The Crazy Ones

I miss the way being an Apple fan used to make me feel.

The CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, recently donated $1 million of his personal funds to the inaugural fund for Donald Trump. He did this after publicly congratulating him for his win. It made me furious to see the powerful out gay man in the US kiss the ring of the leader of the party that seeks to persecute and demonize LGBT people at every turn.

My IT career became heavily Mac focused in 2000. I went to work for a school district where the majority of computers used by students were LC-575s and Power Mac 5500s. Our new purchases were Bondi Blue G3 iMacs with the infamous hockey puck mouses. There were still plenty of Apple IIe desktops in use. Lots of Oregon Trail was played. We bought hundreds of computers at the time and received boxes of promotional material from our Apple rep. It was my first encounter with the iconic black and white posters of the crazy ones the people Apple selected to represent the Think Different campaign. I still have a few hundred of the rainboa Apple stickers that came with new computers in those days. I wish I had some of the posters too. Today they sell for up to $500 apiece.

The name was inspired by a passage from Jack Kerouac's book On the Road

"The only people for me are the mad ones the ones who are mad to live mad to talk mad to be saved desirous of everything at the same time the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn burn burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'""

Apple's version was:
"Here's to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They're not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them disagree with them glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They push the human race forward.
And while some may see them as the crazy ones
We see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think
they can change the world
Are the ones who do."

The people pictured in the ads were by and large heroic figures from the 20th century with a couple of billionaires thrown in because nobody's perfect.

  • Albert Einstein
  • Bob Dylan
  • Martin Luther King Jr.
  • Richard Branson
  • John Lennon (with Yoko Ono)
  • Buckminster Fuller
  • Thomas Edison
  • Muhammad Ali
  • Ted Turner
  • Maria Callas
  • Mahatma Gandhi
  • Amelia Earhart
  • Alfred Hitchcock
  • Martha Graham
  • Jim Henson (with Kermit the Frog)
  • Frank Lloyd Wright
  • Pablo Picasso.

Only three of those people are still alive, Richard Branson,.Yoko Ono and Bob Dylan. Branson may have voted for Trump out of ruling class solidarity, but I doubt Yoko did, and you can god-damned bet your bottom dollar Bob Dylan did not.

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