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2016 The Year of Oops… Redux

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Back in the dark ages at the end of 2013 I wrote an article about how that year, mostly in tech but also in other aspects of life, was full of enough flubs that it should probably be forgotten. I lamented that the tech industry specifically and the mountain of humans in charge of things in general had lost touch with reality and were making decisions seemingly based on what they thought was a good idea without doing any testing. I made a few predictions for the future that these tone-deaf companies would roll back what they did and use the “frog in hot water” method to bring them back. I was slightly more accurate than I expected, but I still held out hope that the people in charge would take the hint from their customers (probably in the form of declining sales) and change their tune. Three years later and I couldn’t have been more wrong. So I’m back again to take a look as some of the “facepalm” (I guess) worthy instances of the last year.

Starting off strong where I left off: Yahoo! (a company I’m already not a fan of for reasons that could be a post on their own) disclosed that it got hacked (“hacked” always being a relative term) years ago and that a huge number of accounts’ information and passwords were stolen. As anyone who uses the system knows, they now advise you to change your password and personal information. Thank you for telling everyone a few years too late. Your security is so good that I, the “owner of the account” can’t log in, but some other random person who stole millions of accounts data can and I appreciate that. At least it’s good news for Verizon who could negotiate to pay a capitol “B” Billion dollars less in their acquisition that now seems even more questionable than that time they bought AOL. So with Verizon in a slap-fight with Sprint while cutting off customers’ unlimited data plans and Yahoo! (who I’m pretty sure still runs AT&T’s email) bleeding money like it’s done for the last decade it seems like Tumblr is still the most sane member of the family.

My segues didn’t get any better in the intervening years so I’m just going to move on to Apple, who seem to be determined to destroy everything I once liked about them. The Apple watch isn’t doing so hot, even with its second generation. I don’t know why they thought it would work well. I, and others, made fun of Samsung for doing it back in 2013. I guess they probably still made boatloads of cash, so success is relative. Their Macbook Pros finally followed their desktop brothers and restricted users to a single port-type, to which I respond “I get it, I get it, the future is coming, but could you please not shove it down my throat?”. But I guess I’m an outlier. I’m still kinda mad they got rid of optical drives. It seems like their innovation has become more desperate to put out a new model of at least 2 devices each year. Their last iPad had me bored, their touchbar had me snoring, and Bluetooth headphones had me enraged. At least the iPhone 7, while being bigger than a datapad from Star Trek and having the worst audio playback quality of any phone in recent memory, has enough internal storage now to replace my iPod classic that lets me have all the music I want anywhere I want it; thank you very much for not coming up with a suitable replacement. People might just say I’m behind the times with my clunky old devices, but as Apple’s OS’ bugs increase, their product lines diversify in the weirdest, most confusing possible way, and they start to become more locked down. I get the impression that Apple thinks I’m an idiot, and an idiot who can be counted on to buy their chained-down PC’s time and time again without question. They’ll still probably get one more generation of devices out of me, and hey, they’re one of the richest companies in the world, but I’m seeing a downward trend I hope they can pull up from.

But while Apple might be specifically annoying to me (and making some general duds) the whole message coming out of the tech industry this year is one to make them not be trusted. While there hasn’t been too much negative press at the announcements themselves, things like Uber’s new “fleet” of self-driving cars and Amazon’s grocery store show that the ideal future in the minds of emerging companies is one without you (and anti-trust laws). And this latest attempt to begin the demolition of these two huge employment sectors in the US comes after years of union gutting, tax evasion, and price slashing that competitors can’t keep up with, while offering no compensation and spitting in the face of one of the core tenets supposed to keep capitalism in check “if the people working for you don’t earn enough to buy the products, your sales will diminish”. Amazon has gone the pacification route by also introducing a way to donate to charities without changing much of your shopping routine (maybe someone’ll create a charity for helping Amazon’s warehouse workers in poor conditions) while Uber and Lyft decided to stamp their foot down and declare “We don’t need you, you need us!” and pulling out of Austin (and other cities) when a clunky but reasonable local law made it necessary to fingerprint their drivers. Their leaving sends the interesting message that the law, their customers, and their contractors can all go to hell, they’re playing for some imaginary future where they win. The future isn’t quite here yet: Teslas are smashing into trucks they think are the sky, Samsung’s phones are literally exploding (because seriously, maybe they should test their products a little better; they don’t have to release a new pocket-dinosaur every year), and a private company landing a rocket is still something to be impressed at, but as the most recent job-destroyers gain footholds on the coasts, it’s only a matter of time before they start moving inland.

