Every time we come to the crossroads of an Apple product release it’s like reminding folks just how consumerism has befallen mankind so much they cannot accept the fact that the device is nothing more than “Honey I Blew Up the Kid” with an iPhone or IPod Touch.

My problem with Apple was never really their technology or even what they offer, my problem with Apple is their trade. Once upon a time they made unique hardware with unique software applications. OS 1-9, AtEase, PPC architecture. The price point was still high, but you could at least take some solace in knowing that what you were getting was something completely different from a PC. Naturally this attracted humanity’s two most prominent groups of unwarranted self-important hipsters, artfags and musicfags. Together with PC haters, trendyfags, and a number of other people who weren’t the cool kids in high school, established the myth that Mac was the “superior race” in computing, but only for art and music, because Bill Gates is a crafty son-of-a-bitch and maneuvered the PC and Windows so well, it became commonplace in the working world and increasingly in education, once a Mac stronghold.

But nothing about a Mac is unique now. It runs on the same hardware as a PC, Intel processors, NVidia or ATI video cards, whatever brand RAM you choose, same with hard drive, and the operating system, OSX, is based off of FreeBSD, a unix-based operating system. Everything that can be done on a Mac now can be done on a PC and vise-versa. Suddenly Apple became a company joined with the rest of the computing world, devoid of it’s uniqueness. Their response? Devices. Phones, MP3 players, video players, peripherals, peripherals, peripherals, where the real money of the movie is made. So they created the iPod, made it look all retro and sleek, pandering of course to the demographic that helped keep them in business, the trendyfags. They’ve become so synonymous with music culture now almost everyone owns one except indie musicfags because they hilariously act as the counter-culture to Apple culture by trying to be non-conformist. Protip, most fail, most own iPods as well. Conformity is hindsight after all.

But that doesn’t stop the Steve Jobs Express, ever one to try to clip Gates at his own game (i.e corner a market before Microsoft can exploit it, ever so tricky these days) he burns the midnight oil and his only liver to come up with the iPhone, a revolutionary piece of hardware that makes phone calls. While forty-somethings and above won’t understand the relevance of smart phones in today’s society, Apple landed yet another breakthrough to a society in need of trendy-looking sleek devices that can do almost anything you could ever think of, it was like having a laptop but smaller and with equal battery life, which is nill thanks to your need to be checking Facebook from every location you are. Admitingly, the iPhone does look pretty cool, and I’ll give Apple back their old crown of creating something unique again, except the initial price was the price of a day-one PS3 and was only on AT&T, the world’s worst carrier ever, so I take that crown back you greedy fuckers, learn to share with the world from day-one, not day-after-you-milk-all-the-applefags, or should I say “OH HAY GUYS, HERE IS 3G, IT’S COOL AND CHEAP” I did love early adopters delicious tears though, and wait, there is more, your “App Store” is full of first-party and DRM crap by a company that does so in order to keep you in the fold as long as possible. Would have succeeded too, except Apple apparently forgot just how powerful and influential Google is, and in today’s world of smart phones, Android steps in and shakes up the game.

Finally, the iPad, a device that looks like a iPhone on steroids, because everyone loves using the phrase “on steroids”. It offers nothing really new to the field of tablets and netbooks, and it’s features pretty much emulate that of an iPhone. So where is my revolution? Where is my intrinsic need to buy this device?

The answer is simple really. Soylent Apple is people.

Yes, I did an Apple rant. Like I said, I really don’t have beef with the devices so much as I do with the people who buy them. They don’t do anything differently from PCs and similar hardware these days, and I can build a hell of a PC that will do music, art, and video for the price of an Apple. But you can’t change some cult members, and to each their own, my money is better spent on stuff that matters, like Moe’s burritos. Mmm.