Tell them, my song.

Today I stumbled over the ultimate quote on Apple, the iPhone and to an extent the iPad (which is just an over-sized iPod Touch):

The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.

I hate it.

I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient.

This perfectly sums up my own thoughts on Apple, and I especially love the fact that Tim also uses the expression “Disney-fied”, which is my favorite word for Apple’s Brave New AppStore World.

You can read the rest on Tim Bray’s blog: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/03/15/Joining-Google

Take a fresh installation of Snow Leopard, Aperture 2, Logic Studio 9 and everything else that you have. Download and install all available updates. Then try to import around 10,000 RAW photos into Aperture. And experience crash after crash after crash.

Basically, that’s what I did and every time Aperture reaches the 1,100 picture counter, it aborts with a long epic failure message. I cannot import my photos, and it doesn’t matter if I try the “import folders as projects” option or the other import option.

Aperture plain and simple crashes every time.

I cannot import my photographs and basically Aperture is now a useless waste of space on my disk drive. And with it, the entire fucking Mac is a waste of space, because Aperture is the #1 reason why there is a Mac Pro beneath my desk in the first place.

I’m beyond being just pissed. I paid a five digit sum for this whole Apple crap. It’s the most expensive computer system that I ever owned – and it also is the most unreliable and unsatisfying one that I ever used. The Mac Pro is loud, Apple has already artificially made it obsolete (no 64-bit OS X kernel, no official 64-Bit Boot Camp support), Snow Leopard is a compatibility disaster and now even Aperture refuses to work.

I don’t want to pay all that money to get a Lightroom license for Windows and to get my existing Adobe for OS X licenses transferred. And I will certainly not give Apple any more of my money: Maybe I wouldn’t have that problem with Aperture 3. But why should I care? I no longer fuel Steve Jobs’ money engine. I also don’t really want to fuel Bill Gates’ engine, but in all honesty and with all the experiences that I had to made, I must come to the conclusion that I have always made a living in Windows land, and that since NT 4, Windows has become a reliable platform for all purposes.

Well, haven’t I been there before? Yes, but it’s hard to dump something that has cost you so much financially. And I do not like to admit defeat and failure or that I have been making some wrong decisions over a couple of years, even if they had only something to do with unimportant (but costly) computer crap.

Anyway. This is it. I’ll put as much as possible of that shit on eBay now.