A prostitute solicits a young man, “For fifty dollars, I’ll let you talk to me about your iPhone.

Apple’s stock rose over 6%, to almost $450, a record high, after it reported its most recent earnings. CNN was putting a target price on Apple of $666, or the number of the devil. No one who knows me, would call me an Apple-phile, but I do love my iPhone. This dichotomy, love the product, but hate the company, would present difficulties for some, but not me. I am prepared to condemn Apple, all of its products, even the iPhone, just not my instance of this device.

Let me first dispense with the rest of Apple’s product line. I’m a PC and I am proud of it, the Mac and its ilk are just overpriced versions of the same product. All of Apple’s innovations were actually stolen from Xerox, which was too stupid to squash the upstart Apple. Ridley Scott’s famous 1984 Macintosh commercial was great, but it fingered the wrong villain. He should have implicated Apple, today’s Big Brother. Let’s segue now to Apple, via the iPhone.

“NPR’s “This American Life” recently showcased, Mike Daisy and his monologue, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”. Check it out. Mr. Daisy, a self-professed Apple-phile, learned of an iPhone that was sold with photographs on it, taken in its factory, in China. These pictures led him on an odyssey, to China. Exercising his own brand of investigative journalism, he uncovered many examples of labor abuse, child labor, blacklisting and unsafe working conditions, to name a few of the offenses that he cataloged.

Daisy’s similarities to Michael Moore, both physically and in journalistic temperament I found unmistakable. The second half of the “This American Life” show does some fact-checking that shows that Apple has corrected many of these abuses. This went only part way to assuage the guilt of an iPhone owner, such as myself.

A Conversation with Siri

Piling on with Apple’s sins, there is its recent debacle, when it attempted to market the iPhone in China. Riots ensued and all sales were soon suspended. Those iPhones were retailed for $800, four times what I have paid for any iPhone. All this in the country of its manufacture.

I have lambasted Apple, but what about its customers? Just like Latin American drug kingpins couldn’t survive without their American drug users, neither could Apple survive without its sycophants. You, the American Apple customer are just as guilty as Apple is of unfair labor practices, etc.

Then there are the injuries that iPhone owners perpetrate upon the rest of society. Case in point, was the recent, much publicized incident at a performance of the NY Philharmonic Symphony. The iPhone’s marimba ringtone went off in the middle of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9. Sure other cell phone users have disrupted a myriad of other performances, but have any of those phone users been dressed down in public, by the conductor?

I want to come clean with you, the reader now. I am a Microsoft Secret Ninja (MSN). I report directly to Mr. Gates and have been working to combat the international Apple conspiracy for many years now. An Apple a day, keeps the doctor away? Don’t believe it, it is all propaganda. They can have my PC, when they sieze it from my cold dead hands, and about my iPhone? I’ll have to text you on that one.