Do everything like it means everything.
— Gradiate.

• It was this question of self-image that was, until now, the reason I could never wholeheartedly buy into the cult of Apple. In truth, I loved the products - but found the behaviour of the brand’s adherents slightly creepy. Apple-lovers seemed to me a cult obsessed with their own otherness, with a superior sense of being different - a little like Liberal Democrats, funnily enough, or evangelical Christians. Even though in each case the product (£10,000 tax threshold/eternal life/touch-screen interface) was great, the user-base was kind of off putting. My aversion to Apple was, I knew, irrational. However, with the success of the iPhone and iPad, I now have more serious concerns.

  These are best expressed in an article by Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times. She believes the millions who are adopting Apple’s universe of applications in preference to using the open web are making the same choice people make when they leave a thriving messy city for a gated community in the suburbs: sacrificing freedom and variety for safety and neatness. The price - that Apple vets every app that is sold - is one Apple fans seem strangely content to pay. We’re I to suggest Ian Paisley perform this vetting, they would be up in arms - they would hate the idea of moral discrimination - but aesthetic dictatorship by a Californian liberal is apparently fine.

  There is a great irony here, of course - in that the greatest Apple lovers are found in Hoxton or Shoreditch, places they chose for their authenticity and grit. In fact, many almost certainly describe these areas as “vibrant” - a word high whe applied to neighbourhoods means both “you can buy exotic fruit at the local market” and “hold onto your wallet”. These people would rather die than move to Milton Keynes. But technologically they are doing exactly that.

  - Rory Sutherland

  An extract from The Wiki Man. I always like it when someone explains something similar to my thinking, but in a much more expressive and concise way. 

  11 Feb 2012