And well… I mentioned politics last time so… Trump, am I right? or more the fact that he created a social-media campaign strategy that no one seems to really understand, even the facilitators like Facebook and Twitter. Presumably afraid that any human interference would be labeled as bias and hurt their image (which did happen) Facebook got rid of human news “editors” and replaced them with an algorithm that gave everyone a healthy dose of fake. I’m still not sure if I’d prefer a biased human serving me up news or a robot feeding me wrong information, because given two bad answers, why choose? (-Apparently Everyone in 2016). Twitter (or Reddit, or really anywhere,) didn’t fare much better, as every attempt at policing they did was interpreted as an infringement on peoples’ rights (which it might be?) and only served to bolster the things they were attempting to be rid of. But public confidence in their ability to be arbiters was only destroyed once they were all that was left after most of the “regular” media came out as crazy biased, as in “blatantly endorsing a political candidate when you’re supposed to be a neutral arbiter of truth” biased. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not happy with the fact that there was an election between, and I don’t have the exact numbers here, about 176,000 people all of whom I hated, but someone had to win, and if anyone stating an obvious political opinion when their job is supposedly based on facts and not opinion, is obviously shooting themselves in the foot. Even sites like Wikileaks that don’t really even have stories, just documents, appear to be extremely biased with the specific documents they release (but who was trusting information from potential traitors anyway?)

Without a segue, but with a bad taste in my mouth, I’ll just move back to less political industry topics. Time-Warner Cable was going to merge with Comcast in a deal that was shady enough they were going to give a significant chunk of their subscribers to Charter Communications and create a new company with other divested subscribers that would be controlled by both of them. But even still, it apparently wouldn’t make it through anti-trust regulations so they had to give up and Time-Warner merged with Charter instead creating the second-largest telecommunications company. Now they’re trying to re-brand, meaning people will get the same terrible service with a new uninteresting name: “Spectrum”. They’re even shooting themselves in the foot a bit by continually saying “Time-Warner Cable is now Spectrum”… way to get your name off of it. But at least they’re addressing their criticism, albeit by running away from it, unlike the Youtube/Google/Alphabet (who cares?) machine that long ago figured out it didn’t have to answer to anyone, especially customers. Even as Youtube sparks large controversies that alienate creators (3 in the last year if my (minimal) count is correct) there is no danger of any competitor catching up and thus a negligible number of creators will leave. Google (and Alphabet) like to keep their big mouths shut about how they can control your online lives for the most part (smart tactic I suppose), and Youtube mostly does as well, but its actions affect so many people that they are pretty uninterested in how to run the business so it benefits the creators and the consumers more than it does at the moment. And they’re big enough that they don’t have to answer to anyone, and even though they’re guilty of many of the things I’ve already talked about here nothing sticks. They just put their heads down and barrel forward with only their own internal monologue to hear.

So I guess the moral of the story is that everything is terrible and you shouldn’t trust anyone? I don’t want that to be the case, and while one should be watchful of that potential outcome we aren’t quite there yet. But as these newer companies get larger, they grow increasingly out of touch with regular people. In many cases they’re just sort of forgetting that people exist, and it seems like more often than not they’re being forgiven (or maybe just forgotten) for it. Hopefully, there are greater potential repercussions for these companies than just me and a few other people talking into the internet void, and hopefully that means more of a dialogue between the parties that will lead to more awesome things in the future. But now my internal pessimism disguised as realism begins to show through. I would feel equally confident in a prediction that the increasing complexity of electronic systems will lead to companies focusing even less on the end user and more on simply creating a product that they can put out, and still crashes, bugs, glitches, and hacks will become more prevalent and more disastrous. And even if things get better, I’ll probably be back in 3 years to talk about some other perplexing failure. But hopefully not sooner.

