About the smashing

I once had a friend who hated Apple in a way I had never come across before. At first I confused it with the  recreational hatred an Ubuntu nerd might profess for Microsoft: Something you could mildly push back against or laugh off as theatrically overstated.

He was not theatrically overstating his case.  Apple's existence in the world pained him. He asked me to please make a version of my site's RSS feed that excluded any posts about Apple so he wouldn't have to see them, or know that someone he otherwise respected and liked would be willing to write them.

Though he framed most of his objections on a technical plane, as Apple's urge for control, I've come to realize more and more that his loathing was also for Apple as a cultural presence.

I'd suppose like a lot of Apple People, I view it on a sliding scale.

I've made my peace with the confines of macOS. It annoys me sometimes, and I feel irked when certain kinds of things become harder to do as more options are taken away in the name of security, but I live with it because it just means you end up installing a few more things with Homebrew, and why did you want Apple's trailing version anyhow?

I don't care about iOS that much. I mean, there's this thing at work right now that is making me mildly crazy because some of my users won't be able to use a particular app thanks to the intersection of lazy software design and WebKit sandboxing, but there's a third party in the mix there that could have taken the time to do it right. But otherwise, I also just live with it.

I'm annoyed by iPadOS, because iPads could do more and are not allowed to. But I only feel that annoyance when I have a keyboard attached and my brain is telling me that I'm looking at a  "real computer," but Apple has negged it into believing itself a mere phone.

Basically, I use their stuff and live with it all.

The hydraulic press ad definitely triggered the cultural reaction, though, bringing to a head my increasing dislike of Apple as a business and cultural entity. 

I wasn't disturbed by the violence of the ad, which I read some people were.   I immediately got what Apple was trying to tell me about the iPad, and interpreted that message somewhat charitably: "You can pursue a lot of creative endeavors with this tiny slab."   

I didn't think "Apple is trying to destroy creative expression." 

But it did hit on the thing I really do not like about Apple at all, which is that Apple is content to define the world in terms of its own limitations. 

There's that whole idea that "everyone else's obsession is just a hobby, but yours is a way of life." 

Applied well, turned around and subverted, that's a gateway to developing more empathy and sharing more joy. 

That hydraulic press ad suggests that Apple's marketing team takes the quote literally. 

Put another way in that MeFi thread:

the joyful zip and zing of just-stretched new strings on a well set-up fretboard;

the creamy nuanced line laid down by a gouache-loaded brush on stretched paper;

the reassuring click of setting a camera lens's aperture ring;

the light metallic pressure on the lips from a trumpet mouthpiece as you count in the bars to begin your part in an orchestral piece ...

Apple can make none of these, so they chose to show them destroyed.

They had me at the third point.

Because if you ask me, photography on an iPhone sucks, but in complicated layers:

Subjectively, taking pictures with a phone is bad because the UI is awful. Apple has done a reasonable job with the problem, as evidenced by all the "pro" photography apps that give you "dSLR-like" controls at the expense of fussing around with tiny or obscure widgets that either cause you to  punt and shoot auto, just in a different app, or add them to the collection of apps with Photos albums that have eight or nine pictures from four years ago.

Subjectively, the pictures an iPhone takes are "nice." Meaning, if you're dropping them in a group chat or posting them on the 'gram or whatever, the 1.5 seconds of attention they get will cause people to say "oh, that's a nice picture of" whatever. Look, that's fine. Photography is defined as much by its popular aspects as its elitist ones.

Subjectively, the pictures an iPhone takes are bad, because given more than a few seconds of scrutiny, you begin to realize they're unnatural, not in a "stylistic or mood choice" kind of way, but in a "some AI averaged out all the pixels in a way nothing looks in nature" kind of way. If I get into this much more, I'm going to sound like someone who is very afraid we'll all someday want to eat ration wafers made out of bug protein, because Apple and other smartphone makers are busy redefining what looks "good" with computational photography in a way that is unpalatable to me but seems to go uncritically accepted with plenty of others.

Objectively, the pictures an iPhone takes are bad, because if you leave all the choices to Apple, it produces remarkably inflexible images that can only be good to Apple's standards. (See the previous point.) Trying to make them good by your standards is a hard task.

So, "fine, just use your precious 'real cameras,' Mike. Let people like things."

I will. But I'm going to credit John Gruber for a good insight about the reaction to that ad:

"... the bigger change is the recognition that computers are eating the world. In 2010 it was seen only as cool that computers were doing more and more stuff. Today there’s widespread uncomfortableness, perhaps outright concern, that the digital world is consuming the analog one."

Right. Outright concern that these gigantic, trillion-dollar businesses are defining taste within confines of what they can imagine, or want to imagine, and that this process is hollowing out companies and industries that do not see "camera" as one item in a long list of product features.

Apple does this to everything: For as much as it is a "premium brand," its software is  often mediocre. Enough to get by on. Possibly enough to destroy the sales of something much better, that someone was making because they actually cared about the problem they were trying to solve.  It has an unpaid marketing arm that rhapsodizes about how the lack of features and capabilities is reflective of some deeper, restrained design wisdom, but much of the time it is hard to credit that as anything other than philistinism armed with a four-year degree. People who earnestly believe other peoples' passions are just hobbies.

Out of steam to roll this into the main body, which has concerned itself with technology, but I'll leave this link to Max Read's literary history of fake texts in Apple's marketing materials, which takes up the cultural half of Apple's cheerful myopia just fine: 

The denizens of Dimension Apple love the following things: Punctuation, trips, sharing photographs, using emoji, taking photographs, surprise parties. You might be inclined to say that they hate roasts, bits, gossip, cynicism, text abbreviations like “LOL,” and other standard features of texting in our dimension--but it is not at all clear to me that any of these things even exist in Dimension Apple to be hated. Like Android users, irony simply does not occur in Dimension Apple.