August 29, 2011
Steve Jobs Chairman of the Board Apple Computer Inc1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014
Steve,
Congratulations, such as it is, on your recent retirement from your veritable position as the Main Brain behind Apple. The accomplishments of Apple Computers under your heady stead are bogglingly numerous, monumental, and, perhaps most important, beneficial to humanity for generations to come. You moved us forward, kicking and screaming at times, but onward toward that great maw of science fiction that we now see as our reality.
I sincerely hope that your retirement is more for your own peace of mind and to more keenly (if possible) focus and facilitate your creative process than it is for health related reasons, as has been speculated. In either case, and speaking for my brethren in human skin, whom even the nastiest of Regressives would have to agree, we wish you many great and thoughtful days ahead.
I write to you out of a gnawing and mounting sense of personal frustration. I have been an avid user of Apple products for years, both professionally and personally. The first keyboard that I ever drooled upon was a Macintosh. I wrote my first love letter on an Apple 2. If my skills of perverse persuasion had been anywhere as effective back then as the machine which manifested the delivery of my deepest teenage desires, it is a certainty that I would have had a much more satisfied high school existence. A transplanted North Californian at the ripe age of 8, in 1980, I literally grew up with Apple as my tangible image of good business, and yourself cast in the role of our technical Moses. As a professional video producer and writer, your inventions and subsequent products have made my career (such as it is) more user friendly, creative, and portable. Until recently, that is.
Despite my best efforts to lead a clean life, with steady piles of veges and fruits, I am unfortunately enduring some sort of rotten Apple syndrome of late. I must have acquired some sort of reverse-Midas touch to have tapped into such awful technical juju, but I can currently count at least six key components to my personal and professional life as deader than Al Davis’ facial nerves.
Every single high end digital device that I own with an Apple serial code tattooed on its cool, contoured underbelly is currently miserably, haplessly, and (to me) tragically broken. The little green lights that have warmed me with their constant, productivity-promising presence for all of these years have all gone terribly dim. No workie workie. None of it. Not my constant companion – my Macbook Pro, my glorious iPhone, my iPods, slim white keyboard, or even the moderately form-fitting SuperMouse. It’s all broken. And damn it all to hell, Steve, I need all of this great shit to work.
“Get it fixed, dude” you might well say. “We’ve got great techs, stores FULL of them, in fact.” All well and good, unless you are living check to check, indeed, job to job as I have been since the bottom dropped out in 2008. I’ve paid twice now to have the bastard motherboard of my professional central nervous system – my Mac Book Pro repaired. It’s the heat, they tell me. Metaphorically, I like to think that the battery can’t handle the intense fire that my creativity produces, or some such. In truth, the beast was maldesigned to handle the regular work of a modern multimedia professional. There aren’t enough fans, apparently. Ironic, in that you could say the same about my efforts as a writer. Nor is there any income to repair my basket full of bruised Apples.
I have now had three such failures in the past year, and each time it has crippled my productivity to the point of inviting the slothful dogs of sustained poverty directly into my cabin office. My second iPhone (the first one was stolen from the Monterey Rec Center. We tracked the thieves via Mobile Me until they wiped the phone and replaced my contacts with a series of Nortenos gang symbols before my very eyes) stopped working when a truly embarrassingly small amount of water touched the screen. That was months ago. Though urged not to by your support people, I performed delicate neurosurgery to the bloody thing in the glum light of my neighbors tack shed and somehow gave it a new battery, as recommended on the boards, but no avail. I still wound up stuck perpetuitously in some godforsaken logo loop. The iPods all died separately in consecutive Februaries. My wife refuses to buy anything with an Apple tag for Christmas anymore because of it. She thinks that we are jinxed or cursed, as if there is a difference.
I write to you because I am beyond wits end. I can’t even see a trace of wit from here. It is possible that you might be both the only person who cares to help a working schmuck like me, and simultaneously do something positive for our economy right now. It’s an easy proposition, Steve: Fix my shit, and you fix America. My livelihood depends on this pile of gorgeous garbage working properly. Without it, I simply cannot do my job, nee cannot even look for a job, and thus in time I wind up back on the streets alongside the millions of other workless fools. America needs jobs like Michelle Bachmann needs Jesus H. Christmas himself to stump for her doomed campaign of brain dead logic and civil indifference. And of all things, I’d think that you’d be interested in that. They don’t call you Mr. Jobs fer nothing, do they?
I’ll end with a quote that seems applicable, while admitting that I have no bleeding clue who the author is. Seems like a right minded chap, eh?
“Fix your eyes on perfection and you make almost everything speed towards it.”
-William Elery Channing
Beep,
Corby Anderson 0300 Vagneur Lane Cabin A Basalt, CO 81621
Nice letter. Lots of broken Macs out there right now.
Great piece Corby. T
There’s always a percentage of ‘bad apples’ out there it seems, even with the best brands. My Apple, Dell and HP products (I have all three currently) all work swimmingly without defect or fault…since the beginning of time. My 1999 NEC laptop with windows ’98 is still my art and graphics machine (although the hard drive is only 2gb and the battery doesn’t hold a charge anymore)…I’m either lucky or you’re unlucky?
Good luck and I hope Steve Jobs throws you a WIlly Wonka and gives you the Factory!