Why Apple, When Apple (Premium)

Reductionism is a powerful negative force that's perhaps too easy to fall into. I've dealt with it for decades in my professional life. We all have. I saw this issue all the time when Mary Jo was partnering with me on Windows Weekly. To many, Mary Jo was just a cat owner. Or a Notepad user. Or a lover of IPA beers. And ... that was it. No nuance. No understanding of the complex human being there and the decades of experiences that helped make her who she is. Just a simple reduction to a pithy, incomplete, and inadequate summary. None of which accurately describes a person.
Reductionism 101
When it comes to me in a professional sense, I get it. I'm a Windows guy. Maybe the Windows guy, depending on your perspective. This is accurate enough, I guess. But it's also unfair--reductionist--because it ignores one of the key ways I differentiate myself from my peers and competitors: I have always used rival platforms prolifically, in part so I could stay educated and up-to-date about the relative pros and cons of these systems. And in part because that's what I do with everything in life. I'm always looking to improve, and if there are better tech products and services than those I'm currently using, I'll switch if it makes sense to do so.

But Apple is unique in some ways. Problematic. And you can sense the insecurities that arise in certain quarters when I speak or write too favorably about this company and its products. The Windows community has suffered from decades of defeats on the consumer side, and the added ignominy of Microsoft ignoring and now actively undermining the OS in some ways doesn't help. We're overly sensitive, perhaps. Waiting to be triggered.

The first time this really blew up in my face was 2007, when Apple announced and then released the first iPhone. By that point, Apple was already an obsession for fans and detractors alike, thanks to its unexpected resurgence under Steve Jobs and its transition to a personal electronics maker with the iPod. The iPod was bad enough for Windows guys, in their view it was just another me-too MP3 player that didn't deserve the accolades and sales it garnered. But MP3 players were, at best, a secondary concern. The iPhone was an affront, an open declaration of war. Some did not handle this well.

Looking back on my coverage of the iPhone that year, I see familiar patterns of me trying to understand what this all meant and then communicating it to others in real-time. I didn't get everything right, but I did see its importance. And that's why I wrote about the iPhone exhaustively, pointing out all the ways in which it succeeded--there were many--but also how it fell short in conforming to the mobile standards Microsoft had created for the workforce. Apple resolved those issues with iPhoneOS 2.0 the next year, an implicit admission to the failings I had pointed out. But I dealt with a lot of pushback from the haters in both directions. The comment I remember most clearly sarcastically...