• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, December 4, 2014

In every home there are issues that tend to divide the family. They can be as trivial as whose turn it is to walk the dog or trek to the mailbox, to DEFCON-Two issues such as what color the Christmas tree lights will be this year. Or if you should allow your teenaged son to take his girlfriend to the basement, where they will undoubtedly have sex even if you (and they) pretend they are watching an old Seth Rogen movie.

In our house, nothing divides us more than Apple vs. Microsoft. Or more accurately, nothing divides ME from the rest of the family more than my refusal to be part of the Apple attempt to monopolize the digital equipment world.

This makes me the uncool one with the Dell PCs and Samsung phone and Sony MP3 player (they still call them Walkmans), while the rest of the clan slavishly fights over who gets the next upgrade so they can pocket the newest iteration of iPhone.

As a father, being uncool is a comfortably familiar role. I apparently wear the wrong jeans, like the wrong TV shows and movies, and persistently fail to have seen this or that sensation going viral on YouTube or Instagram. I never check in with Facebook, and am the only one at all who uses Twitter.  What a loser.

While I have no great love for either Dell or Microsoft, I digitally grew up on Microsoft Office and still prefer the Outlook and Word interfaces to almost every alternative I have looked at. So while some of this is just lethargic habit, I have not liked Apple from the beginning, mostly because I don't care if my technology is cool, as long as it works. 

Most of the Apple stuff I have tried (primarily music players) have crashed and burned long before their less cool competition. Even my Microsoft Zune — which the company has utterly abandoned — works better than iPod this or that. It just isn't cool.

I have long argued that the interactivity among Apple products is not so much a convenience as a trap. Nothing says this louder than the current antitrust hearings, which clearly show evidence of an internal campaign to keep iPods free of music that wasn’t purchased from Apple’s own iTunes store.

By updating the iTunes and iPod software to block music from competing online stores, Apple maintained a closed system that discouraged consumers from buying competing music players, it was argued on Tuesday. That froze out makers of rival devices and allowed Apple to sell iPods at inflated prices, jurors were told.

This testimony only confirmed what I have said to the rest of the family for years: Apple was building an interconnected closed garden that would force you into persistent and largely unnecessary upgrades and product failures for life.

And it has pretty much worked out that way. While everyone seems to love the happy place known as the Apple Store, my experience was that they were no more flexible about replacing clearly defective products than, say Dell. The only difference was, they don't mind you eating up three hours of your time to come in and be told “NO” -- but by a happy, smiling guy.

Apple is famous for product failures just beyond the expiration of warranties, giving rise to the notion of institutional-planned obsolescence.  But all these issues matter not to the 4/5th of my family who relish form over function.