Is Apple Getting Uncool?

I usually tolerate spam from Apple - it's white and colorful at the same time.  But today I got an email that had please-please-buy-me writ all over.  The subject line said, "We spoke too soon."  I clicked to see Apple showing off a prize from J.D. Power and Associates, a company best known for blessing new automobiles.  Ahem.  Ahem.

As a quick-and-dirty survey, I checked traffic sources for this blog.  Here's how it looks:

Macintosh 57% Windows 31% iPad 4% iPhone 3% Android 2% Linux <1% BlackBerry <1% Other Unix <1%

There you go.  More people are on Macs than Windows.  Apple is edging to become a producer of mass consumer products used by everyone.  What must be happening here?

When we obsess about something, we become that obsession.  Apple is more outwardly focused now than it ever has.  It used to be about ignoring customers and thinking differently from within company walls.  Now the focus is less on the inside but more about grabbing market share and protecting its turf.  In its pressure to meet Wall Street's expectations, the company needs an ever increasing growth curve.  While there must surely be a healthy pipeline of products, it needs a churn at a piping hot frequency - not just version changes.  The only alternative for Apple is to find ways to sell more and more.  That's what it's doing, gradually trading exclusivity for quicker bucks.

Samsung, Microsoft and others are getting hipper - diluting Apple's difference.  We are now officially in the tooth-paste phase of computing products, a state of mind-blur where every product is only as interesting as the other.  Differentiation is marginal - not real.  And an iPhone becomes just a smart little phone.  There's a worm lurking in Apple.  Steve must be squirming...somewhere.

The Power of Not Wanting

I want things all the time.  I want sales.  I want money.  I want resources.  I want to build things.  I want people to pat on my back.  I want to be liked.  I want respect.  I want time.  I want to be useful to society (I like this one because it makes me fool myself as a good samaritan).  What if I don't want - even if it is just for a few moments.  Not wanting sets me free.  In that freedom lies great power to do things exactly the way I want because I really don't want.  

Wanting makes me desperate and weak.  Not wanting puts so much faith in my ability to make things happen that I feel heady.  Instead of resisting something that I think shouldn't be happening, I simply say yes and move forward.  This somehow opens doors that I didn't know existed.  Not wanting puts me in a position of saying yes or no.  Wanting puts me in a position of waiting for someone to say yes or no.  Not wanting makes me think of myself as unique and the world as an abundant place full of undiscovered resources.  Wanting makes me competitive, hungry with a hopeless world view that there's not enough out there.  Not wanting triggers that part of my brain that gives me ideas.  Wanting puts emotions at the forefront.  

Not wanting somehow gives me all the things I would think I want.  It gives me time.  When I'm playing with my son and think of that time as his and not mine, it makes me desperate for time.  But when I don't care about time then that time becomes mine and I seem to have infinite time.  When I'm desperate to close a sale, it never closes.  I come across as needy.  When I don't care about the sale, somehow I speak more truthfully and it takes its natural course to closure.  When I don't care if someone likes my work, the focus becomes the work and not useless externalities that dilute it.  

Try not wanting.  Now would that make you want to try it or not want to try it?  Go figure.

Being Okay With Not Knowing

The more I know, the more I seem to get a glimpse of what I don’t.  When I know what I don’t, I soon find that the I-don’t-know part expands and expands.  I don’t seem to know much about the past or the future.  Even better, I don’t seem to know anything about the present.

Let’s travel to our past.  5 years, 100 years, 1,000 years - how about 50,000?  Scientists recently sequenced a Siberian girl’s DNA from her pinkie bone.  Much like me, she had dark eyes, skin and hair but she got to hang out in the Altai mountains back in the days.  They call her kind the Denisovans.  Denisova hominin are an earlier species of humans and Neanderthals - suggesting interbreeding between the two.  What’s more intriguing is that 2.5% of my DNA (and that of most living Asians and Europeans) might be Neanderthal-laced.  This means that my ability or inability to fight diseases today may be the result of sexual choices of my prehistoric grandparents.  Ahem.  Do we really know our past?  How much past is good enough to call it so?

Let bygones be bygones - the present should be more in our grasp.  But time, even in its present moment, is wide and deep.  What we see is not usually what we think it is.  Fungus on old bread isn't just fungus on old bread.  Learning a little about mycelium, I now know that fungus serves as the Internet and circulatory system of our ecology - transferring food and intelligence.  Molecular communication in the environment occurs through cellular mats of fungus, sometimes spreading over thousands of acres.  I'm hardly aware that my lunch is a product of this network that has been in the works for generations past.  So is the present moment really about now?  I don't know.

That leaves our future.  When I think of the future I'm reminded of Sonmi-451, a genetically re-engineered waitress in Cloud Atlas - a deliciously chaotic movie by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer.  In the year 2144, Sonmi starts a revolution when she discovers that bodies of her species are “recycled” into food to produce future waitresses.  Centuries later, most humans are destroyed and the tribe that remains worships her as a fearful deity.  This amusing take of the future makes me wonder about the reality of today that embeds unknown influences of the past.  It also makes me wonder about the future that will borrow from an unreal today.  What is future then?

When we only see the red dot on a white board, we miss the vast nothingness that stares at us.  Time is expansive and cannot be contained.  I don’t think Time thinks of itself as linear dots neatly arranged as past, present and future.  In fact, Time possibly thinks of itself as a repetitious sphere going round and round - think night and day, season after season, yearly revolutions, solar and lunar eclipses, water cycles and so on.   Why should our time be any different?

We love the false sense of security that I-know offers.  But in reality I-don’t.  The more immersed we are in I-don’t-know, the more we may indeed know.  May be.