And for all you who thought I was done ranting

I told you so. Just so you don't have to read through the (rather egregious swearing), allow me to quote a tiny piece of it:

They want Palladium. That's right. Fuck dual cores and clock speed, this is all about them being able to deliver dvd's right to your greedy little hands via iTunes. Or whatever the fuck they're going to name it. Your moldy piece of toast will happily download Charlies Angels IV, let you watch it without pausing, capturing the screen, broadcasting it, or doing anything the MPAA doesn't want you to do with it. When it's done playing, iTunes (or whatever) will cheerfully delete it from your moldy piece of toast without you having any say in the matter. You may remember this process from the last time you watched "Naughty Nurses XXIV" on pay-per-view at a hotel. It's the same shit, different day. Steve-motherfuckin-Jobs wants to OWN you and your computer. There's no getting around it.

Over a year ago, I said that. And in the process of getting Naughty Nurses onto my computer via iTunes, they have so horribly mangled that application I find it nigh impossible to use. It is so cluttered with information and marketing, that I can't seem to figure out how to rename my music library "Asspants". Furthermore, since there is no more playlist named "Videos", all my smart playlists which filter out videos (so my iPod doesn't try to download them -- I use smart playlists to manage my iPod) are broken. I have no idea how I'm going to fix this.

All this in the name of progress. Or, for the cynics, to make a buck for Ol Steve.

Steve, give me my goddamn BSD, mpg123, SQLLite to manage my database of music, and rsync to stuff it onto my iPod. I have earned the right to use my computer as an expert. Sure, there are five year olds who use Macs, but maybe you should make it possible for people with three or four neurons to use their computers, too. Fucking wanker.

Apple. Again.

Dear Steve,

I noticed that Apple has released new iPods. They've also released new iMacs. They've even released new PowerMacs (yeah, I said PowerMacs). Only they really haven't done any of this. It's smoke and mirrors. The iPods are the same fucking iPods the old ones were, only the batteries (shameful crock of shit those are) last longer. And the hard disk is bigger. Steve-o, I have well in excess of 120gb of music and video sitting in my iTunes library. Until Apple comes up with a way to put all that stuff on a portable device, I will be unimpressed. Furthermore, I don't find watching video on that itty bitty screen to be all that impressive, either. And the iMacs. Well, well, well. We now have a 24" iMac. It's no longer even remotely portable, weighing a metric fuckton. Sure, it has a bright display, but what in the hell am I going to do with it? It hasn't got storage to speak of, and it may have a processor that can run the finder (does anyone even remember what "MultiFinder" is anymore?) reasonably well, but I'm certainly not going to recompress my copies of Best Motoring on it. And let's talk about these new PowerMacs, too. Since the iMac and the "Mac Pro" are all still Macintoshes and the terminology has been Mac since 1984 (remember that, Stevie, or has your brain shriveled too much?). One needs to differentiate. So, PowerMac it is.

Ooooooh, they have fucking Xeon's in them now. Oooooh, they are just as fast as those swanky Dell Precision workstations. Why, exactly, should I fucking care, Steve? I mean, if they're just Xeons, and underneath that SAME FUCKING CHASSIS they are just a PC, why would I bother buying one?

The answer is vendor lock-in. You've been playing this up for years. Buy Windows, buy Microsoft, and you're fucked. You need to use the Word document format. Nothing else can read Excel files (nevermind there isn't a spreadsheet on the planet that can touch Excel), and so on.

But what, Steve, do I do about my fifteen thousand photos sitting in iPhoto? Or my hundred plus thousand tracks and videos in iTunes? I'll tell you what I'm going to have to do.

I'm going to get myself an Alienware laptop. Because, afterall, it's a fucking PC, just like the fucking Mac, only it's cooler looking, and comes with support that doesn't look at me with that faggoty caramel-macchiato-mustache "well you must have done something wrong to it if it's broken" attitude. And, I'm going to buy an Alienware tower. I'm going to extricate all my photos from iPhoto, and put them in an agnostic format -- Adobe Bridge (directories, xml) -- and use some goddamn beefy Opterons for all my transcoding. And then, because I'm locked into this stupid Apple shit, I'm going to buy one of those pathetic Xeon PowerMacs, and use it to run iTunes. That's it. And I'm going to feel stupid doing it, too. Because now I have hundreds of hours of video in iTunes, and no way to stream it to my television. I mean, what fucking gives, Steve? If I buy Pirates of the Goddamn Carribean, I have to defeat the DRM, recompress it, burn it to DVD, and then sneakerfuckingnet it over to my television to stuff it into my Microsoft XBox. I mean, can you even understand how stupid all that is?

Steve, take your money and run. Let Jonathan take over. He's got a better sense of style, he doesn't have the acid-addled brain you do, and he might actually get something accomplished. All you've managed to do is turn Apple into a commodity PC manufacturer with a cutesy little device that is worth more to your stock price than the fucking computers you made your name selling.

Oh, and with regards to that stock price. Hey, great news. I like seeing it above 70. Let's see it at 80 or 90 around christmas so when the ESPP hits, we can cash the fuck out and buy stock in a company that isn't flushing itself down the shitter.

Love,
Alex