I fell in love with Apple with the first Mac I used. My forward-thinking journalism teacher in high school could tell in 1985 that desktop publishing was about to sweep over the world. She bought one, and a copy of Aldus PageMaker, for the newspaper. As the paper’s (paid) typesetter, then using a phototypesetter, she sent me home for a couple weeks of winter break with the Mac and a manual. I never looked back. I bought my first Mac in 1987, managed over 100 in a job from 1991–1993, and have owned oodles since then.
My career’s foundation has been knowing how to use Apple hardware (and sometimes software) and teaching others to use it or get more out of it. Nearly every significant professional advancement I’ve made across 35-plus years has been because I knew the ins and outs of making a Mac produce what we needed—and later, Xserves, iPhones, iPads, and more.
I certainly loved the company as a concept and was loyal to it, though I have never been someone who ignored its flaws. As one version of the old saying goes, “Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!”
Apple wasn’t always right, but it was my Apple—our Apple—and we celebrated it for what it did, even though we would complain or openly critique its problems in management, direction, finances, bug fixing, user interface direction, and more. We are often more frank about things we love in describing their flaws than those we hate because we care enough to want them to improve. (That’s okay advice vis-a-vis businesses; maybe don’t try to tell people how to fix themselves, though!) One of my most popular all-time blog entries was a 2015 listing of all of Yosemite’s many weaknesses and bugs—over 100,000 views.
Perhaps this is why I was shocked by the inner sanctum details revealed by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in a suit against Apple by Epic Games. You can read all the back-and-forth details elsewhere, including this very site.
The upshot is this: Apple was directed to give developers in the United States a pathway to let customers pay for stuff used in the app outside of Apple’s payment system. The judge’s decision was upheld on appeal and the Supreme Court declined a review. In January 2024, Apple unveiled its new system: developers could apply to add links to outside payment web pages, which customers would reach after clicking a scary warning. Apple would collect a mere 27%.
Love is a many-colored thing
Maybe this is when my decades-long love affair started to crack. That was a clearly offensive action, contemptuous of the developer community that built the software Apple reaped a reward from; of users who paid an implicit Apple tax (like renters in a housing market dealing indirectly with property tax spikes); and the court, practically flipping the bird at the judge. Apple wrote this at the time: “As both this Court and the Ninth Circuit recognized, collecting a commission in this way will impose additional costs on Apple and the developers.” Ha.
I mean, there had been many previous challenges, but none this overtly hostile—and the worst was yet to come. There was Antennagate, when Steve Jobs said users were holding their phones wrong: “All phones have sensitive areas. Just avoid holding it in this way.” There was the $17,000 gold Apple Watch. The $700 Mac Pro wheels. Their obscure revenue recognition practices—albeit in line with other tech companies—that let them avoid paying the full tax bite. (Apple stated, “At Apple we follow the laws, and if the system changes we will comply.”) Reports of violating workers’ rights, particularly at retail, anti-union tactics, as well as discrimination. Even the iPod Socks, for god’s sake.
But I’m not sure I ever felt the sense of actual personal betrayal until Judge Rogers revealed in a scathing order that she had found not that Apple’s plan was merely egregious, but that “Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath.” She wrote, “Apple sought to maintain a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of this Court’s Injunction.” She said that rather than figure out a compliant plan, the company came up with an arbitrarily high fee and built lies around it despite marketing chief Phil Schiller raising red flags. At least somebody tried. She ordered the company to allow immediate access to developers, which Apple did: You can now click a link in the Kindle app to buy ebooks from Amazon’s web site. Apple has also filed an emergency appeal to reverse this.
Over the last 17 years, since it launched its first App Store with a 30% commission, Apple has had every opportunity to rethink its deal with developers and, by extension, customers. It made a few 15% concessions for small developers and renewing subscriptions. But, by and large, it used its position of power to reap the highest possible return. Faced with a judge’s decision and having lost its appeal, the judge says Tim “Cook chose poorly.”
Fans of Apple are often dismissed as “fanboys/girls” and referred to as the “Apple faithful.” This has always rankled because I love Apple because of what it has enabled me to do, even as it contains seeds of truth: We stick with Apple through its poor decisions and weak periods because they are the only hardware company we trust to keep our best interests at heart. If it’s not always the best, it’s not Microsoft or Google for crying out loud. While I’ve yelled at my Mac on many occasions, I’ve never felt it was out to get me—or my private information.
I had a crisis of faith in 1998, when I told the New York Times, “I bought my last Macintosh last year.” (Jason will note that I also posted hundreds of thousands of messages on Twitter after quitting Twitter—twice! The third time, in 2022, stuck.) That 1998 crisis was that Macs had become expensive and slow, there was no roadmap for better outcomes, and the company seemed to be circling the drain. That was true, and then Steve Jobs regained the helm.
Broken trust may never mend
This court-reported behavior by most Apple executives puts Apple’s disregard in sharp relief. I have never protested its high hardware margins (more than 35% in recent years) because that’s a “tax” I pay for getting the best. After skirting what could have been bankruptcy, I don’t mind the company having a vast cushion to protect its future and pour billions into research and development—it’s paid off. And they charge a price the market will bear: we can freely opt to buy a Mac or iPhone or other hardware or not. While as an Apple user, we might not feel there’s a choice, Android and Windows are viable alternatives, particularly in 2025, and would run all the software we need—an old complaint that’s faded away in both directions.
But there’s a difference between a stated price and a choice in the marketplace and being lied to. Perhaps, as in politics, all businesses lie—some a little, some a lot. Part of sales is selling us on an idea bigger than the thing itself. Apple, particularly in the Jobs eras, was especially good at making us think we were part of something much larger than a mere computer or, later, a phone or tablet. I’m a Pepper, you’re a Pepper, we’re all Peppers.
There’s a classic sci-fi story by James T. Tiptree, Jr. (a.k.a. Alice Sheldon), Brightness Falls from the Air. In it, a race of intelligent, peaceful alien bugs live on a planet bathed in the radiation of a special kind of nova. Speaking for the humans who protect them, the narrator notes, “Beautiful as the adults are, they are surpassed in sheer exquisiteness by their children.”
However, by the end of the book, the nova’s trailing edge passes, and one character says to another, “D’you know, they even looked different to me! Oh, they’re beautiful. But I never really believed they were evolved from, from insects before.” He sees them as they are instead of within this glowing aura. I think Apple’s nova aura may be gone at long last.
Maybe it is the right time for this love affair to come to an end. Not the end of my love for what I can do with Apple stuff, but creating boundaries, something good for any relationship. From Tim Cook down, executives—Schiller excepted—have proven themselves unworthy of our trust. As shepherds of the company, they have revealed themselves. I may still love the concept of Apple, but certainly the company no more.
[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing (Aperiodical LLC) and How Comics Are Made (Andrews McMeel Publishing).]
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