Too Hot To Handle

It is not that I don’t particularly dislike Apple products that I am writing this.

Ok, Ok, Ok, I can here Lewis’s voice reminding me not to lie; I do dislike Apple products.

It was not always so, as I was enamored with the first Apple computers that had add-in boards where you could add peripherals, additional memory and other such stuff as A/D converters for analog data collection.  There were a lot of things you could do with these magnificent machines such as measure the temperature and display it on the screen, make charts of time vs. temperature and create crude lie detectors, just to mention a few.

The fact that I worked at Synertek (who manufactured the 6502 processors, 6520, 6522 and 6532 I/O devices and more) did not hurt a bit as those components were used inside the Apple computers.  At a time when the maximum speed was 1 Megahertz, a renegade group of us managed to create a 4 Megahertz Apple, but the built-in video output to a TV screen did not work as the video frequency was slaved off of the master clock.

We even attempted to build a 100 Megahertz version Apple out of ECL devices since we had a great working and fully functional breadboard model of a 6502 processor, but that is another story of too-fast and too-ahead-of-its-time.

My problems started with the first Mac.  That hourglass instructing me to wait as the sand appeared to slowly drip through just drove me crazy.  Ok, I lie again; I was already crazy at that time, so it just drove me nuts and flustered me while ruffling my feathers.

This turned me off to Apple products for good.  I would rather have a system just be slow rather than it yelling na-na-na-na-naaa-naaa at me with that hourglass all the time.  Then, to add injury to an already altered mind, it changed to a smiling computer in later versions.  Now the computer was actually laughing at me.

So now I do not feel too bad when I bear bad news about an Apple product.  I also have a disclosure to make to you, my dear readers:  I owned two iPods (a 20MB and a 40MB, one of them OEMed by HP) and someone who probably did not like Microsoft products stole them from me when I was recording music with them at a gig.  I currently own an 80G iPod Classic, which made my $40.00 iTalk microphones inoperable, so I cannot record with the new one.

I also have another disclosure to make: I nearly had my work purchase an iPod this past January 16^th.  I went into the office for a company-wide year end review and planned to purchase an iPhone to test our email system operation.  A few people bought iPhones and expected all the functionality with our Microsoft Exchange server.  I am glad I did not have the chance to do that, as I would have had to turn it in.  I was laid off (all of manufacturing was terminated) less than ten minutes after the meeting was over.

That said, I am really glad not to have an iPhone.  The new ones have a problem running when you are in a hot car and running the GPS programs.  They also can get a bad case of pimples!  This product (which is supposedly one of the “greener” Apple products) does not function well in a Global Warming environment.