"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

My dad bought an Apple II in 1977, when I was a high school senior. He got it to help manage his real estate investments, which he worked on when he got home late at night after closing his pharmacy. I was fascinated with the thing, not because I wanted to figure out how to program it, or what was going on inside that cream colored case, but because of the really cool games I could play on it. Up until that point I had only played the Atari version of Pong. It may look boring now, but my friends and I would spend endless weekend hours staring at the flickering grey image on the tv screen. We would drink a few beers, smoke a few joints, and fire up the console, usually choosing the hockey version over the less interesting tennis screen. It didn’t take much to entertain us.

When I carefully inserted the floppy disk labeled “games” into the Apple II’s drive, I couldn’t believe the difference. The only game I specifically remember was one called Olympic Decathlon. You used key combinations to help the primitive, vaguely human collection of pixels run races, pole vault, high jump, and perform in other decathlon events. My dad claimed that his computer helped him get his bookkeeping done, but every time I walked into his home office he was playing one of those games.

By the mid 1980’s I was a PC guy. I remember seeing the famous Apple Super Bowl 1984 commercial and thinking it was ridiculously pretentious. Right around that time I began taking a real dislike to Steve Jobs. I saw him as the marketing guy behind Apple, and Wozniak as the brains. Jobs struck me as smug and arrogant, and I thought of PCs as the machines where you got work done, while Apple was for drawing pictures. I know that was probably a naive simplification, but that’s how I saw it.

After Jobs’ return to Apple after his NeXT debacle, he just seemed like more of a pompous narcissist. He designed, engineered, and packaged his image as carefully as he did his products. Everything about him was calculated, from his beard to that goddamned black turtleneck. I found him to be all style, and no substance. That probably wasn’t fair, but I was into MS- DOS and early Windows.

When my wife bought me an Ipod for Christmas in 2001 or 2002, it became the first and only Apple product I would ever own. It was a device to play music. I plugged it into my stereo system and I was smitten. I have to admit that it was one beautifully designed piece of technology. It was incredibly well built. I still own it, but I doubt I could do much with it and its outdated software anymore. I had gotten my first cell phone sometime around 1998, and I didn’t see the two devices as being even remotely similar in function.

When first Iphone was released in early 2007, I was firmly anti-Apple, with the only exception being my Ipod. I did use it to buy and play music. Still, it was already apparent that even Itunes was a locked down marketplace. Apple was the definition of closed source. Microsoft wasn’t great either, and Apple’s tech always provided a more user friendly experience, from what I was told. I had no first hand knowledge since I had never used it.

By then I had become deeply entrenched in Austrian economics and libertarian philosophy. Apple just really rubbed me the wrong way. That 1984 advertisement seemed more ironic than ever. Apple was Big Brother in my eyes, creating a world of conformists needing the next cool thing. George Orwell is probably still spinning in his grave. It didn’t matter to me that Apple wasn’t the government. There was something about those clean white lines and staged presentations that screamed totalitarianism. People I respected told me Jobs was a visionary genius, and I begrudgingly had to agree. That wasn’t enough for me to buy an Apple product, though. Once the smartphone became ubiquitous I naturally got an android.

I soon realized that I liked tinkering around with my phones. I had always been what I would describe as a tech fan boy. I spent hours messing with my work computers when I should have been actually working. I’m a lawyer by trade, and my aptitude is not towards tech or programming. This is not false modesty. I loved the idea of learning about the stuff, but I knew I didn’t have the ability to go anywhere with it professionally. I just really enjoyed playing around. That’s when I discovered that you could really tinker with Android phones. Unlike with Apple, they were for the most part unlocked, and I started modifying them. I particularly liked my Motorola Droid for doing mods, and owned a few of them over the years. I would go to sites like Android Central or Android Authority and learn how to flash roms, download weird apps, speed up the clock settings, and do all sorts of other stuff that really served no practical purpose. It was fun, but I bricked my share of phones. I couldn’t believe people would buy an Iphone and miss out on this joy. Both the hardware and software were inpenetrable. Forget even trying to get an Iphone repaired. The Apple ecosystem was like a prison.

”All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall" Roger Waters

The company became a symbol for me of all I disliked about corporate America: Commercialism, conformism, and living within the “walled garden” of their ecosystem. I couldn’t even look at Jobs on that big stage, wearing that black turtleneck, preaching to the masses. To me, it was oppression, the opposite of freedom.

