Oh yes, I can...

I remember the iPhone launch queues...as in the strangest ritual in consumer tech. People camping overnight for a device that will be sitting on shelves in unlimited quantities the following week. Like queueing up for a vacuum cleaner and pretending it's the moon landing.:-)

Oh the love for a company, with the battery gate ($500M settlement for throttling phones customers already owned), the CSAM on-device scanning proposal, a decade of Irish tax routing, active lobbying against right to repair, repeated supply chain findings on child and forced labor... and a CEO who hands Trump gold while going quiet on the causes Apple used to grandstand about.

So much much to love on this company. Its poised with assholery of Steve Jobs to its core, and has no salvation. If I want luxury, I buy a laptop from Cartier...

The worst is the tell that an all Apple setup is a the near perfect filter for not a hacker. The ecosystem is engineered against the instincts that define hacking, no sideloading without ceremony, no real repair, no low level access without fighting the OS, no running what you want without Apple permission, no swapping parts that haven't been blessed with the right serial number.

Its computing for consumers, not tinkerers. Which is fine, except the culture around it borrows the prestige of technical sophistication while actively opting out of it. :-)

The Mac in the coffee shop is a lifestyle object. The ThinkPad running Linux next to it is a tool.