Against the Apple Apologist

Now that the rudimentary over-praising of Steve Jobs has subsided, a compelling deluge of criticism regarding Jobs’ decisions has flooded the Internet.  According to pieces such as this one, Jobs was a tyrannical boss, an unethical entrepreneur, a selfish billionaire, and an asshole of a dad. Not only that, he used to be a staunch believer in alternative medicine, and initially refused to undergo life-saving treatments for his cancer, only regretting his decision when it was far too late.

 

One author, however, has taken it upon herself to defend what she calls all this “finger-wagging” regarding Jobs’ death. She says that:

“…the notion that if we are not doing absolutely everything our doctors and our friends and our shamans tell us, we will commit the great error of not wringing the maximum amount of time out of life, well, that’s really a hell of a lot of pressure.”

“The pressure to make the right choices, the wrenching doubts and fears of disappointing everybody: Aren’t these too much to weigh upon any of us? How much ‘if only’ are we expected to bear? Mortality is grueling enough. But guilt-tripping is an entirely curable condition.”

She wants people to give the guy a break. Personally, though, I feel that it is important to take advantage of all this so-called “finger-wagging,” most especially since Jobs is a celebrity. Alternative medicine doesn’t work, but a lot of people still believe in it. Jobs’ example will continue to be one of the best and most visible cases you can pit against mumbo-jumbo meds. His death, in a sense, can help save lives. At this point, I would rather forego walking on eggshells if it means educating people about the dangers of pseudo-science.

Would you?

Image from technology.ezinemark.com

11 comments

  1. I don't get this article. Jobs believed in alternative medicine but it's not that he was no openly promoting it. If not for his biography, we wouldn't even know about it. So what is the issue here? If the issue is about alternative medicine, then I think there are a lot more people who deserve more to be put in a bad light than Jobs. And he did get surgery, right?

    • Yes, I'd take the source article with a grain of salt. The doctor they interviewed as resource person wasn't even actually involved with Job's medical case and had no access to his medical treatment history, he was just a cancer researcher and it was just his personal opinion on the matter.

      In the spirit of journalistic integrity, it would have been more prudent to interview the doctors actually involved in Job's case who could give a more accurate picture of his treatment regiment instead of resorting to "haka-haka"…Each cancer is a different case, and without access to actual labworks, its still just a guess-timate of what really happened.

      • I'm looking forward to reading his biography. Some portions of the interviews/biography came out as a series of articles (I think bloomberg.com) and in one article it's about the alternative medicine thing. In it, it was mentioned that Jobs regretted getting alternative medicine treatment and that he did not have surgery earlier than he should but we all would not know what could have happened if he did.

        (For the record: I own some Apple products that I have been satisfied with and I used to own other Apple products that I will not buy again like the wi-fi base station, AirMac Express because I think they are low quality. I am not an Apple apologist but I do admire Jobs' business genius being an aspiring entrepreneur myself.)

        • I've been trawling through the cancer-survivor forums and some offered an alternative explanation as to why they delayed surgery – it may be that the cancer was benign at the time and the best thing would be to leave it alone and help your immune system eat it up naturally.
          Some cancers have been known to spread faster after aggressive actions like surgery because the very act of cutting open tissues may spread the cancer cells to other parts of the body. Surgery also taxes your body's immune system a lot so it shouldn't be considered as the 1st choice when determining course of treatment. Quality of life may also decline heavily after surgery so there are a lot of factors to consider. Cancer treatment is not always so clear-cut as scheduling surgery the minute you hear you have cancer, there are a lot of second-guessing and differing opinions on how to balance quality-of-life with probability-for-recovery even among oncologists.

          We may never know the real story until the doctors actually involved in his treatment would step forth, but patient-doctor confidentiality would prevent that, as was the case with Micheal Jackson's death.

          • Reminds me of two other people, not superstitious unlike Jobs, but nonetheless also died of cancer – Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould. (Reading Gould writing about statistics and the probability of surviving cancer is really interesting of not informative.) Cancer remains a serious disease. Anybody diagnosed with it, will have to contemplate about life and make life-changing decisions he/she may regret later on, even have no chance to regret at all.