Of course, Bill Gates wasn’t much better. I soured on Microsoft too. I started hearing about Linux but didn’t have the motivation to try it until probably 2014 or 2015. There were many fits and starts. I found it difficult to accomplish many work tasks on my basic Ubuntu machines, so I invariably went back to Windows. It wasn’t until this year that I finally made the switch for good. Being retired makes it easier.

In the meantime, my disdain for Apple grew. Revelations about Job’s personal life, his treatment of subordinates, and Apple’s exploitation of low cost labor overseas irked me. If you’re interested in reading more about Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson wrote the definitive biography. When Jobs died I thought that Tim Cook would maybe change things for the better. I do like him better than Jobs, but that’s a low bar. He continued the tradition of hype, fashion, and exploitation. If you’re interested in reading more about Apple’s labor practices in Asia, read the book Dying For an Iphone by Jenny Chan. Every “new” model was extraordinarily overpriced, but the marketing machine kept pushing them out the door. Every slight model change required the purchase of a new, overpriced charger. Every dollar was squeezed out of the loyal sycophants. To make matters worse, since the release of the IPhone 4 every user’s location is recorded several times a day with a time stamp. Then the information is transferred to an unencrypted file on your phone. This is particularly worrisome now that we know that Apple cooperates with the NSA Prism program.

As time passed I discovered bitcoin. I first heard about it at some Libertarian Party meetup in 2012. I dismissed it, to my everlasting regret. I finally bought some in early 2018, and have become more deeply committed the more I learn. I started following the young developers in the space like I would follow players on the New York Mets, my favorite baseball team. Knowing how modest most of them are, they would be embarrassed to know how much I revere them. So, imagine my shock when I discovered that many of them used the Mac OS and had IPhones. I know they are younger than me, and they know a hell of a lot more about computer science than me. But still. Apple just struck me as so antithetical to the idea of innovation, revolutionary tech, and most importantly, bitcoin. I couldn’t think of Apple and bitcoin in the same sentence, and I still can’t.

Late last year I found nostr. I had long ago abandoned all social media. I despised Facebook, Twitter and Google with the same fervor as Apple. I was incredibly disappointed to discover that the best nostr client, Damus, was only available on Apple IOS. I wasn’t shocked, just jealous. I didn’t care how good Damus was, though. There was no way I was going to give money to Apple just to find out.

Now Apple is threatening to remove Damus from their App Store. They also recently delayed approval of the latest update to the Zeus app before allowing it to remain. I understand the consternation this is causing, and I know they want to get back into the ecosystem, but I can’t bear to watch these brilliant, creative innovators grovelling before the small minded gatekeepers of the Dark Empire. I know that sounds overly dramatic, but it is how I feel. Apple is the status quo. Apple is a major cog in the old system. Apple is one of the problems that nostr and bitcoin solves. It’s not just Apple. As I said earlier, Facebook, Twitter, and Google are members of the same empire.

“Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” George Orwell, 1984

I planned my own modest escape. Android is only slightly better than Apple IOS. It is a more open system, but those doors are gradually closing too. I decided to switch to Graphene, a privacy oriented, de-googled version of android. I ordered my Pixel 7 the other day and began the process of switching to Graphene. I needed to unlock the bootloader. At first I tried my linux laptop. After hours of installing packages and copying code into the terminal, I gave up. Then I tried it on my Windows 11 laptop. The process was even more complicated. I was downloading drivers, entering commands in Power Shell, and searching help sites for answers, all to no avail. Once again, I failed. I was angry and frustrated. In a last ditch attempt, and against everything I stood for, I borrowed my daughter’s MacBook. I connected the phone to the laptop, hit a few keys, and Voila! It worked. The bootloader was unlocked immediately. I had the phone loaded with the Graphene OS in minutes. Easy as pie. I was both happy and humiliated. I caught a lot of abuse from my family. You see, I am the lone infidel in an Apple worshipping house. It was a rough afternoon.

I’m not a very spiritual guy, but I had the irrational thought that Steve Jobs had exacted his revenge on me. In the end, the beast he built had helped me escape. I was grateful. Does it change my mind? No. I still hate Apple.