Cracked underlines the point I have been making for over decade now. It is Apple that are the techno-fascists; the famous 1984 ad was nothing but pure psychological projection:
When you buy Apple products, you don’t just buy computers or gadgets. Apple sells iPods and iPhones that play music purchased in their iTunes store. It’s all part of Jobs’s sales pitch to people who pride themselves on individuality. Even before there were ads featuring the kid from Die Hard 4 bickering with John Hodgeman in heaven, the message was been the same: PCs are for those people who follow the herd, but you choose Mac because you think differently….
[M]anufacturers of other cell phones and gadgets generally don’t care what customers do once they’ve paid for their products with good, honest credit card debt. But Apple goes beyond complaining. They will actively break your shit for disobeying their arbitrary rules. Yes, Apple has sent out updates specifically designed to disable phones that have been modified to work with carriers other than AT&T, or to run Microsoft Office. Seriously now, we’d be inventing new, fluorescent shades of berserk if, say, a PC manufacturer broke your computer for installing Linux.
Now, I have no objection to people using Apple products, even if I don’t deign to use them myself. And I understand the brilliance of Steve Jobs’s philosophy of limiting utility in order to reduce potential problems; every game designer knows that at least one-third of his time will be spent figuring out how to prevent idiots from purposefully ruining their own user experience. I was speaking with a technology reviewer a few days ago and I mentioned that if we created a function called ERASE HARD DRIVE, at least 10 percent of the users would assign it to a button and click it to see what happened. The reviewer laughed and commented that 100 percent of that clueless 10 percent would be furious upon discovering that the function had done precisely what it said it would do. And, of course, they would blame us for giving them the power to destroy their data so easily.
So, there is a solid rationale for simply not letting people do basic things like load their own software onto their own hardware at will. There is a sound logical reason for treating users like cretinous children and refusing to let them make their own decisions. And one can clearly make a great deal of money if that technofascistic attitude is combined with keen vision and great design talent. And yet, that doesn’t make it right.