Don't be jelly bro...

Sitting at Starbucks I’m directly across from an obvious PC sheep.  His poorly matched shirt and pants fighting with each other for attention as he struggles to wrangle a 5 inch phone from a pocket-sized pocket.  A “notebook” computer several inches thick dwarfs his lap, coated in a cheap plastic paint that resembles aluminum.  Off brand white headphones dangle from his ears.  As he glances over my direction - he must be at least somewhat curious how it feels to sit away from a power outlet.

The reality is dead simple - Steve Jobs never built a company, he built an invention machine.  Whatever technology you’re using, chances are very good it’s inspired by, if not blatantly stolen from, Apple.  This is of course something Droid fanboys today, just as Windows fanboys before them, don’t have the mental capacity to fully comprehend.  It isn’t just some strange coincidence that everything you use looks like a child’s drawing of something we use.

This has been a fun progression the last 10 years.  Steve’s resurrection at Apple in 1997 immediately began to bring some major changes to the company.  While he was away the company had gained far too much PC mentality and was creating trash to fill every non-problem in existence.  After axing about a thousand irrelevant products the company gained a laser-like focus on again developing things that matter.

In the late 90s and early 2,000s Droid didn’t exist (how could it when Apple hadn’t made iPhone?), and Windows was everywhere.  Geeks were still getting rosy red cheeks whenever anyone would mention the Pentium Pro.  It was at this time, when losers were at their least threatened, that they loosely stated affection for many of the resurrected Apple’s products.

Steve’s new Apple immediately reinstated what had one time been Cupertino’s underlying design philosophy - form and function are intrinsically linked.  Better form, in software and hardware, allows for better function, and vice versa.  As products built in the light of this fundamental truth began to hit store shelves, overly confident PC users were quick to acknowledge that the G4 Mac Pro looked awesome, later that the iPod and then iPod nano were great.

Honesty from thieves you could call it - continued until about 2005.  These first few years of the new millennium PC users were still too dim to understand that, as Steve would quote Dylan saying, the times they are a changin’.  Mobile was the obvious future, not power-hungry desktops - and in mobile, Microsoft’s hegemony was no longer relevant.

Two thousand five through around 2009 must have been an interesting period for a Windows sheep. For these few years all the companies they fanboy for stood completely still cranking out failing products (Vista), visionless crap (Android T-Mobile G1).  The apparent Sheep strategy at the time was to have some clowns like Ballmer or Vanjoki drop a disparaging quote to the press...

 

“There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

-Steve Ballmer - CEO Microsoft

 

“Apple has attracted much attention at first, but they have still remained a niche manufacturer.”

-Anssi Vanjoki - Chief Strategist at a once relevant phone company called Nokia?

 

From 2009 on WinSheep began to again change gears.  It was becoming clear that Steve was right, and Apple was winning.  PC users could no longer say anything positive about Apple designs, nor acknowledge Apple innovation - doing so would confirm their products were behind, inferior, and poor copies of Apple’s.  In a decade Apple had come and largely removed the Windows sheep’s entire purpose for being.

Now we have entered the current period in the Sheep / Apple battle.  This brings us back to my seat here at Starbucks.  PC users wearing headphones that are white because of what Apple made.  Smartphones without a thousand tiny plastic keys, because Apple designed it that way.  Laptop’s painted to look like macs.  An Windows 7 OS created as closely to OSX as legally possible, Droid phones rolling UI’s based so heavily on iOS it was not legally possible.

Ask any of these sheep their thoughts on Apple’s new anything and you’ll immediately hear “apple sucks”... but secretly they’re jealous of me being able to sit so far away from that wall outlet.