... for delivering yet another lousy set of products to the consumer.
All the talk now in the computer world is about Apple's new iPod Shuffle and Mac Mini. Both, I am assuring you, are absolute pieces of crap. I don't have anything remotely resembling real evidence to back up my claims, other than my experiences with two other rather popular Apple products: iPod and Airport Express.
Macheads tend to go on and on about the stability and reliability and good design of their beloved white thingies (read: Apple's current design is everything-white). I beg to differ. The first day I had my iPod I realized something was wrong with it. The screen is screwed up and so is the sound. Where is my iPod now? Being "serviced" i.e. someone looks at it long enough to see that it hasn't been broken in half, calls it "okay" and sends it back to me.
Shortly after the iPod disappointment I was rewarded with the Airport Express disappointment. I warn you, if you are thinking that this product is cool (Ryan, this means you, if you are reading), do not buy it. I know a guy who has two of these things and neither of them works right. Mine certainly doesn't. The entire point of the thing is to play music wirelessly. However, I can't play jack so long as I am doing anything else on the internet. This includes merely having a chat application open. That doesn't even mean I'm chatting with anyone. So the options are play music and do nothing on the internet or do something on the internet and don't play music. Boy does that sound handy. I can do that with a $20 wireless router. Boy do I wish I had one of those instead of a $120 Airport Express! Believe me I have tested everything you can test on this thing. What a waste of time.
Don't get me wrong, Apple has great ideas. The iPod is awesome, if only it worked correctly for me. The Airport Express is also a wonderful idea, but very poorly executed. Even looking beyond the crappy inability of the thing to play music (its main selling point), the interface is clunky as hell, and doesn't exactly give me many options. So, I get back to my long-standing Apple complaint: The sole reason their products continue to sell well is that they look cool. The next time I hear of someone who has an Apple product that doesn't crap out, please let me know. I'm dying to hear about it.