Apple No Longer Cool

Nine years ago, the quaint, unassuming pioneer of the personal computer market, fresh off the flash-in-the-pan success that was the original iMac G3 and its disgusting consumer-pandering “flavors” seemed destined to flounder and fail.

Strawberry. You make me sick.

But then, like a bolt of lightning to Dr. Frankenstein’s monster-making machine, they struck gold. Not in computers, mind you, but in personal Mp3 players. They called it the “iPod.” Suddenly, Apple was trendy and slick. Everyone had to have an iPod. If you didn’t have an iPod, you were persona non grata (which is Latin for “not too great a person”), and no one wanted to bump uglies with you.

Ownership of this little device was all that was standing between you and copious amounts of sex.

Nowadays iPods are more common than ants, people eagerly await the release of whatever the new iThing is, whether it be an iPhone, or an iPad, or an iToilet. And Apple provides iStuff for all your iThings through the iTunes Store. Some people have even gone so far as to actually begin to buy computers from them. Apple, to put it plainly, is where it’s at.

Or so it has been, until yesterday afternoon. See, Apple drew a lot of its trendy, slick, hip, coolness from the fact that it was the alternative to “the Man” a.k.a. Microsoft. Microsoft Windows was pretty much the only operating system during the 90s, and as such, they had come to the decision that things like “quality” and “ease-of-use” were just a huge waste of time and money. Which is generally what happens whenever a single entity provides a service or good. Apple were the underdogs, the Boston Red Sox to Microsoft’s New York Yankees, and Steve Jobs was Tito Francona to Bill Gates’ Joe Torre. Except, if both parties possessed less athletic prowess and more money. It might be an over-exaggeration, but I’m willing to say that Apple vs. Microsoft is more divisive than Roe v. Wade.

Yesterday, however, the New York Times broke the story that Apple is now the world’s most valuable technology company. The previous MVTC was…you guessed it, Microsoft. This also makes them the second most valuable American company, after Exxon Mobil.

Exxon Mobil: The Dream is $10.00 a gallon by 2015.

And thus, we come full circle, to the title of this article: Apple is no longer cool.

See, once you kill “the Man,” you become Him. It’s like if Luke had killed Emperor Palpatine at the end of Return of the Jedi. Now that Apple is the top dog in the tech market, and almost top dog in the country, Apple users can no longer pretend that they’re buying from a boutique company, no matter how much translucent and white plastic and lack of sharp corners Apple’s stores contain. Anyone who buys an Apple product is buying from a vicious, cold-hearted, often ruthless, corporation.

Now, I’d like to tell you that there’s someone waiting in the wings, some small, often overlooked, tech company just chomping at the bit for your attention, but that’s simply not true. Microsoft, just like pantaloons, will never come back in style. Google is touting their operating system, but Google suffers from the same issue as Apple, in that it’s swimming off towards the evil corporation end of the pool, and besides, who really trusts their data to cloud-computing? There’s always Linux, but really… Linux?

Would you trust a penguin with your computer? I wouldn't either.

But here’s the bright side: If there’s no longer anyone cool to buy from, then it’s cool to buy from anyone you’d like. Although, to be frank, I wouldn’t risk it.