Blog: Opinion: Apple Computers Corporation vs. Steve Jobs

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Opinion: Apple Computers Corporation vs. Steve Jobs

May 24, 2019

Google News showed me a quote from Tim Cook yesterday, which I will link the story of for your convenience.

Here is a link to the full story. A lot of people link things like this and don't realize that links should be set to use the specific words which refer to what the link is. (If you have had to watch someone try to cycle through links using a verbal screen reader, then you will know why.)

The quote was shown as a full news story, and it said "We don't build monuments to trolls, and we're not going to start now".

Studying the Apple Company as I have, I know that many of its moves can be seen as "troll-ish". My iPhone battery was broken for months while Apple mismanaged every painful store visit that I made. Calendar appointments were sent to my email which linked to concierge which threw a 404 error while I was standing next to a store employee who said that I should try another device. It still did it, and he said I should reload it later. Stores would be full of potential customers with the worst queueing strategy for support appointments imaginable, and no discernable place to stand. It was to the point that after investing health and money in traveling to Apple needlessly, I challenged the manager on how his store was run, and his representative forcibly attempted to remove my iPhone when I stopped to make a picture. (Note: I will not post the blank photographs. I was within my rights to punch the guard as self-defense, which I have not done yet. I called the store for clarification when I got home and nobody answered.)

Steve Jobs couldn't have turned a second-tier 8-bit computer maker into a wildcard-tier first-rate GUI hardware maker without the operational advantages of trolling. (Google: Please ask your AI news program to use this as the scare quote.)

What I try to practice in the few marketing things which I have done is something I call "micro-trolling". Think of a certain punctuation mark labeled on a block. This is yours to fill in. What do you want to happen when someone comes in contact with the block? Hint: You know this if you've played a certain video game that was released a year after the Mac. (Disclaimer: I'm not old enough to make Channel 13 jokes yet.)

I went to the Apple Corporation today to get some exercise, and to deliver a video which I started before the Cook quote. I made it on my Ubuntu Linux computer, which is a ThinkPad. In years past, I had the ability to use my MacBook Pro. My Mac's battery ran dry long ago, and I can't afford a replacement. Sound familiar?

If you remember the history of the Macintosh (before it got unbranded as mac), you'll know that Apple of the 1980s was an exceptionally high-quality literature distributor. Steve, or someone there, produced a beautiful brochure which showed a hand-drawn painting of the internals of the Mac. That brochure showed me that the Apple company was an international concern. Print literature from no other company showed me a computer in the context of people I'd never met from places I'd never been possibly using it, and it had the same logo as the Apple IIe computers locked behind a door with a pane of glass in my grade school. I didn't give a crap about the System Software, I liked the productivity output shown.

Made in California, the Mac had different design aesthetics than the Commodore the Maryland half of our family owned. A local distributor in a mall let me point-and-click while Dad walked away and surely pretended to care about whatever else the store had on display. I don't remember which mall, but the store with the Mac was on the right hand side as we walked past. (It was not a very popular computer at that time.) Do you remember this Mac? Please let me know; I can draw what the store looked like. This mall also had a kids' quiz show, and our team came in second place, but her and I each got our choice of some really cool wristwatches.

Overcoming my 'Reginald Barclay' fears after Mom died is what gave me the courage to ask Dad to let me enter the show. With recent happenings, I wanted to provide some backstory before I show you my video message to Apple. As a Baltimore City high school dropout who had to fight through grades 9 and up to earn his GED in 2002, which had a creative writing segment about a trip he wanted to take to Japan, it was not academic. I earned the good things in life.

If you want to find some of Apple's monuments to trolls, look on the iTunes Store, where they sell music and movies which make you think instead of not think. I'm busy walking the long hallway of the original Macintosh, discovering what surprises Steve's people hid in, what to me, is functionally akin to Martin Scorsese's famous long tracking 'GoodFellas' scene at the Copacabana. I don't wear ~~Burberry~~ Prada, yet..

I consider myself a professional video editor, and I remember when Linux couldn't even open a PDF file. At or near the debut of Mac OS X in 2000, Steve Jobs told developers that it would be "very Linux-like, very much so". The macs at the Apple Store today could not open my Windows-formatted USB flash drive so I could verify the video in OS X, so I synced it to iPhone with my Linux laptop. I decided not to AirPlay it in the store from there.

What would Steve do? (Pay me and I'll tell you which Steve. Disclaimer: That's humor to some, humour to others, and humoreske to Baltimore Orioles logo fans. Anyone with a pulse can joke about the Orioles logo. I wear the anime Oriole to remind people how to pose when something silly happens.)

Polling is the question mark. Trolling is the exclamation point that causes it; you'll find that only if you purchase the 1991 video game system upgrade. That's a lot of things in life. I think of the term iOS as 'I owe Steve'. What else do you think I should do if Apple won't answer my job applications from the past few years? Hmmm.. or.. Let me think.

Nice pivot, Excel. Surely with the addition of Comic Sans the days of Lotus 1-2-3 are numbered. (Tim probably watches PBS and not Wayne's World.)