Steve Jobs is dead. Millions of Apple People are weeping in their Lattes. iNinjas are committing seppuku en masse. Lindsay Garvey will never get to work on time again.
Without the promise of new iDevices, life has no meaning to an iNinja.
I’m concerned. Despite my best intentions, Curmudgeon Compound has been infiltrated by iDevices. (Note: none of them can be traced to me. I would happily burn a pile of iPods to save a scratch on my CD player. Younger viewers may want to visit the Smithsonian to learn how pre-historic man in the far distant past of the 1980’s owned rather than rented music.)
Will this tactical failure bite me in the ass? Will Apple products go HAL 9000 in a ritual of digital self-immolation? Will iPods delete everyone’s music and ship iTunes accounts to a secret cloud computing facility in Luxembourg? I wouldn’t rule it out! I’m not going anywhere near any iDevices until a suitable mourning period has passed.
But I’ve got to give credit where credit is due; Jobs took a company that was swirling the drain and used it to bludgeon several moribund sectors into life. Moving Apple from junk bond status to perennial trend setter is a world class magic trick.
He also created Pixar which gave me The Incredibles and Up. Actual stories! Delightful counterpoints to Hollywood’s usual steaming heaps of propaganda (or lame rehashed superheroes) slathered in CGI. (Note to Hollywood. Shakespeare was awesome, you are not. Learn to write or hire someone who can.)
Jobs (when he wasn’t attacking me with iNinjas) was a creative force that will be missed. Even by me.
I like both your comment on Whollyweird and on the renting of music. I’m an awkward cuss; I listen to music from an iPod, which I get by ripping it from CDs that I actually own. On those rare occasions that I “buy” a song from iTunes, I generally burn an archive copy onto CD.
As for Hollywood; I do get SOOOOOOO tired of “Groundbreaking films” that are none-too-original rehashes of ideas SF has been kicking around since the early 1940’s. Not that that is a trope unique to Hollywood. I recall listening, with rising incredulity, to two lit. major types talking excitedly about the very latest THING in modern literature …… Magical Realism. I had to firmly restrain myself to keep from choking the life out of the two little idiots, while screaming “Magical Realism is a hallmark of representational artists, such as the Pre-Raphaelites! It! Isn’t! New! Even in writing, it isn’t anything that Ray Bradbury and Henry Kuttner weren’t doing – RATHER BETTER!!!!! – in 1954!”.