Man, I left the 2013 article on so much less of a downer… Maybe pessimism is just the curse of a thinking people… No that’s not funny! Um… At least we won’t hear “Do it for the Vine” anymore? Maybe… Samsung and Apple should be less conspicuous with their Hitman™ exploding phones… Sure, good enough.

 

Post-Script: Here is a link to a Verge article that, while not being the inspiration for this article, helped guide the direction it went.

I Think Apple’s Still Going Down

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I’ve had some time to study the Iphone 6 since its release, and some time to think about the Apple Watch since its announcement. I’ve put a lot of faith in Apple products since 2009 when I bought my MacBook and Ipod. Later I also got an Iphone. But now, to me, it seems that my prediction of Apple slowly going downhill post-Jobs is proving to be true.

I don’t have too much to say about the Apple Watch, other than that I won’t be buying one, ever. I’m not going to say that it’s a bad product, but in my opinion it’s poorly conceived. And I don’t want to charge another thing at night, I already kick myself when I use my phone too much to avoid having to charge it daily.

I will say that, on the new Macs, I’m glad they do still have USB and didn’t switch to Thunderbolt entirely like I originally thought (I don’t really listen to too much tech news). Other than that, I’m not the most pleased with their operating system, but that is really beside the point. And the OS is far from their worst failing, though it does add to the general slip in quality of their company as a whole.

My real problem comes with the Iphone. iOS has been going downhill for quite some time, in my opinion. I haven’t upgraded for a while, but that’s just because of my general dislike of upgrades. I see the new layouts and design choices, how everything fits together perfectly and I see a lack of character. The older app icons had character that these new ones lack. But as long as it functions, that doesn’t matter. And from what I’ve seen, the new app versions function exactly the same as, or worse than, my characterized versions. So I still like the older ones. And the sleek design is really off-putting. I tend to think more of us being controlled by devices like these and not being in control of them, a point that it seems was stressed before and has now been forgotten. The man who was to hold your hand through the friendly tech renaissance is no longer there, and neither is the friendly.

But to the new iPhone. I have a 4s, which I consider at this moment to be the last good iPhone. I love the design, aesthetically, ergonomically, etc. I think it is wonderful. The 5 is fine, and the 5s and 5c are both steps down. And the 6 is even worse (though, if you’re really counting, it should be the iPhone 8 or 9). First off, in my opinion, it looks ugly, which isn’t the biggest deal, the iPhone 4 looks kinda ugly, and indeed so do most cell phones, but at least the 4 looked rugged and classic. This new one just looks too rounded and thin, it’s like a toy. “Oh, your hurt yourself on the last phone, well here’s one that suits you better, Billy.” It’s kinda like Apple’s talking down to you.

The 6+ is even worse. I couldn’t possibly use it, it’s so large, and the thin, toy-ish-ness of it would make it easier to drop than to hold. I know that some people have a use for larger, thinner phones, but as I already try to cram my pockets, satchel, and backpack full of everything I might need, a few extra centimeters goes a long way toward making something uncomfortable. I’ve already combined my wallet and phone and still don’t have enough space in which to put things.

There’s also the bending problem, which isn’t really a problem as it requires one to put quite a bit of force on a specific point. The fact is that the new phones are much less durable than the old ones, which anyone can tell you is caused by their being thinner. Unless they made it out of titanium instead of aluminum, I don’t know how one could expect better performance, really. I just don’t want a bent phone. You’d think Apple would’ve tested that or maybe they just said, “Okay guys, we have this several thousand dollar prototype, no one sit on it” and the first day of purchasing someone says “I have this new several hundred dollar phone, let me sit on it!”

