem along lines of attack that Jobs had already sketched in. Innovation since Jobs' death has taken place, but much more sluggishly. The key was to layer incentives for staying within the ecosystem.

     Meanwhile the *existing* fetishistic Cult of Apple was already there. The religious iconography, minimalist store layouts, ads full of shiny, happy people: it's subliminally religious design.

   • Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Saturday, 23-Mar-2024 08:47:05 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     Apple users from 1988-2008 had to justify to themselves staying with an awkwardly non-compatible platform run almost as a cult by a control freak (Steve Jobs). But Jobs got ill then died JUST as Apple launched a breakout product range (the iPhone, which revolutionized previously-awkward smartphones, and the iPad as a spin-off that totally overturned the idea of how a portable computer should work) and was replaced by a soulless paperclip maximizer of a CEO (to be unfairly nasty about Tim Cook).

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Saturday, 23-Mar-2024 08:48:44 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     @cstross and sure, you will see some stuff from the other big tech companies. IBM employee shirts and Microsoft hats.
     But Apple has several orders of magnitude more of it, and more dedicated fans.

     (I've joked that you could take a job at Apple for zero pay, and still get by just by selling all the employee swag on ebay)