What I particular dislike about Apple, though, is their attitude that anything that isn’t made by Apple has to be worse than Apple. This is prejudice. I don’t know if they still have this attitude, but they certainly used to—for reasons I can’t remember, I was taken along to a posh dinner hosted by Apple in London in the late ‘80s and subjected to all kinds of insults because I was a Windows programmer. This was not simply friendly barracking; you don’t insult then refuse to talk to someone you are being friendly at. Hence my belief that Apple commercially exploited bigotry. As you’ll realise from my poetry, particularly the clarion sequence, I consider bigotry to be a dangerous form of psychopathic behaviour, so, as far as I am concerned, Apple encouraged a potentially lethal mental illness to make money. Having said that, I do not consider them to be racist (unlike lord pisswater’s clarion).

Of course, Apple have since been through some very bad times, which isn’t too surprising given that attitude, but they’ve picked themselves up (partially thanks to a serious investment from Microsoft). I’ve no idea whether that attitude has gone, but I’m not convinced.

Update: A couple of months after writing this essay, I find myself writing software for the Mac, specifically code for Darwin, the UNIX base of Apple’s OS X. The kit’s good.

^* As in enthusiastic pancake preparers. Why, what do you think I meant?