I can’t understand sitting on any phone. How in the world could you ever find that comfortable and/or not think it would break it in some way? I think the flaw is with both parties there.

I’m not going to be upgrading my iOS either, as I don’t want to see horrendous drops in the speed of use which may or may not be for malicious reasons. It is meant for better hardware, I wouldn’t expect windows 10 to run on most XP machines. As I said, I don’t like the graphic design, which is weird for me. I guess I just want more hard edges. YouTube moved away from hard edges some time ago and I still don’t like the way it looks now. It’s like it’s trying to stop me from hurting my eyes with the sharpness. And the new iOS has a lot of what seems to be semi-transparent features, like they’re ashamed and trying to hide. I’m not a fan, and I don’t think it functions better.

Now, I said at one point that the end of Apple would be the iPhone 5c with its silly plastic construction and vibrant colors. It looked like a toy, not like the serious and classy items Apple had made in the past three-quarters of a decade. After progressing past the kidlike original iMacs, they’re going back, and losing their exclusivity and image.

In a world with the Windows operating system and linux, Apple can’t sell to the bottom or the top of the market. Windows and android are too flexible and can outcompete them. Who’s going to buy a five-hundred-dollar or more phone when the “c” version’ll come out in a year and look the same for a few hundred less. In the top market people like exclusivity. It doesn’t just matter if it functions better: they also want it to look better. They want people to perceive it as better. And when your thousands-of-dollars gold Apple Watch looks the same as the several hundred dollar one that is spray painted by some kid, you might feel a little cheated. You got rich to get something better. It has to be designed exclusively from the ground up for you.

And at the bottom of the market Android and Windows really rule. You can make any crappy piece of hardware run those, or some open-source OS, and tinker with it to your heart’s content. Apple can’t make it cheap enough to grab the people on the really low end, nor can they make it open enough to appeal to tinkerers. In my opinion, Apple’s losing its core market with nowhere to go.

Now I do hope that isn’t entirely true. I like the modern Apple. And don’t think I hate Apple now or think they’re useless or terrible. I just think they’re making some bad decisions that are leading it downhill. I don’t want to see Apple fail, and I’m worried that it’s heading that way. But only time will tell.

2013 – The Year of “oops”

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Well 2013 is over, and it has been for a while when I write this because I am lazy, “cough” I mean wanted time to reflect. Although reusing that joke kinda makes me look lazy, doesn’t it. Anyway, I’m going to talk about 2013, but not the year as a whole, or anything like that. I’m going to focus on the tech industry in 2013, which can be summed up easily by a quote from someone at Rooster Teeth whose name I’m forgetting: “The year of oops”. Specifically, he was talking about the games industry, but I want to apply it to the broader tech industry as a whole, because in 2013 it came to a screeching halt.

I’ll start with the video game industry, which began this year with the runaway success that was the Wiiu… Okay, the fact that Nintendo prematurely released a console with not a game but Nintendo games for it is almost unsurprising at this point. I can’t remember people playing anything but Wii Sports for the first two years that console existed. The surprising thing this time was that it almost backfired. By almost I mean that I’m sure Nintendo made a lot of money off of the console, and I’m sure it will be a well loved platform in the future, but it has literally nothing to talk about on it. “Hey, have you played the Wiiu?” “Yeah, I played that cool remake of a 10 year old game on it!” “…” Is pretty much how it goes. But at least no news is good news when comparing that to Microsoft’s marketing and PR departments which appear to be made of one super-smart, typing weasel apiece.

I’m not sure exactly what Microsoft was thinking when telling people that their console was going to be doing all of the things people usually don’t like their electronic things doing: i.e. looking at them all the time. But it does show something that I am going to iterate and reiterate throughout this article: that people developing in tech companies have distanced themselves from the consumer, which makes it impossible for the developer to determine what the consumer wants. For instance, the developers at Microsoft, being around cameras all the time with high-speed internet, don’t understand that there are people, like myself, who don’t have reliable internet connections or enjoy weird, gimmicky, “cameras” staring at them all the time. The developer is so far removed from these problems that they are completely unaware that the consumer even has them.

