Let the Steve Jobs backlash begin

Look, I was on the Apple bandwagon back in like 1990. But then Pepsi dude John Sculley came along and wrecked the company and I just never went back. Since then, the Apple cult has continued to grow. And even though I'm likely to drop several thousand dollars on some Mac products in the next few months, I'd rather not buy an Apple.

4 reasons that Steve Jobs and Apple suck.

1. They make crappy hardware. I have three friends who have had harddrives fail on their Macs in the last few weeks. Apple is putting these crappy Seagate harddrives in laptops and they seems to crash and lose all of their data. I've had a Dell PC for 4 years and I've never had a problem with my harddrive. Apple is a software company but by pretending to also be a hardware company they can make 30%+ margins on both. It would be much better for consumers for Apple to split into 2 companies -- a software company + a hardware company that makes iPhones.

Apple (TM) is like In-N-Out Burger -- if In-N-Out made burgers AND teak furniture. "I'd love to sell you this nice delicious burger, but first you have to buy this $1700 teak dining room set." I suppose they could do it, the profit margins on both burgers and teak furniture would be very high -- but at the same time, it'd be kinda dickish too.

2. Only Steve Jobs could be called a genius for making a phone that can't make phone calls. AT& T is the worst fucking cell phone service in the world. Dropped calls, no reception in almost 50% of American cities, and terrible customer service. And Steve Jobs forces his customers into a 2-year contract with AT&T to have access to his shiny iPhone. To read more, check out this post, "AT&T is a Big, Steaming Heap of Failure." Thanks Steve for chaining all of your iPhone customers to Jabba the Hut.

3. Steve Jobs killed the music. I know what you are thinking -- 'illegal file sharing killed the music industry and Steve Jobs saved it with iTunes.' But here's my beef -- music used to be a shared experience. Music was intended to be listened to collectively, from speakers. In creating the iPod, Steve Jobs individualized music. He made it a personal experience -- just me and my music, with my earphones in my ears, shutting out the entire world. 'But!' you're saying, 'so did the Sony Walkman!?' Which is kinda true but not. The Sony Walkman was just a player -- the cassette and later CD could be played on any stereo. The iPod is both the player and the music and increasingly our music is locked inside a device that does not have speakers. Yeah I could go over to my computer, burn a CD, take it over to my stereo and play it, but by then I could have just watched the video on YouTube. And I suppose I could buy one of those speaker docks for the iPod -- but after spending $200 for the iPod it kinda hacks me off to have to spend another $200 bucks to hear it played on speakers.

4. In an age when software is increasingly free, open source, and universal, Apple is expensive as hell, closed, and proprietary. If the Apple OS is so great, and if Microsoft sucks so bad (which it does -- that's what's making Apple rich), then Apple should turn off the stoopid trusted platform module code that cripples the Mac OS if you try to run it on a PC. If Mac OS X is really the best operating system, great, prove it by selling it for the same price as Windows and letting me run it on a $500 PC.

Update #1: For a fun look inside the mind of Steve Jobs, check out The Secret Diary of (Fake) Steve Jobs. It's laugh out loud funny.

Update #2: The Apple backlash starts to get loud:

"My Evil iPhone" article on Salon.com

"I Hate my iPhone" article in New York Times Sunday magazine (with over 1400 comments!)

ihatemyiphone.com website that lets iPhone users vent.

Class action lawsuit against the iPhone 3G.

The craziest thing about all this is that Apple makes good shit. It's just that they are always trying to double bill their customers -- 'buy our awesome software plus this really overpriced hardware to run it on, buy our iPhone but AT&T is giving us a bigger kick back so we're going let them completely screw you and forget about ever getting your voicemail.'

When is Apple going to stand up not just for pretty design but for the entire user experience of the product?

Besides isn't it an unfair restraint of trade to disable your software if it doesn't detect your hardware? Again, if Apple is truly the best software, great, make it universal and able to run on any device (PC or cell phone) by any manufacturer -- and put Microsoft and Google out of business. And if Apple is truly the best hardware (it's not), great, make it universal and let any software run on it. Let the best universal platform win.