McCain Can't Use a Computer. Game Over.

Focus about a third of the way in:

Seriously?

I'm sorry, but if you intend to lead our economy in the 21st century, a prerequisite must be competence with a computer. Good lord.

I guess it comes with the territory of being older than the ballpoint pen and the polio vaccine.

Apple Products: Still Garbage

Let's depart from politics for a second. I'd just like to say the following:

"HA HA HA HA HA."

I have contended from the beginning that Apple, the company responsible for the Mac (which is incorrectly referred to as a "computer"), exists in its own little cultlike fantasy world and rarely corresponds with any form of reality. When it does, such as in potentially useful products like iTunes, it insists on its own Holy File Formats and its Purifying DRM Rituals so it cannot be polluted by outside influences. As a result, like most things produced in isolation by religious zealots, Apple products applied to the real world are weird and shoddy.

Still, I was surprised to see that Safari's inexplicable port onto Windows crashed and burned so quickly -- my God, less than two hours. And look at the stupid-ass way they did it:

Apple's Web site touts, "Apple engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one." As Larholm explained on his blog, that may very well be correct: Its engineers obviously designed Safari to take advantage of security protocols in the OS X operating system, as evidenced by function calls to those protocols Larholm located inside the source code for the Windows version - calls which would obviously go unfulfilled.

Yes. Apple programmers forgot what platform they were writing for. Insert the slow clap here.

It's symbolic of Apple's basic problem: self-indulgence. All their programs -- iTunes and QuickTime particularly come to mind -- are bloated behemoths clogging all your RAM with unnecessary features and graphical swirls, and remarkably prone to crashing. Their products are almost sickeningly slick, elevating design over functionality and jacking up the price in the process. Their technical support (such as it is) fully expects you to replace your product wholesale if you so much as get some dust in it, and they expect you to do it smiling. They are the DMV of computers.

This cannot last. I say the empire of Apple and Macintosh is a house of cards; outside the niche market of graphic & video design (at which Mac products do excel, so long as you can comprehend their terrible OS and deal with those useless one-button mice), their products have no place in the market; they've lasted this far riding good advertising, gullible buyers and a system that locks you in once your files are there. Free-market capitalism may be flawed but it's not that flawed.

So put me down for a prediction that the launch of the iPhone, their latest boondoggle, will be the one where everything finally snaps. Because while people will tolerate Apple's ego, and their products' pathetic attempts at functionality, in luxury items like music players and desktops -- they are "cool", after all, and one must suffer for fashion -- they cannot put up with this in something so key as a phone. If your phone breaks, you're fucked.

And the iPhones WILL break. Oh, will they break. A product this ambitious? My God, think of how fragile your iPod is, now multiply that by five and add in software issues. Damn thing is a recipe for disaster; it'll scratch, it'll crash, it'll wipe out your data, it'll give you 20 minutes of battery life on a good day or heat up in your pocket like charcoal on a grill. And once it breaks you'll have to go through Apple Purgatory while they either ship it to Cupertino or make you buy a new one for full price as you yell at those blank-faced Apple Store androids -- during which time, you will have no phone. Enjoy that.

No, the time has come for Apple's reckoning. Just you watch. Within six months there'll be angry mobs outside Apple stores waving iPhones with those annoying frowny faces on them, screaming "REFUND!" The publicity empire Steve Jobs has crafted will collapse, and their stock prices with it. Apple will lose its credibility among consumers, sell off QuickTime to Macromedia, Amazon.com will usurp the online music sales market, the iBook will go the way of the Dodo, and within five years we'll all go back to using Microsoft Windows the way Jesus wanted us to. The end.

...I promise I'll go back to writing about politics later this week.

TREMENDOUSLY IRONIC UPDATE (6/14): Less than 36 hours after I posted this, my PC's registry got corrupted somehow and I can no longer boot Windows on my home laptop. Tonight I'm planning an intimate evening with the Windows XP Recovery Console, or failing that, Linux installation. A man of less intestinal fortitude might take this as a wake-up call -- but I am no such man...

LESS IRONIC BUT STILL RELEVANT UPDATE (6/18): One reformat later I am up and running with Ubuntu Linux -- and pardon me for being evangelical but I wholeheartedly recommend it for everyone. It's better than Windows and Mac OS on every possible scale; more efficient, more customizable, better design, better security; plus everything -- every program, every upgrade, all of it -- is free. Download it, you can try it on a Live CD without ever touching your hard drive. Goddamn am I happy with this thing.