But in the end, Microsoft did a 180 on all of that, and turned off all of their wonderful features they’ll patch back in in a few months “cough” “cough”. And throughout the entire thing Sony was in the back saying, “we don’t do that, or that, or especially that”. Keeping their mouths shut and letting the rather large ones at Microsoft make the mistakes and then address them was very clever of Sony. And in the end it looks like it might have won them the launch month, though if the past is any indication, that’ll even out over the next few years.

None of that really matters, though, because no games were released for either system, an artifact of the fact that they were just launched. I never get caught up in console hype for this reason. There are no games to play until the second year, at least. And with these always-on functions, I’m not sure I’m even going to buy a console from this generation. But for those who did buy this generation of consoles near release time, let’s at least hope that they are faster than Nintendo at releasing games for them and that they aren’t ask broken as GTA V and Battlefield 4.

Getting away from video games for a second… ha! just kidding! I’m gonna talk about Windows 8, which as far as I can tell is a phone gaming platform for your desktop. An OS that failed so miserably no huge amount of Surface tablet marketing, or giving them to all the TV shows, will save it. I’m sure Microsoft will be using those tablets for firewood soon the way they’re (not) flying off the shelves. This goes way back to the aforementioned disconnect between developer and consumer. Who asked for such a device or piece of software to be created? Clearly only people at Microsoft did. I have heard no excitement for Windows 8 (to be fair, no one is really excited about a new OS) and have not only not seen anything positive, I’ve barely seen anything at all. Such problems with the Xbox One (Did I mention how dumb that name is?) and Windows 8 (In which the titular “windows” were almost completely eliminated in windows 7) just prove that Microsoft is so big that it can just shove things at us and still make money.

And speaking of shoving things onto us, (every… single… segue… is going to be that clunky) Google decided that it hadn’t covered its quota of stupid stuff, and near the end of the year decided to shoe-horn in their failed social media site to Youtube (the only thing that makes Google money anymore) purely for statistics jacking purposes. “X-million people use Google+” now counts in at least 75% who do so under duress. What are you gonna do? Go get kicked off Blip? (something I have experience with!) As far as user-submitted, simple content, there is nowhere else to go. Blip and a few others are only for making shows and getting paid (two things I’m very bad at, so I see why they kicked me off). There is nowhere for that market to go, so they have to stay and make a Google+ account to use the basic functionality of the site they already signed up for. Hell, I had Google+ and didn’t want to link the two, why? Because the back end of Google sucks enough already without having to be afraid of accidentally moving to another service and being stuck in an infinite hole of madness. The whole guise of combining Google into “one service” or “one Account” is laughable when the rough edges between several completely different user interfaces glued together are at best badly blurred over with a Photoshop tool, and at worst serve to break the entire system. I still haven’t figured out how to get from Google+ to any other service, even though Adsense, Adwords, and Youtube all take me there. I just don’t understand how a company like Google, with so much money, infrastructure, servers, and interaction with people can create something so fundamentally broken. I mean they followed up the public stupidity that was Google Glass with this. (I forgot Glass was even in this year, because It was like five years ago that we figured out people don’t want to wear a computer on their face, or talk like an idiot to nothing, or be banned from literally every public place for spying, and don’t tell me someone can’t crack google glass in about a day and a half, because people do that with everything.)

None of this even mentions the fact that they’re basically spying on us and manipulating us into searching for what they want while chanting such a subjective, nebulous phrase like “don’t be evil”. The only way Google isn’t evil at this point is them standing up (read: trying to) the even larger travesty that is the NSA, who apparently think “help people” means “steal all of their personal information” or something similar. I can’t wait until they just accidentally release all of their data out into the wild like Target’s credit cards or Adobe’s passwords. I would have trusted Adobe more with my passwords than the NSA with where my phone has been and those guys still messed it over harder than someone trying to Google search in Facebook. So now that the Government (who, by the way, also says “don’t be evil”) and Google are spying on us, where do we turn? Right into our graves, I bet. RIght where people will be using our credit cards at Target and logging into Photoshop as us.

