There. I said it. And you can quote me on that. I have been an acolyte of Apple for years, and it took me years to turn away from all of it, until I very recently made the decision to never buy an Apple-product again. If I think about it: it’s silly why I would want to stick with a line of products that are overly expensive and poorly made. It has been a recent development though that has started roughly 10 years ago, but it hasn’t always been that way.
I can still remember the day in 2008 when I bought my first MacBook. It was exclusive. It was something that most people didn’t have. It held a promise and it connected me to whole other range of people: those with Macs.
It worked good enough, even though it was kind of slow. And I didn’t think any worse about it when the wifi stopped working within a month. And I managed to work around the battery that started swelling so much after two years that it no longer clicked inside. Then the escape-key fell off.
Looking back, the reason that I looked past that was: 1) maybe this Mac is a little flawed, and 2) it’s still a Mac. Now you might think that I was treating this machine very rough and that I went all over with it. That really wasn’t the case. I left it at home and treated it with care. And in all honesty, it did serve me a good long time: eight years.
Then what am I bitching about
In all honesty, eight years for a laptop isn’t bad at all. In fact, if I had bought another brand, it would probably not have lasted that long. In fact, after those eight years I was still a believer. But all of that changed over the course of the last four years, which was coincidentally around the time that Trump was elected into office.
It was only more recently that I connected those dots: 2016 was the year when it seemed that everything had gone downhill. A big part of the reason that Trump got into office had to do with both the complacency and elite-ism within the democratic party. The attitude was kind-of: people will make the right decision, so we don’t need to go above and beyond in order to do the best job possible, to give a vision of a better tomorrow and to secure a functioning society.
Obviously that whole attitude didn’t originate in 2016, but it started around the economic crisis of 2007-2008 of which the causes (excessive risk-taking by banks and the housing bubble) were never really resolved. So after that it wasn’t just business as usual, but it was ‘grab all you can’.
Call me naive or old-fashioned, but personally I’m a firm believer in putting good things out there and that being good to other people, will in some form return to you later on. Or to put it another way: be passionate in every aspect of your life, and the money will follow later. This is kind of the opposite of ‘grab all you can’ and ‘f*(^ other people’.
It does touch on one core idea as well: in what kind of world do you want to live? This is where I believe that most people are on the same page: a world where you will have a fair chance of making something for yourself by determination and working hard. The other end is too depressing to even consider: a world where the 1% keeps amassing wealth and power.
The way to succeed as a normal person is where it gets fuzzy, and where people don’t make it, is where it opens the door to all kinds of frustrations. That’s the realm of the underbelly, superstition and all that, if a society let’s it happen by not having security mechanisms.
Such mechanisms are fragile and it doesn’t take much to create enough room for fake news, flat-out lies and ultimately right-wing politicians and autocrats. Just like it doesn’t take much to create and maintain a functioning society.
There’s this little known principle: if everyone is doing better, then it will benefit everyone involved. This applies to a small organization that has found a niche and developed a product that people love and because of that they have developed a loyal customer base.
Everyone benefits, from the cleaners to engineers to managers to executives. But, it takes effort, it’s hard work, it means making sure that customers stay loyal, it means continuously updating your products to stay ahead of the competition, and to overall give an amazing customer experience.
Taking this further, the same principle also applies to societies. The only difference is that the social structure is more complicated and there isn’t a customer to satisfy, but it’s the system that needs to satisfy itself. This works as long as the system functions properly, but as soon as a cog (a person or a group of persons) becomes rogue and starts grabbing things for themselves, that’s when the system gets unaligned and can ultimately collapse.
That’s the tipping-point where things can go wrong, where populist politicians start pointing fingers to the elite, but also to a scape-goat who isn’t organized and who can’t fight back. Think minorities. That’s where a lot of the following sentiments creep in: anti-tax, anti-regulations, anti-accountability, anti-trust, anti-loyalty, and it doesn’t take long until fear takes over. And irrationality. And distrust. And hate.
Who wants to live there
And this is exactly where it boggles my mind every time: these populist politicians are the ones who stand to benefit the most from anti-tax and anti-regulations. They usually have money, and because of that they have the means to take care of themselves whatever happens. But this doesn’t apply to the majority of the folks who are also anti-tax, anti-regulations and anti-everything: because they feel left out, they have become anti-the-system, while they are in fact the ones who stand to benefit the most.
A strong system secures healthcare, education, affordable housing, a strong and stable currency, and by means of investing during tough economic times, a strong system secures employment. I would almost call this a democratic superstate, and the sad fact of the matter is that many countries have moved away from that, or they have moved away from the trajectory of getting there.
