Understanding Apple Culture for the non-Apple User.

Few consumer brands can inspire the kind of fanatical religious zealotry as Apple computer has managed to do over the past 20 or so years. The corporation has expanded beyond a provider of high quality hardware and software to a dictator of culture and ideology to the brainwashed masses that follow their iconic “Great Leader” Steve Jong-Il Jobs. Steve was kidnapped as a child by agents of Kim-il Sung so that the autocratic ruler could learn about American children. He sensed great evil in Jobs, and raised him as his own son alongside the jealous and competitive Kim Jong-il. Kim and Steve made a wager as children as to who could better carry out their father’s philosophical legacy of Juche, or self reliance.

Having no leadership abilities, Kim led a charge to label his brother as a "counter-revolutionary" for his "innovative" political ideas (which were really just rehashed ideas from a generation earlier, with new flashy names like "iDictatorship" and "PowerCommunism G3.") Steve was eventually forced to flee to the United States, the hated enemy of North Korea.

Now in the US, Steve rounded up a talented group of graphic designers and started American People’s Party and Liberation Enterprise, known as APPLE, and modeled their computer software and corporate governance after his adopted father’s philosophy. He realized that he could not enslave the people of the United States, so he turned APPLE into a cult of sorts, hoping to build a base of power from which to take over the American political process. Steve's idea was simple enough, offer America's underfunded school systems APPLE computers at discount prices and children will grow up knowing nothing else.

In 1994, Kim il-sung died and Kim Jong-il assumed power. Lacking Steve’s charisma and charm, Kim imprisoned and killed millions of his own people and cut off ties to the world. All of this was to try to make his brother agree that he had best carried out their father's legacy.

Not to be outdone, Steve left APPLE computer because of it's ideological impurity and started neXt computers. The "neXt" step was a thinly veiled attempt to force the ideological foundation of APPLE onto the business world. This move was a severe miscalculation as rivals had emerged with more powerful, faster, and cheaper alternatives. Even the now leaderless APPLE had begun persuing this course, but it was too late, and fading into obscurity. Steve reassumed the CEO position and began a purge of any capitalist practices that they had picked up in his absence. Shareholders loved him, users loved him.

Some Steve's logic of marketting the most expensive personal computers to the poorest segments of society (students and artists) yet the tactic has somehow succeeded in developing a fanatical following that can’t shut up about how great their computers are for 10 minutes.

Over the next decade, Steve led the company back to financial and ideological success by making their products into fashion accessories and continuously smacking the shit out of it's users, forging the bonds of Stockholm syndrome. (whereby hostages become emotionally dependant on their captors) He kept users salivating for products, releasing functionally irrelevant upgrades to tremendous fanfare and propaganda at the annual party conference. Over the years, he has slowly purified the APPLE platform to the point where only Apple and a select handful of close associates are allowed to produce software.

So who won the bet? Only time will tell.