The Forbidden Fruit

I had to buy a MacBook Pro for a gig. So, I still have that. I still use it because it’s lighter and slightly faster than my ancient Lenovo laptop, and the battery lasts an hour longer. But, my life is still on the Lenovo.

I upgraded the OS from the cat before to another cat, but I am not going to upgrade it to the latest cat. I want no part of iCloud.

Apparently, I did not tighten one of the screws well enough after upgrading the memory to 8 Gb. So, a few months ago, it fell off. I couldn’t find it in my laptop bag. By chance, I found myself one block from an Apple store in NYC. I walked in, and asked if I could get a set of screws. They told me I would need an advance appointment to see one of their geniuses to see if that really was the problem or if they needed to take possession of my laptop to see if there was something else wrong with it.

I ran out, murmuring FTFY, just like 26 years ago, during my first encounter with a Mac.

It turns out, they got 12 of those geniuses on a jury in their anti-competitive lawsuit against Samsung. What’s next, Ford suing Hyundai because all their cars have four wheels?

Just, for a moment, imagine what the computing world would look like if IBM hadn’t built a system using off-the-shelf parts, if they hadn’t licensed the OS from Microsoft, if the U.S. government had been able to institute effective tariffs against DRAM imports.

The reason we have the internet we have today is because Linus decided to sit down in front of his affordable 386 and wrote a kernel. The reason his 386 was affordable was because people were able to build clones of the IBM PC that were better than the original and they kept upping the ante. They were able to do that cheaper because IBM wasn’t able to collude with Texas Instruments to keep prices of various kinds of chips high while the U.S. government did the nasty on Asian producers.

On paper, I lust after the retina display on the new MacBook Pros. However, for the first time in my life, I have decided to actively avoid every single product made by a company that is hell bent on restricting competition, and recommend, at every turn, to everyone I know, every chance I get, that they do the same.

Apple has as many geniuses as BestBuy has geeks.