Mockery

I was actually going to call this post “iMockery” but that’s already a web site, and I don’t want to confuse anyone. No, what I am referring to this time is a follow-up to my recent post about the Apple Computer iPhone fracas, which I had called Current Events. This morning the Internet was buzzing about an article that supposedly reported that Apple was also going to settle another old score – refunding the money wasted by anyone who purchased a Lisa computer back in 1983.

For anyone who does not remember, the Lisa was the first home computer to hit the market with a Graphical User Interface (or GUI). Despite the claims and counterclaims made at the time, neither Apple nor Microsoft invented the idea; the GUI was a Xerox invention from about five years earlier. You can read about the controversy and developments here if you like. As is often the case, the Lisa failed badly – as much because there was no software for it to run that made use of its unique abilities as for the legions of bugs still lurking in the operating system. Of course, the $10,000 price tag did not help; back in 1983 that was enough money to buy a car. A nice car, in fact.

I was almost ready to believe the “article” when I noticed the dollar figure this gesture was expected to cost Apple at the end. The author is talking about a $70,000 cost, and since the difference in price between the Lisa and the first Mackintosh computer (released a few months later) is about $7,500, that would imply that they only sold 10 or fewer Lisa units. Here’s the link to this journalistic hoax. Sure enough, a visit to the Apple site reveals nothing about any Lisa refund ever being considered.

I think the point being made here is that Steve Jobs was correct in his original remarks about the drop in price for the iPhone: technology DOES always drop in price within a year or less, and everybody knows it. Certainly, the $7,500 (in 1983 dollars, no less) that people lost buying a Lisa when what they wanted was a Mac was far more egregious than the $200 they paid for being the first people to have an iPhone. Yet there was no public outcry at the time. And, since the Internet was still known only to a handful of technology wonks, there was obviously no flame war, either.

I’m not sure if all of this reflects an increasingly touchy society hung up on its perceived entitlements (show me where in the Constitution it says that you can’t make money on the gullible – or even on the Early Adopters) or the fact that email and an electronically interconnected world allow everyone to express their outrage about the least little thing whenever and however they like, or both. I just know that all of the people who flamed Apple, Steve Jobs, or anyone else over the iPhone price reduction are being mocked – and that they richly deserve to be…