And that’s not all the stupid tech stuff the Government’s done this year. (I am in the US so Government means the US Government) Right after the shutdown, with its ridiculous premise of “you’re going to steal millions of dollars from the American people, so we’re going to steal it first and call you a sucker” (I hate these people), they rolled out a website for the bill they passed nearly five years ago, (in what I’m sure was a plot to make the next president look like a nob if he didn’t get reelected) but apparently this site was designed by Ted, the guy who knows computers, who sits right next to Tim, the guy who funds crack in the ‘Department of people who think they have Government jobs’ in the Government. Ted, the guy who knows computers, apparently said he could design a website (he made one for his dog), and then bopped off (with a billion dollars the way our government spends), leaving the website so broken that even the NSA’s inexplicable number of servers couldn’t save it (they should have called Microsoft).

Now some may say they should have called Apple, but Apple is experiencing its own problems now that the only person who knew what he was doing in the entire company is gone. Apple products are now as buggy as anything else now that the man who actually yelled at people who did something wrong is gone. Remember how much Apple sucked without Jobs before? If you don’t, it was like Microsoft with more colors and fewer features. Now the Iphone has become just another gimmick “ooooohhhh, different colors, oooohhhh, cheaper plastic version” I went on record saying that the second the Iphone 5c releases the Iphone has lost its exclusivity and thus a huge percent of its market share. With a few more years of this the IOS and Android (oh, hey, something good Google did, and I never use!) will be indistinguishable save for the fact that the IOS has a higher barrier to entry. Who do you think’ll win that?

But not to worry, Apple will stay afloat with the new Mac Pro, assuming people don’t throw away too many things into is trashcan center (it’s where you store the snacks). Even though they were technically released this year, they won’t be going to consumers for another few months, partially because they are made in America, and partly because Apple just wanted to release them early and said “release” with an unfinished product, another trend I don’t like. And it doesn’t have USB ports, which ensures that I won’t be buying one for three decades. Seriously, I still have several operating computers that exclusively use serial ports. But wait, there is a new Ipad! It’s about a millimeter thinner than the others, and oh, who cares anymore? Apple releases so many stupid updates to its products it sounds like Call of Duty at this point. And they broke their OS, and the Email software, and they broke Itunes for me about 17 updates ago so I don’t care. I kinda just want Apple to shut up.

Now let’s finish up with disappointment at things that nobody cared about in the end. Samsung released a watch phone, because everyone was just dying for one of those to make them look like an idiot and not at all like Dick Tracy or the Jetsons, as the commercial would have one believe. Again, another product that no one asked for and I’m positive no one wanted, just throw it in the bin with our futuristic glasses that cost more than your car and continue to surf the web on a slab and play games with a controler like a sane person. And finally, the biggest disappointment… Yahoo didn’t screw up Tumblr. Well, at least not yet, nothings happened, I mean Tumblr is still great. Who’d have thunk (ha, it’s funny because it’s wrong) that the only companies in the tech industry to not screw up this year are the newest, and the one known for screwing up. That’s both great and terrifying. And while 2013 may have been a good year for people I can say with certainty that I hope in 2014 the tech people will again figure out how to do their jobs. I hope y’all had a good 2013 and I hope you have an even better 2014, I might see you there, but probably not, because we are interacting through text on a computer screen.

How Apple is a bad horror movie.

