The rotten apple.

Steve Jobs is dead. My best wishes go to his family and close friends - who are no doubt experiencing the pain and loss that go with losing a loved one, especially when they die before old age. He was a father, a husband, a son. RIP.

Now. I am not his wife, his daughter, his mother, not even a remote acquaintance of his. Yet, much as I have my daughters smiling face on my desktop, every time I access the internet I am faced with this.

Steve Jobs was a man. He made computers. Some of the computers he and his company made were different. That is it.

Like Diana (who was a woman who married the man who was the son of a Queen), in death he is being revered in a religious-style: confirming the suspicion that Apple is more of a cult than a company. Cults are dangerous.

As a User Experience Designer, many will try to argue with me about the 'good work' that Apple has done. Largely this will centre around the (now decades old) innovation of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) that used human-oreinted visual metaphors to represent the environment of a computer (desktop, folder, file, document etc.) so that people could more easily interact with, interpret and manipulate their data. Great. But innovations happen all the time. No one cried (beyond the appropriate close family and friends) when the inventor of the portable defibrillator died http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Pantridge - yet he invented something that had a dramatic impact on the very existence or not of many many people.

But then of course, Jobs has done more than that. He - through his leadership of the Apple corporation - has created personal devices that entertain us. He has enabled us to stay in contact with other people just like us across the world, and and to shut out the existence of the less pleasant that might physically surround us. We can now help anyone, anywhere instantly just by spreading information, ensuring that thousands of pounds each year of disposable income is not wasted on supporting out local businesses or available to charity.

He has created a global unification of the upper-middle classes. A joint aspiration to have the latest version of portable consumer electronics. This ensures that there is a constant demand for manufactured goods with a sales model that encourages the disposal of these items. I'm sure I could go on.

But the main argument is often that 'Apple is better because its easy to use'. And yes, it is. But does this mean that is it better?

Cigarettes are quite easy to use. They come in handy 20 or 10 packets, with enticing packaging and until recently seductive marketing campaigns. And they are addictive. Once you start using them, they are always on your mind - you want them all the time, even the idea, the haptic sensation of opening the packet, the feel of the slim tube between the fingers - you'll *need* to have one as soon as possible.

Now consider the analogy, but not in a knee-jerk way. Just because something is easy to use does not make it inherently good. Nor does it make it bad. It just makes it easier. Yes, Apple's products have been easy to use, they have been fun, they have been revolutionary. But so are cigarettes.

Apple's products are toys at best. Made for generations of self-interested kidults with short attention spans