Apple is Not My Favorite Flavor

A couple years ago I bought a Mac Air that died on me within a year and never worked properly from the day I bought it. I have a MacBook Pro that takes FOREVER to boot up and shut down, and I’ve never used the iPod Touch I got for free (when I bought the @#!@$#! Air) because it’s such a pain in the butt to load my music (next time they invent a new music storage format it better be a chip embedded in my head).

So imagine my chagrin when a friend I consider computer-savvy just told me that he’d bought a MacBook for home (no, I’m not naming him — everybody makes mistakes sometimes). He told me about the purchase rather shamefacedly, and said he hoped I’d respect the choice, and I just gently patted his knee and said, “Don’t worry — you’ll regret it.”

Then I read The Week’s “5 signs that Apple is a cult,” which led me to David Segal’s recent New York Times piece, “Apple’s Retail Army, Long on Loyalty but Short on Pay.” Interesting quote from Segal’s article: “Last week, four months after The New York Times first began inquiring about the wages of its store employees, the company started to inform some staff members that they would receive substantial raises. An Apple spokesman confirmed the raises but would not discuss their size, timing or impetus, nor who would earn them.”

Hmmm. Sounds to me like much of the rest of American big business — obscenely huge rewards at the top, pats on the head at the bottom. An iPhone is not in my future.

More as it happens,
Cheryl