  2. i think the most honorable gesture you can make for the dead is to remember their memory fairly, taking in the good with the bad. let's not let undue superstition or respect for the dead prevent us from remembering their life accurately. i still detest jobs for making a closed system and stomping on developer freedom.

    to be fair, jobs didn't actually advertise his illness or choice of treatment, so that at least lessens the impact of him involuntarily spreading the notion that alternative medicine to treat a life-threatening disease can be an option.

    also, your use of "alternative medicine" must be qualified. some doctors support the use of variants of alternative medicine (massage, scientifically-tested herbal medicine) as an addition to conventional treatment. for example, the use of aloe vera for treating minor burns and scrapes is recommended, but radical treatments like the use of homeopathy and/or faith healing to treat cancer is frowned upon.

    • I am a developer and I can write programs for Mac as well as for Windows. The way I see it, there's not much difference between the two platforms. Why is it a closed system again? Before the iPhone came out, could anyone just jump in and develop on say Nokia, Nintendo or PlayStation? I think a lot of this "detesting" (a strong word) have solutions. Do you also detest Sony, Nintendo, Sharp, Samsung, for making closed systems TV? Or how about Toyota, Honda, BMW for making closed-systems cars? If you don't want closed systems, assuming you really need the system to be open, is to not buy them. There are plenty of alternatives.

      • sorry for the exaggeration with my use of "detest". 🙂

        i will have to defer to your experience in writing programs for Mac. all i have to go on are the articles about the negative impact of Apple's "draconian" App Store policies on developers, particularly Apple's attempt to thwart the use of Google products on the iPhone (as it turns out, in his biography Jobs hates Android :)).

        i say Apple promotes a closed system, perhaps compared to Windows and Linux. now there is actually an advantage to having all your devices use proprietary hardware (and to a lesser extent, software). Apple has very strict control over ecology of their products, and thus ensures that customers have less problems with interfacing with unsupported systems. better quality, less headaches. imagine the hassle of searching for Linux drivers for a particularly arcane piece of hardware.

        or using iTunes to sync music to your iPod instead of using it as a USB drive (third-party software don't count). i had to download Senuti to get the music from an iPod and place it on a Macbook with a clean HDD.

        as someone who has more patience in mucking around with a gadget, i really would prefer it if i can get officially-supported components from other manufacturers conforming to an open standard. i'd be happy if instead of pushing HTML5, Apple relented and included buggy Flash, just because i'd be missing part of the web experience.

        • Hey, no need to apologize. As a software developer, I can say there will always ways to circumvent "closed" systems. The App store is indeed draconian but the App store is not the only way you get software for Mac. Maybe for iPhone, it sucks (I dont't have iPhone myself), but with lots of apps out there, you will not have needs for an open system except of course if you want to develop and sell your own apps. There are good things and bad things about having a closed systems. The main thing is control. I think Apple is a brand freak in that it chose to build it's brand on some standards it want to control. i think it's not a bad thing in itself. About iTunes, I bought my first and only iPod when it came out out with a Windows compatible iPod. It's a 5GB first generation iPod. There was no iTunes then. There was a software (I think 3rd party) I used to synch my ripped music to my iPod. Mind you, it's ripped music from my own CDs that ANYBODY could do without restrictions. In fact bought an iPod because it's so obvious at that time. I had CDs I didn't want to carry but I have an MP3 CD player and an MD walkman. iPod was the next logical step nd more convenient.

          BTW, it was mentioned somewhere that Jobs really hated Android. He was only human. And the way it was, Eric Schimdt was on Apple board so he got insider info about iPhone while Google was developing and having ambitions about smart phones, Eric Schmidt was CEO of Google at the time he was in the Apple board. I think Shmidt was an asshole playing double agent.

  3. For some people, placebos work.

    As for me, I grew up watching too much anime and believe that diseases can be cured by pure willpower :p

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