This event took place in Alpharetta, Georgia… I believe we are talking urban redneck country. This is the sort of thing which could be expected to happen with an ignorant sales clerk.

From the ITAR point of view, an IPad or IPhone is not a very powerful computer– it is simply a computer which can be carried around in a fashionably small pocket– everything else has been compromised to that goal. If you want to play a full-motion photo-realistic video game, or do engineering simulations, a desktop computer is much more practical. An IPad or IPhone is not suitable for use as a micro-controller, either. You can buy something like an Arduino, which is designed for the purpose. Desktop computers of roughly comparable performance are often treated as junk, and can be bought for ten dollars or so at yard sales. Of course, Apple really hates having this fact stated in plain language.

The remedy to Apple’s discrimination is quite simple. On January 32, 1960, Black students commenced a “sit-in” at a racially-segregated lunch counter in a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina. Picketing rapidly spread across the South, and then to the rest of the nation, extending as far as Boston and Chicago. Woolworth’s and the other chain stores surrendered at discretion on July 25, not quite six months after the action began. Very well, Apple is not fundamentally different from Woolworth’s. When people begin picketing Apple stores in Hollywood and Sweden, Apple will surrender at discretion. And now, of course, we have the internet. Communication is faster. I doubt it need take as long as two weeks to bring Apple to its knees.

The Deep South is America’s tragic region, in the same sense that Sicily is Italy’s tragic region, or Andalusia or La Mancha would be Spain’s tragic region, or perhaps Ulster, in the case of Ireland. The Deep South cannot forget that it lost the American Civil War in 1861-65. If you are an Irishman, I don’t suppose you’ve read William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor. There is a recent writer in this tradition, James Lee Burke, who is probably comparatively accessible for foreigners. Do you remember the William Butler Yeats poem in which the young man says that he cannot forgive Dermot and Dvorgilla for inviting Strongbow to Ireland, back in, what, the 1270’s? That approximates the Southern Mind at work.

Here is a famous poem which explains something of the probably mentality of the store clerk. The clerk probably chose, more or less at random, to find a Non-White to pick on, to express his self-hood. Nowadays, that usually does not mean attacking Blacks– they have consolidated their position sufficiently to be able to protect themselves against that kind of thing. It is likely to mean attacking Hispanics, or Asian-Americans, or whatever.

W.E.B. Du Bois, On Being Crazy

http://mca.nmcougars.org/USH/CR/EarlyCR/WEBDuBois.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._E._B._Du_Bois

Du Bois was a charter member of the first group of Black intellectuals after the Civil War. In contrast to his peer, Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute, Du Bois tended to focus on psychological grievances, ie. the condition of constantly being insulted.

This is just such nonsense. Discarded PCs going to the scrap pile or some recycling plant are far more interesting in terms of computational power. What Apple sells is in this regard is last decades technology dressed up very well.

If you are really worried, it’s the expensive high end graphics cards you have to worry about. Now THOSE are actually used in serious computational work.

iThings are just cheap toys.

A further note: It seems, per the Council on American-Islamic Relations statement, that Apple privately contacted one of these people, seeking to defuse the situation. They told the aggrieved Iranian-American that she could buy an IPad or whatever, on-line. That is an old, recurrent pattern of the Segregation-Time in the South. For example, a hotel might offer a Black guest room service in order to keep him out of a public dining room. Out of sight, out of mind. The same applied to railroads and their dining cars. If one takes the University of Mississippi desegregation case, the State of Mississippi tried to buy off James Meredith with a scholarship he could use out-of-state. The White power structure was covertly offering economic justice, but not “justice of esteem.” What the power structure was concerned about was the reaction of the White man at the bottom, who already knew he wasn’t much in terms of the White Power structure, but who could console himself with the belief that at least he was axiomatically better than any Black. With desegregation, that kind of person’s world came tumbling down. The kind of person for whom an IPad matters a lot is _not_ the kind of person who has had various kinds of computers over the last thirty years.

Correction: The date for Strongbow should be 1170, not 1270. I must have been a bit accident-prone yesterday.