Doesn’t anyone else find Apple supremely irritating? Sure, their products typically exhibit the cutting edge in industrial design, and their user interface design prowess is famously unrivalled. Yet, call me a curmudgeon, a Free Software communist, or just a sore loser, but given the restrictive choices that Apple products typically offer-our way or the highway- I choose the highway every time. It’s not just the way that the company exerts paranoid control over its products through its insistence on closed software ecosystems; or the way that they thumb their nose at established computing standards in favour of proprietary alternatives. Hell, it’s not even the infamous ‘Apple Tax’ which sees Apple product users pay exorbitant prices for basic accessories like adapters and cables, as well as the computers themselves. What really gets my goat is the religious fervour that greets Apple product launches, where Apple’s well-oiled hype machine has the world’s … There’s more →