Just for general information, here's the AppleInsider link John is probably referring to, concerning discoloration of white iPhones: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/06/30/white_iphone_3gs_units_discoloring_from_excessive_heat.html
The article ends, "Apple so far hasn't commented on the issue and has taken to closing a large discussion thread on its forum centering on the subject. However, some have had success obtaining replacements."
Criticizing a company to put pressure on it is reasonable--especially if you happen to be one of its customers--but concluding that Apple is "fascistic" seems to me a bit ill-advised. On one point in particular: Apple still manufactures its own hardware, and so offers a more limited range of models than what Windows users can choose; this strategy has served it well enough in the PC marketplace, as Apple hasn't gone the way of IBM. The limited range of hardware is perhaps one of the reasons why John thinks Apple takes choice away from its customers. If you really want to make that argument, you would have to see first the degree to which all product choice offers the illusion of freedom. Moreover, Macintosh users (like me) are likely to suggest that Apple's software is generally much more flexible than Windows, while still more usable than Linux. (In its software design, with which I have some acquaintance, Apple continues to be more open to innovation than Microsoft, whose software sustains the same paradigms it always has used.) It could also be argued that Microsoft has a much more dismissive attitude toward its non-corporate customers than Apple.
Branding a company as fascist seems appropriate to me only when, say, it is actually politically engaged with fascism. Mercedes-Benz is sometimes used as an example, and there are claims about IBM's commerce with the Nazi regime.
This isn't of course quite what John was saying. And reading some other posts here, I've noticed what seems like an obsessive focus on one company as a supposed embodiment of its customers' authoritarian mindset. While I think some misapprehensions are involved, this also seems to me to miss the larger picture of consumer culture. And I do wonder what kinds of satisfaction this persistent attack on Apple and its supposedly deluded customers yields.
P.S. Readers interested in technology might be interested in Jaron Lanier's defense of closed-source development (here: http://discovermagazine.com/2007/dec/long-live-closed-source-software/), in which the iPhone is mentioned once or twice. Though open technologies are a good thing, I agree with Lanier that they are leading to widespread assumptions about technological availability and innovation that aren't necessarily correct.
