This past Monday, Apple rolled out some new junk at the dawn of their Worldwide Developer’s Conference.
According to the Wambooli Poll, Apple is the most evil of the Big Three computer companies (the other two being Google and Microsoft).
Despite their winning the Evil Poll, Apple is still the only computer company that is capable of anything remotely exciting. It reminds me of the heyday of computing back in the 1980s.
The fattest computer magazine (if you want to call it a magazine) back in the 1980s and for part of the 1990s was a beast called Computer Shopper.
At it’s largest (in the early 1990s), Computer Shopper was over 800 pages in size, nearly 3 inches thick.
I’m not making that up.
Computer Shopper was more of a phone book than a computer magazine. It was chock full of ads. Leafing through its pages was a reverent experience. It was like computer porn.
I wasn’t a fan of Computer Shopper because I craved info more than pure hardware. To sate my desires, I subscribed to about a dozen computer magazines and periodicals.
Like many computer geeks of the time, I also kept all my magazines. There were stacks of PC Magazine, BYTE, Computer World, 80 Micro, Dr. Dobb’s Journal, and myriad others festooning my apartment.
The justification for so much literature: Lots of information flowing about computers back then!
At the center of the New Computer Toys universe was the Comdex convention, specifically the Fall Comdex in Las Vegas. I attended the convention often between 1983 and 1993. That was one hell of a time for computers, new technology, and lots of excitement.
Lamentably, there wasn’t a lot of excitement Monday when Steve Jobs announced what everyone already knew about the iPhone 4 and its new operating system, iOS 4.
Yawn.
What was exciting was the anticipation. It’s that anticipation that reminds me of the way things were so many years ago. If you take the potential of what Apple could have announced Monday, multiply it by 20 and then spread that intensity out for five days, then you have Fall Comdex Las Vegas.
Yep, those were the days for computers and for fanboy geeks such as myself.
Meanwhile, Apple continues to bore me. I mean, how much time did Steve Jobs spend Monday talking about frickin’ Farmville (a silly game idiots play on Facebook)? Where are the Mac Pro and MacBook Air updates? Where is the new Mac mini or a new, exciting version of Apple TV? (Relevant article here.)
I feel that Apple is lost under Jobs. He’s obsessed with mobile devices and forgets that Apple also makes money from computer sales. Or it did once.
As someone who enjoys using Apple’s stuff, I’m beginning to feel abandoned. If the company doesn’t pay attention to its computer line soon, I’ll be giving up on the company for good. Wall Street? Are you listening?
