If Jason Calacanis is against Apple, who can be for it?

jason_calacanisIt is the end. Jason “The Animal” Calacanis is thinking about maybe quitting using Apple products, reporting that the company has gone all corporate and mainstream and that Steve has lost his hippie, dippy LSD edge. Look at this language, people:

Years and years after Microsoft’s antitrust headlines, Apple is now the anti-competitive monster that Jobs rallied us against in the infamous 1984 commercial. Steve Jobs is the oppressive man on the jumbotron and the Olympian carrying the hammer is the open-source movement

For folks in the tech industry, this is not a new discussion. Another radical visionary, Steve Gillmor, has been hosting this discussion since Apple’s draconian iTunes updates led smart people to *downgrade* their software. Think about that mind bomb for a second: people downgrading their software to maintain their freedoms–is this a William Gibson novel?

Steve Jobs is on the cusp of devolving from the visionary radical we all love to a sad, old hypocrite and control freak–a sellout of epic proportions.

This is not the thought process of a well man. Perhaps Jason spent too much time next to his Tesla roadster or maybe the stress of running Mahalo has finally gotten to him but someone needs to send Jason an iPod Shuffle STAT. Intra-cardial insertion of the Shuffle, much like the needle in Pulp Fiction, has been known to snap anti-Apple zealots out of their madness.

In all honesty I kind of agree with him. His reasons for picking Apple are sound. In terms of tech-per-day, PC and Macs tend to a one-to-one parity. I switched to OS X because every few months I’d have two weeks of intermittent problems with my PC, requiring a full reinstall of XP or 98 or whatever I was running. I called it the Week of Shame. With OS X problems are much more impressive (one recent problem occurred when I upgraded and needed to roll back yet Time Machine didn’t recognize the old back-up) – yet fixable in about a day.

So would I give up Apple. Never!

As for his five points – including his anger at iPod/iTunes lock-in and the App Store debacles – his complaints are pretty common but have come to a head because now instead of hipsters losing their music collections those same hipsters, now self-styled mobile businessmen, are being denied access to a lucrative revenue stream (see Palm Pre v. iTunes and People Who Make Dictionary Apps v. the App Store).

We at TechCrunch are required to follow the company line. For example, we are no longer allowed to use iPhones or shake hands with people or accept embargoes and we are prohibited from wearing red while blogging (long story). However, Michael – and his little pal Jason – can pry my 10-inch MacTablet out of my cold, dead hands when/if it ever appears. Which it will. Because Jobs loves us and is good.