Open letter to Apple on iPhone 4

Dear Apple,

Congratulations on selling over 600,000 new iPhone4s! As an avid supporter and customer of Apple since 1984, I was always confident that I backed a winner and am happy that you are enjoying such prosperous returns on a vision so many predicted would have died off a long time ago.

Yesterday, in my exuberance, I attempted to upgrade my iPhone many times throughout the day. I was unsuccessful and notice now that you have suspended all pre-orders. This was probably a prudent thing to do given the volume of traffic that was hitting your servers.

In 1984, I found myself needing a personal computer. I was looking hard at the IBM PC-AT and was in the process of securing enough cash to buy one when I passed by a Macintosh running a demo program at the University of Minnesota. From that chance meeting, I realized I was seeing something special and several days later, I visited a store in the mall selling Macs and bought one. When you came out with the Macintosh Plus in 1986, I upgraded for $2,600.00. Shortly afterward, I upgraded to 1meg of RAM and a 20Meg external hard drive.

In the ensuring 24 years, I have purchased a Mac II, Mac IIvx, (2) Quadra 900s, (2) G3 towers, (3) iMacs in bondi blue, tangerine and grape, a Mac Mini and the latest iMac for the desktop. In addition, I have purchased a Powerbook 170 and 165c, Powerbook G3 (Pismo and Lombard) (4) Powerbook 15″, (2) Powerbook 17″, (2) MacBookPro 13″ and a MacBookPro 17″. I have also purchased (8) iPods, an iPad and (3) iPhones. I even bought a Newton and several Imagewriters.

On top of that, I have spent hundreds in the iTunes store and thousands in software and peripherals to support the Apple hardware, mostly at a premium. On top of the personal purchases I have made above, I was also a champion for outfitting my various departments with Mac video editing and desktop publishing equipment, mostly by convincing my superiors and the IT departments that the PC world had no such capability. I probably lied more than I should have, but you were the superior platform and I need to attract the best people. The best people at that time worked on Macs.

I have endured taunting and teasing from my peers in meetings for being a “Mac boy.” I have endured passive aggression from hotel meeting planner and engineers for having a Mac that needed “special plugs.” I have spent more money than I should have on peripherals that supported Macs. And since I live in Dayton, Ohio, I could not pop into the local Best Buy to purchase software or peripherals that worked with a Mac, though USB changed that.

And yesterday, I felt that I did not matter at all to you. Yesterday, I felt like just a battery to fuel your lust for profit. Yesterday, I did not feel at all like I was part of something special.

Perhaps I am just a bag of money to you after all. Perhaps I’m old enough to know that you are just a company looking to make a buck. Perhaps I should have been smarter all these years and realized that while I was taking part in a vision to change the world, you were just grifting on us poor, clueless bastards.

But your products worked well and they enriched the quality of my life by allowing me to create in ways that were not possible with a clunky PC.

If you could do one thing over again, I wish you would not have forgotten where you came from. I wish you would not have forgotten that each one of those iPhone sales yesterday was not only just a phone, but a piece of a vision that you begged us to trust so many years ago. I wish you would make us feel special once more.

Yours sincerely, though not as wholly as I once was,

G.