Update -- Why Do Some People Dislike Apple So Much?

iSchadenfreude is everywhere! It is another bad day for AAPL stock due to a slowdown in the Apple pipeline of orders. AAPL bears are rejoicing -- they want to see the stock fall down through $500 because of the psychological significance. Even though I am an Apple hater, I will try to take a philosophical look at the anti-Apple syndrome.

First of all, why should any of us hate Apple? Is it just envy? How can we not be grateful for the innovations that Apple has brought forth, with some even benefiting the consumers of rival products? And what about all the jobs? (Some are even in the USA.)

One of the more emphatic critics of Apple is Karl Denninger, who recently said:

There are plenty of people who hate the linkage with iTunes that comes with Apple products...

Everyone on Wall Street wants to talk about ecosystem, but what they're really talking about is a walled garden -- and the wall has razor wire and broken bottles embedded in the top.  It's a prison, which appeals greatly to Wall Street types but it only works for consumers so long as the illusion of free choice and beauty persists. 

The underlying problem for Apple is that the company has stopped innovating.  Love him or hate him (I'm in the latter camp for those who don't know better) Steve Jobs was one of those guys who could make teens scream and then buy all the crap he produced, irrespective of how good it really was...  [emphasis his]

For my part, I became furious at Apple after it tried to "take over" the music library on my computer. I naively downloaded something from another blog. Then a box came up and said that I needed to download Apple's QuickTime player, which I soon did. Fortunately I was able to uninstall that piece of crap, so that my music wasn't wiped out. (I won't mention names, but you're able to guess, perhaps? Grin.)

Can we at least all agree that Apple is less of a technology company than a consumer cult? The average fanboi thinks that he deserves to get all the hot babes at Starbucks just because he has shown up with an iPhone a half a millimeter thinner than a commodity Android phone, or because his iPad has more rounded or more square corners, depending on whichever is de mode this year. 

Contrast that to a no-nonsense consumer who wants the most benefit for his hard-earned dollars. The fanboi cult doesn't seem to care about that -- such concerns are only for the uncool. It angers us consumer-nerd types to see marketing and media have so much control over human behavior.

Much of the credit for weakening Apple's aura of invincibility redounds to Samsung and its Galaxy phones and tablets. Windows Phone 8 hasn't really reached critical mass yet, and of course we don't know whether it ever will. But let's be optimistic, since it is in the interest of the cellphone carriers to promote and subsidize Windows Phone 8 in order to take the iPhone (subsidy) down a notch.

There is hope that the next generation of Atom chips from Intel will do a good job running real Windows 8 (not RT) on a tablet. At a good price, and with a keyboard docking station, you'd think a device like this would quickly dominate the field. So much for the iPad's days of glory.
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Update: I've really been enjoying articles by Ashraf Eassa on Seeking Alpha.com, a financial website. Today's article about the Pro (non RT) version of the Microsoft Surface Tablet was quite informative. The moral of the story is: don't be an early adopter and get sucked into those sub-Windows RT tablets based on ARM chips. Wait for lower-power Intel chips and lower prices to appear on the Pro (Windows) tablets. This might take a year or two. Don't think for a moment that a chronic early-adopter will listen to this advice.