I hate Apple. Don’t be mistaken, this isn’t a gentle dislike. I despise the company, their products and, above all else, their customers.

When I see trendy young things tapping away on their shiny MacBooks, bopping up and down to their iPods or fellating their lifesize model of Steve Jobs, I feel an (almost) uncontrollable urge to commit cruel and unusual acts of punishment.

I am not, by nature, a violent man (I have the musculature of a malnourished urchin, violence would be a particularly poor life choice) but there’s something about products with the “i” prefix that just makes me mad.

There are many practical reasons to believe the Mac is a pernicious influence on the computer industry and that the products in question don’t quite live up to the propaganda. However, I prefer to concentrate on the more ephemeral.

It is not difficult to find appropriate analogies for the Apple phenomenon. In a way it’s remarkable that a thing can be awful in so many different ways.

Presumably Mr. Jobs holds some sort of Communist utopian vision of what the world should be like. A world where there is only one computer, one operating system, one music player, one phone and no freedom to choose.

I imagine that this is the sort of masturbatory fantasy Soviet apparatchiks would hold dear — a world of faceless drones in grey, carrying their machines to and fro, each and every one available only in black or white.

On the other hand, whilst there may be socialist dreaming, the reality is that Apple embodies the worst excesses of capitalism. Markets thrive on competition; Apple thrives on ensuring it can never happen. Epicycles of proprietary technology ensure that once you’re trapped in the labyrinth, there’s no choice.

As annoying as the company is, though, it is the legions of acolytes that really feed my bitter hatred and deep-seated revulsion.

It is a relatively popular pastime in the technology press to compare Apple fanboys (and girls) with cultists. This, however, seems a little unfair to the likes of Messrs Cruise and Travolta. After all, at least Scientology makes us laugh.

Apple-worship, on the other hand, is a humorless pastime, requiring slavish product devotion and bizarrely intimate expressions of love for one’s iPod. Plus there’s no Xenu.

Those dreadful Mac vs. PC television ads have few merits, but they do nicely capture a certain kind of Apple user: The wannabe creative.

Each evening, the cafes of San Francisco are filled with people who spend their days embarrassedly scraping together a living by working, but pass their nights living the dream and “creating” (in fact, if everyone in the city had as much to contribute to cultural enrichment as they thought they did, we would be on the verge of a second Renaissance).

It is apparently the case that any deficit in talent or inspiration can be made up with the judicious purchase of a MacBook. Writer’s block is so much more meaningful when accented by white plastic and glowing logos.

That indefinable idea of “cool” has been neatly packaged up for sale (with the aid of diverse-looking 20-somethings and hip music) by the boys and girls at Apple. Even more impressive, they’ve managed to mass-market the notion of uniqueness.

Hoards of folks buy Macs, iPods and whatnot in order to stand out from the crowd. After all, nothing screams “Look at me, I’m different!” quite like owning the same computer as all of your friends.

Another thing that’s a source of endless puzzlement to me is the hero worship of Mr. Jobs. After all, he’s just a guy running a computer company.

This devotion is especially odd when contrasted with the reception Bill Gates generally gets from the same people. Without launching into a tedious discussion of the relative merits of the greatest charitable donor in history and some dude who wears jeans, presumably we can all agree that whatever the differences in achievements, they don’t merit the differences in public image.

There are nice parallels between company, customers and products. They all present nothing to the outside world but image. It is not so much style over substance, but some seamless amalgamation of the two.

All of which means that this article is pointless. No Apple user is going to read it and suddenly realize the error of their ways (or more to the point, acknowledge the brainwashing). No, my criticism will slide off the polished exterior casing, generating nothing more than a sotto voce “Apple-hater” or a shake of the head at my ignorance.

Still, the ranting makes me feel better.

Email navins@stanford.edu with recipes for hash brownies. Alternatively, you could write something about my article, but that would kind of dull.