Apple's Cult Lives On

2:30 PM -- Amusing to see the flak that Alexander Wolfe, a former EE Times colleague, is taking for his Top 7 iPhone Questions Steve Jobs Doesn't Want You To Ask. Several of the more vicious comments boil down to, "How dare you question the glory that is Apple!"

You get used to this. I remember covering Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) during some pretty bad times -- the Gil Amelio days. Any non-positive story brought out the hate mail from the Apple cult. That includes the neutral stories; we'd get letters asking why, in mentioning Apple peripherally, we didn't elaborate on how the Mac was bringing Utopia to the masses. Accusations of Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) payoffs flew freely (never mind that our entire publication ran on Macs).

Even funnier, any faintly positive Apple stories brought out the haters, too, with letters bemoaning how only a brainwashed Mac acolyte would even bother writing stories about the doomed company.

Granted, this was more than a decade ago, and my memory probably exaggerates a bit. Our message-board traffic on the iPhone seems more rational and mature than what Alex is getting. But in an age where performance is measured by Web hits, I guess the moral is that I should be mentioning Apple in every story.

Can't you just see the headlines: "Nera Wins in Indonesia and Apple Sucks."

— Craig Matsumoto, Senior Editor, Light Reading