Update 10/9: that’s what I suspected. Glad to have it confirmed. [via Sema]
The whole family of “I”s holds no attraction for me whatsoever.
Aesthetically: each of those items – pods, phones or pads - look cheap, impersonal, badly stamped in China hellokitties, like pressed together plastic soapdishes, garishly colored expensive disposables – aesthetic of 3D software models and computer games – infinitely adolescent, flashing, perpetually in a hurry imitation of adult world that inexplicably took over the adults.
By interface: I hate poking my fingers at the screen. Besides ugly fingerprints, it makes me think I have a sensory paralysis or something: unlike with mouse, my fingers can’t gain control over the action. Strangely, anywhere else, with any other tool besides direct screen-finger interaction, they can. I don’t even use my touchpad on my (Windows, of course) laptop – I can’t get it to comply with what I want it to do. It drives me nuts – as do people who claim it is the “most intuitive and easy-to-operate” interface.
By function: not interested. Not in “angry birds”, not in war games, not in Niagara of music, not in non-stop news flood, not in never-ending cacophony of the web. I don’t want to be always connected. Don’t want to find instantly where the closest restaurant, library or transport police is. Rather the opposite: I want to be left alone and let to smell my own roses. Figuratively speaking.
Talking of more fundamental Apple product – Macs- be it a workstation or just a keyboard – I will come out and say it straight: I hate it. I hate the physical feel, hate the look and hate the unfamiliar logic of its commands: I can never find anything on its empty screen.
So when I read all these cries, praise and wailing on Jobs’ passing [f.i.] – which always, always comes down to laments about his company and chotchkes it produces- I can’t feel a thing. As a “computer genius” and manufacturer of all those despicable devices he is rather repellent to me; as a businessman who created a hugely successful company and kept it afloat he commands respect – but I am, by my nature, not an entrepreneur, so it is mostly theoretical with me. As a person – I didn’t know him and it seems, by what information I can gain from obituaries and mass reminiscences that surfaced now, I wouldn’t like him: highly aggressive, competitive-to-nastiness people have no appeal to me.
I guess I am a coldhearted techno-retrograde, self-kicked out of the universal flow.
