iPad 2 - The Best Thing Since Sliced Faeces

People of the world, stop what you’re doing immediately and heed these words, for there has come a new, revolutionary product from the geniuses at Apple Incorporated. Yes. the iPad 2 has been announced and, as predictable as it is that a cat will get pissed off if you apply selotape to its bum crack, morons and drones from across the western world have joined forces to waste their hard earned currency on pre-ordering this tablet-shaped scam. The iPad 2 boasts a “brand new design” – in the same way that one could create their very own “new design” by rubbing a brand new dress in a turd on the side of the street. Basically, by “brand new design”, Apple mean that they’ve made it about 2mm thinner (didn’t see that one coming) and added a basically useless HDMI output capability – and not even a hardware output at that, of course not, you’ll have to spend about £30 extra to buy the adapter. Doesn’t sound very impressive does it? That’s because it really isn’t. Heck, at the unveiling even Steve Jobs himself appeared nervous that this particular hustle was going to go tits up. But no, as rehearsed, his planted audience members started an appreciative, if tentative, round of applause when he announced these incredibly underwhelming additions to an already ineffectual appliance.

A few days ago I posted a blog which, I’ll be honest, was basically a rant about why I don’t like Apple. A lot of people agreed; some, however, definitely did not. Some pointed out that Apple products are not just bought by “starry eyed idiots drooling over anything that gets put in front of them that's in white or brushed chrome”. Others explained Apple’s popularity by saying “People pay more for nicely designed (and well marketed) products.” Both of these statements at least hold some truth; neither, however, could even possibly sway my position on Apple. The news about the iPad 2 provides a useful example as to why.

For a great many years now, big companies have been using a technique called “planned obsolescence” to ensure that they can squeeze as much cash out of their consumer puppets as possible. No company in the world exploit this technique to anywhere near as great an extent as Apple. A quick explanation: when you buy a high quality, highly priced product you would expect that the build quality would be of such great a standard so that you get your money’s worth. Wrong. Nowadays, things are designed to break; after all, why would a company just want to sell you something once that you’ll have for life? There’s no money in that – our economy relies on cyclical consumption. Apple couples this technique by releasing a very slightly altered version of their products approximately once every year. Just think about it. Why couldn’t the original iPad be 2mm thinner and have HDMI output? Do Apple seriously think we’d believe that one year ago there wasn’t the technology available to achieve that? The problem is that hardly anyone nowadays stops to think about this sort of thing because they’ve grown up in a world where it just happens and seems natural. And they fall for it.

So, you’ve had your iPhone for a year, it suddenly breaks, why spend all that money repairing it when you can just get the new one? And so the cycle continues. You may ask yourselves now: “Why is this bad? I’ve got the money. I don’t mind forking a bit extra out now and then to make sure I’ve got the latest gadgets.” Yes, that’s all well and good, but think about what happens to your old phone - it will very rapidly become obsolete and then be discarded. When you think about how many resources go into making phones and how many phones across the world are sold and then thrown away... that’s a lot of wastage, and unless you haven’t noticed, the world does not have an infinite amount of resources. This is all we’ve got.

This is why I hate Apple. It’s not about petty things like minor differences in operating systems or wanting to be the guy who bucks the trend and says “I don’t do Apple, man. Like, that’s so mainstream”. It’s because this consumer culture, of which they are the flagship company, is dangerously exploitative – not just of the public, but of the Earth. We simply cannot afford to support this economy of cyclical consumption otherwise, a few decades down the road, we will be living to regret it.