In front of 1 Infinite Loop (coolest address for a computer company - EVER) there are a bunch of flowers, candles - and apples. Some of them with bites taken out. It's the same in front of every Apple store in the world...literally the world, including Beijing which, btw, I managed to call Beijing and not Peking and that's not easy. It's still Peking Duck. Anyway, here's what I'm thinking.
The last few days there's been a lot about Steve Jobs, it pretty much eclipsed every other news story except my tension headache which is hardly news and will continue until it bloody well decides to stop anyway. Steve Jobs is being mourned for, well, I'm not sure why, Not that he's being mourned, (most of us hope to be mourned, in spite of the hubster's family and their penchant for throwing their loved one's remains off the side of party boats) but why are we all mourning him? Apple will continue, in spite of that lackluster Tim Cook at the helm, and we'll upgrade our iPhones to the damn 4-S because so many of us have the 3 and Apple doesn't support it anymore because, well, hell, it's OLD. We all made fun of the iPad (next model? The Max-iPad...) and yet, within six months I saw them everywhere and I watched my company's sales force grab iPads and carry bulky presentations around in their pockets. Okay, they were BIG pockets and no, they're not going to make it into a phone but wow...the iPad is pretty much stabbing Power Point in the heart and good on it, I HATE Power Point. It's a slide show. The iPad can pretty much do the rumba. If only they could do something about Outlook...
Now, except for my iPod (which, btw, is a PINK MINI, how many years have I had THAT?) I don't use Apple products, mostly because, while they're hella cool, the data plans AT & T gouges you for to operate them are way beyond my financial capabilities at the moment. I mean, how do you call your landlord and tell him your rent is going to be late, again, when he can plainly see you're calling from your iPhone, which cost you $200 (face it, no one in their right minds pays the $649 ticket on that phone, or any other phone for that matter, this is why God invented the "TIME TO UPGRADE" email) and is costing you at least 70 bucks a month to maintain? So I stick to more modest means of communication.
Doesn't mean I'm not going to sit up and check up the iCloud though, which, apparently will allow me to store my pictures in Kathmandu or something. It'll be expensive and probably require a data plan but hell, it's totally the future and, when the next earthquake hits and the walls and starting to crumble, maybe I won't be running around looking for my shoe box full of pictures because I won't need 'em anymore...I'll have everything on an iCloud. With any luck, there will be some sort of cool, Apple cyber scrapbook which will make scrapbooking obsolete and all of those God awful Creative Memories consultants with them. We can hope.
Frankly, if Steve did nothing in his life but put Creative Memories out of business I'd send flowers to his grave twice a year, but I digress...besides, no one has found it yet (nicely done, Jobs Family), including the idiots who call themselves the Westboro Baptists and really ought to change their names to the "Phelps Family Church and Asylum" because, frankly, those idiots have only formed a church for the tax breaks - they're all lunatics, and stupid ones at that. This combination, btw, makes them dangerous. Just saying...
So, back to the apple. While there's a portion of my extended world who are mourning the loss of the guy who invested in Pixar (I didn't say I hang with them any more, I realized I'm getting too old to waste my time on tunnel-visioned idiots) I think those of us whose brains are still firing mourned Steve because he was pretty much the embodiment of what we all want to be ourselves...smart, self-effacing and able to spend his life in jeans, turtlenecks and New Balance sneakers and look good doing it. BUT...he also was one of the most imaginative sons of bitches who ever lived. My 3000+ record collection in my POCKET? Get outta here. A computer and phone, all in one in my PURSE? Dude...that's not a purse, that'll be a steamer trunk. And yet, here they are. Not to mention the seriously coolest thing about the Mac, which is that grab and drop onto your desktop thing. Damn, I do LOVE that, I mean, I'm okay with copy and paste but I'm nothing if not technologically lazy.
So here's the question. People are coming in droves to honor the most imaginative inventor of this, or the last century and how to the honor him? By leaving apples. Apples, apples, apples. Somewhere, Steve is looking at all those bitten apples, rolling his eyes and saying:
"Apples? That's the best they could do? Y'know what I would have done? ..."
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