Bruised Apples

Jane and I have always espoused a jazz approach to gardening [can you see a pattern emerging in the ongoing story of my life?] - basically, a plant planted either survives or not: we don't apply too deep a thought process or follow the nostrums of gardening sages. If you don't want slugs to eat your hostas, don't plant hostas: simple. The great thing about a jazz garden is that it is infinitely repairable: if an improvisation fails going in one direction, just try another: rhythm, harmony, melody: riff on what works and don't sweat the failures.

I was looking at some YouTube content this evening about the relatively recent Framework laptops - bear with me - which bring the hitherto outmoded concepts of expandability and - cough! - repairability to a market that had - particularly in Apple's case - descended into the realms of disposable white goods. The history of Apple's product and commercial development is a classic one. A story arc that traverses from geeky garage startup to luxury goods to more general, business-oriented product [media, mostly], to white goods ubiquity [albeit slightly posher white goods] in the form of phones, tablets and thin laptops.

Growing out of the 1970s home-brewed computer enthusiast scene, Apple aimed itself - well Steve Jobs actually aimed himself and the company - at producing 'the computer for the rest of us'. A laudable concept at the time, as home computing was traditionally the preserve of nerds with soldering irons: however, the computers they produced were so expensive that only a privileged few - mostly creative types - could afford the price of admission, and their technical specs and lack of available software outside of that supplied with machines, rendered their utility scant at best. Meanwhile, the mainstream use of 'personal computers' was pretty much all for business use, with IBM creating a whole new market to expand themselves away from the by then ailing mainframe and minicomputer markets. Alongside of which was Microsoft: providing business-oriented software and their own operating system, MS-DOS, running on the ubiquitous grey boxes that were proliferating in the clone market.

The crucial difference between the Apple and PC cultures was in expandability - both in software and in the original Macintosh hardware itself, and repairability. Apple, or rather Steve Jobs, favoured closed-box systems, preferring to sell 'complete and entire' product to wealthy individuals and mostly creative & media companies, based more on image and concept than outright usability or utility. But, the company thrived for a while until the limitations of both the machines and the business model started to flake out, as more and more people realized that the price/performance/usability/expandability/repairability advantage of the rather boring IBM/clone/DOS world really was the most practical and standard-ish way to go, leaving Apple somewhat in limbo.

Jobs was ousted, and went on to create yet another, beautiful dead-end in Next Computers, built Nexar, which is another saga entirely; and lay low for a while, whilst Apple went through some massive changes under successive new corporate management. The next few years were great for geeks and developers as Apple effectively opened the gates to coders to produce new software, and hardware companies to produce add-ons and expansion cards for a range of - admittedly, not always great - newly expandable and repairable Macs; focussing attention on the higher end of the media production market. However, the period practically bankrupted Apple due to some frankly crap management and a seriously unfocussed product line.

Re-Enter The Dragon: Steve Jobs returned - a matter of some considerable record - and literally turned the clocks back to the 1980s, realizing that the market for home computing had come full circle in his 'wilderness' years, with people now wanting out-of-the-box usability, like buying a fridge, and moreover, the cachet of relatively-affordable luxury goods and style. Jobs brought Apple back front and centre, and made it the most successful tech company of the era, and on an unleveraged, cash-rich basis, to boot, with innovations from the iPhone [creating the modern smartphone market], to streaming services, to tablets, to a closed [yet again] ecosystem of Apple product, that this time around, was wildly successful.

But, the world turns, people die - Jobs, too - and markets change. Apple in the years subsequent to the demise of its founder have suffered from a lack of vision and originality, content to stay where they are, at the top of their - frankly still impressive - pile of cash. But the world now is a very different place than twenty-five years ago. People - and the planet - demand more user input in the utility, expandability, and most importantly, repairability, of their devices. In one particular instance, the Framework laptop, that desire looks like being fulfilled, at a reasonable price point, and with a level of design and manufacturing quality that rivals Apple's own.

Maybe the tech markets are little different to gardening, with the best plants for the prevailing environmental conditions surviving, whilst others wither and die. Framework is just the product direction that could have taken Apple to a four trillion dollar market cap, had someone in the company the kind of vision that Jobs himself had, let alone the benefit to consumer and planet alike. I currently run both macOS (on an ancient MacBook) and Linux (on a MacBook Air), but I still can't stomach the idea of an Android phone, or a complete divorce from Apple - I've been using their products since even before the Mac itself - and continue to be locked voluntarily into an ecosystem I could probably well do without: rather, suffering gladly some form of consumer Stockholm Syndrome. Sad, but true...