Depending on who you talk to, the decade is either ending tonight or a year from now. The Macalope’s not going to weigh in on whether or not a decade runs from 0 to 9 or 1 to 10. This is a technology column, he doesn’t get into religion.
Regardless, a lot of people are looking back on the decade of Apple news and taking stock of what were the big events and products of the last ten years that are at least an elapsed decade whether or not they are a canonical decade.
Which, if The Macalope knows his terminology, is a decade that you can fire out of a cannon. Just checking his notes and… yes, it can be any cannon. Military, shirt, confetti, what have you.
What were we talking about?
Oh, right. The last decade of Apple.
We sure got into a lot of dumb arguments, didn’t we? Is market share the most important thing ever or is it of some kind of uber-importance that cannot be measured by our universe’s science? Is the iPad a computer or just a sandwich? How big of a flop is the Apple Watch? And how devastating are those yearly iPhone production cuts that happen every year after the big launch but, ZOMG, this year they’re cutting production?!
By the way, that is the last time The Macalope is legally allowed to use “ZOMG”. Yep, it’s been deprecated as of 2020. Some would say as of 2012. Anyway, it had a good run.
Here’s a question from the last 10 years that no one followed up on: did anyone ever get wrist cancer from the Apple Watch? That’s one The Macalope thinks about from time to time. At least Apple eventually shipped the cancer-causing Apple Watch after “disappearing” for a while in mid-2014 by failing to ship something in the wearables category that was vastly important in the mid-2010s but now that Apple owns it, no one talks about it anymore.
The Macalope could go on and on about this. Seriously, he even has an interpretive dance about all the dumb things people said about Apple in the 2010s. It was very well reviewed in Dumb Dance Quarterly.
But he doesn’t want to leave the year and the decade on such a sour note. Instead, in the spirit of reaching across the aisle, he’d like to point to this piece by Antonio Villas-Boas at none other than Business Insider where Villas-Boas lays out his reasons for using Android and Windows without committing the crimes of claiming that it must be so for everyone if it is so for him and that Apple can do no good.
Sure, he drops a soupçon of “walled garden”-style references, but it’s not like The Macalope doesn’t use a garbage truck of “cess pool of malware” references when talking about Android.
(The cess pool really is the worst kind of pool, isn’t it? It’s not even a contest.)
The Macalope doesn’t care what platform people choose. Choose the right one for you. There are very good reasons to use Android over iOS and Windows over the Mac. Villas-Boas values hardware choice, and that’s a completely valid reason to not use Apple products. Just stop trying to tell us Apple platforms suck and the company is going out of business any day. Despite the company’s ridiculous level of success in the 2010s, that didn’t happen. Something to aspire to in the 2020s.
Not that The Macalope is saying that’s a canonical decade.
Just to be clear. The horny one’s not in the pocket of Big Decade. Don’t threaten The Macalope’s children.