It has created a gap, or to be precise, a gaping hole that’s being filled by big global corporations and ‘the market’. The interesting thing is that these are systems of their own, but where a superstate stands to serve everyone, these corporations have different agendas that are largely unknown. What we do know is that they have absorbed vast amounts of liquidity, and it isn’t hard to guess what that can be used for.
The exception
The only global company that deviates from this trend of endless wealth-accumulation is Tesla: the liquidity that’s amassed by Tesla is used towards SpaceX. And by that it exactly fills that gaping hole that’s left by shrinking governments, and this might be one of the few cases where less government is actually desirable.
Looking online, it has almost become a hobby of many to buy TSLA-stocks. The current dividend of this stock is 0.00%, which means the company knows how to allocate liquidity. Without dividend it’s more like a crowdfunding than a stock-exchange, and that’s exactly where it outperforms government-budgets. In theory, this construct makes the SpaceX budget endless.
Most other big corporations are definitely not on that trajectory, and they amass liquidity for the sake of amassing liquidity. This in itself isn’t ‘bad’, it’s just what 99.99% of big corporations do (Apple, Amazon, Google). That brings us back to the drama of the Trump-administration with fear, back-stabbing, false news, disloyalty and all of that nasty stuff. It’s exactly the stuff that you don’t want, but it has become kind of the dysfunctional household that many folks have found themselves in.
And it is a household, because there’s that shallow threshold between the private and the public, where things spill over and what seems to have been out there, has also entered our private lives: we feel the effects on a daily basis. And then I’m not even talking about mounting healthcare costs, mounting housing prices, dysfunctional governments that want to please by not collecting enough tax to sustain a functional society. I’m just talking about the rot that has set in after the recession of 2007/2008 was ‘sort of okayed’.
But at the same time, it becomes kind of warped, because in a way you build kind of a one-way relationship with brands like Apple, Amazon and Google. This includes all its effects and constraints: intimacy, commitment, loyalty, pride, preference. Where relationships become interesting in the public domain is where things turn South, and most notably one specific case thereof: some people willingly stay with their partner after they have been physically or mentally abused, humiliated or cheated. It’s a strange psychological mechanism, but it’s also a fact of the matter, and it may be a stretch, but the same kind of mechanism might apply when we decide to stick with products and services that are overly priced, and not of such great quality.
That’s where we’re almost full-circle. The recession of 2007/2008 was the result of ‘grab all you can’. It had become the norm, people came away with it, some people suffered because of it and that was that. It may work for a while, but it isn’t a strategy that will work in the long run. What works in the long run is decency, of character, but more importantly, of action.
Back to apple
When I bought my over-priced MacBook just before the Trump-election in 2016, it starting falling apart within the next two years. And in a way it was much like what Trump had done to the US: after a year the battery failed, then the charger, then the second adapter, then it stopped charging, then the screen failed.
I started looking online on YouTube and the decline of Apple-products has been steady since 2009. I became an avid fan of the videos of a guy named Louis Rossmann: he runs an independent repair shop for Apple-products and for his business he uses the kind of model that’s used by smaller organisations.
In his videos he gives it all away: he shows exactly how to repair any Apple-product on the level of replacing microchips and all that other stuff for which you will need specialized equipment. The idea is simple enough: by putting the knowledge out there, it both levels the playing field, but it also establishes his reputation.
I performed all of those repairs myself, except for the not charging issue (I have left it un-repaired since). What shocked me most of all was the quality of the components: no brand that I had ever heard of, except for one. The screen was made by LG. Now there’s nothing wrong with LG, but it isn’t exactly a-class, and since I paid top-dollar, and since this machine starting falling apart so rapidly, this really is a case of ‘grab all you can’.
That’s it? Only two bad experiences?
Even after all this, I still wanted to try another Apple-product: the iPad. I bought one in September, a 7th generation just weeks before the release of the 8th generation, because I wanted a device without too many bugs.
It stopped charging after one month. Since I live in the Caribbean, it can only be returned in a box that will be send by Apple and it needs to be returned within 10 days. Mail is slow in this part of the world with items sometimes taking up to three weeks before arriving at my doorstep. I asked for a manager through their site, but no, they weren’t willing to show any flexibility on those 10 days.
In a way Apple has become the 2016 democratic party: it has become complacent, with a fat-cat goal and objective of the 99.99% of big corporations: amass wealth to create a bigger stronghold for the 1%. There was no flexibility. In other words: they don’t need me. I’m not one of them.
So that’s it. I’m done. I will ride out my MacBook, the iPad will go into the trash and I’m looking into either a gaming laptop or a Linux-laptop as a replacement. It’s really messed up, and I believe this story needed to be told, because awareness of all this stuff needs to be out there. Tell me your story: are you still using Apple products?
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