08-08-2013, 09:19 PM
Thing is, unless I have been completely deluded all my life, Apple really were an admirable company not very long ago. When I fell in love with their products, around, say the early 1990s, they were the rebels and iconoclasts with a really appealing ethos. (Or so I thought.) They were dwarfed by Microsoft who represented everything bad and Apple were the good guys. As far as I can see, this really only started to change with the introduction of that revolutionary first iPod and the process snowballed with the iPhone. At that point they were no longer a computer company and didn't seem to greatly care about their once loyal user base. In fact, I suspect they would be happy to jettison the computer division altogether. The astonishing thing is, they have become Microsoft in the space of such a small space of time. Just a few years. This latest technology is too Orwellian for words. One feels sheepish about always reaching for the Orwell analogy, but there really is no way to avoid it. Even so, I don't think it's the end of the world in that there will be plenty of alternative products that will enable one to film the police brutality. It's really the audacity of Apple's arrogance that astonishes me. And maybe this will be their undoing. Folk will take a lot but there comes a point… And the cracks are already beginning to appear in the Apple facade. They are not the same company after the death of Steve Jobs, and really, like Manchester United without Ferguson, there really is only one way and that is down. Anyone stil remember the kings of the early internet, Netscape? Whatever happened to them?