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By: Austin Smith

With the release of the new ipad, it has become very clear that we are all doomed. Apple is obviously trying to take over the world, and is looking increasingly like a bad hollywood writer’s confused sequel title array. The name of the new ipad is not something easy like the ipad 3 to come after the ipad 2. No its the “new” ipad. It’s like Alien: there’s Alien, Alien 2 and Alien Resurrection. Well, okay, there’s Alien 3 in there also, but that’s beside the point. Apple can’t even decide on a new name so they just don’t call it anything. Or perhaps it’s all a ploy to try to get you to forget that other ipads ever existed.

But this isn’t the first time Apple has done something like this. Remember the iphone? I do! The first time I saw it I said: “man ‘that long cool woman has it all’ will you ‘take me out’?” But do you remember how the iphone came first, then the iphone 3G. Like the Zombie movies. Zombie then Zombie 3, Zombie 4, and Zombie 5, Etc. At least in America, as the original Zombies title is actually Zombie 2, a sequel to a completely unrelated project. That would mean that the iphone was actually originally a sequel to the black berry and then renamed at the last minute. The next ones were then changed back to their original name, as it was technically the third iphone, to avoid confusion. Within…. nothing. It was pointless.

And do you remember when the Macs were called Apple computers? It’s like the entire thing was rebooted with a slightly different name. Like the body snatchers. Okay the body snatchers didn’t spin out into their own series but again you should get the point. They’re trying to make it seem as if they are a different company entirely, or they’re just bad at labeling things.

But the real problem is the ipod. The ipod is everywhere. Quickly, think, does someone you know not have a ipod? You can’t think of anyone, can you? Everyone has an ipod, literally everyone. It’s not like they all have mp3 players, they all have ipods. Mp3 players as a category don’t even exist, they don’t have a chance against the monolith that is apple’s ipod. Since their intro in 2001 ipods have split into so many ranges and different mini-sections of ipods. All based on the fact that the first ipod was good. Like how star wars has three good movies that sell everything else star wars related. So that would make the ipod classic the special edition of “A New Hope”. Well, I guess it was the new hope of all portable music players at the time. And the new ipod nano being “the Phantom Menace” makes sense to me. But moreover they have made it so that everyone can listen to music at any time. Like music is actually an important part of life for everyone. And since nickel and dime-ing people wouldn’t make anyone much money, they ninety-nine you out of a dollar a song. Again like  someone actually cares. Everyone just wants to show off that they have the newest ear-splitting pop song or their great music collection. For absolutely no reason, apple just makes it possible. 

But now that they have something in every household in america soon the sci-fi takeover will start. Or it has already started, they’ve already taken all our money with one dollar songs and cases since every one wants “their””leather studded kiss in the sand” i.e. leather iphone case. What’s to stop them from taking over? I mean you all could have already agreed to a license agreement that gives apple your soul. I’m one of the only people left that still doesn’t have a smartphone, mostly because I’m paranoid about how apple would track my every move and see where I hid the hookers. But also because they could very well kill me, and not just from cancer. But then as xkcd pointed out the takeover would be slow*. And the always correct reporters at Rooster-teeth have shown us that Siri literally kills people*. 

I’m almost prepared for the takeover (I have experience in breaking electronics). But to all the nonbelievers out there that think Apple is such a good company, you just need to think. Someone has to take over the world. If Microsoft tried they’d freeze up and keep rebooting, if linux tried they’d always be waiting for a better “take over the world” patch to come out, and Google would try to take over too many things at once while going too fast and end up disintegrating. That only leaves apple. Apple must take over the world and fulfill its destiny. 

And we can do literally nothing to stop it, I mean we’ve already seen how the future will end up. Even the starship Enterprise is a giant ipod. Or, since we never know where Skynet is or what it looks like (except in the gameboy game and in journey to sillius, but no one remembers those) it could just be apple headquarters with a bunch of iphones linked into each other.

But it really is a horror movie, bad names and all. It’s in everyone’s home, all the kids know about it but can’t stop it, all the adults know nothing or all about it and thus can’t stop it, and only crazy people believe it will hurt someone. We are all doomed, and it’s your fault for wanting that new LMFAO song, your fault.


*citation needed