I’ve been a devotee for a long time. You can blame it on Sewanee. When we arrived there in 1994, just after Windows came out, Sewanee was an all Mac campus. I never recovered. I never got used to Windows and found keyboard commands and functionality on Macs more user-friendly, intuitive, and quicker.

But that’s as far as my brainwashing went. Others are more deeply inducted into the cult. There’s Andy Crouch, who argues Steve Jobs has offered hope in an increasingly despairing world. The Ipod appeared in October 2001, just after 9-11 and the Ipad was introduced in January of 2010, in the depths of the recession and in a month when unemployment hit 10%.

On Jobs, Crouch writes:

But the genius of Steve Jobs has been to persuade us, at least for a little while, that cold comfort is enough. The world—at least the part of the world in our laptop bags and our pockets, the devices that display our unique lives to others and reflect them to ourselves—will get better. This is the sense in which the tired old cliché of “the Apple faithful” and the “cult of the Mac” is true. It is a religion of hope in a hopeless world, hope that your ordinary and mortal life can be elegant and meaningful, even if it will soon be dated, dusty, and discarded like a 2001 iPod.

But Andrew Sullivan goes even further:

This is certainly why my own conversion to Apple, and my deep loyalty to the company and its products, somehow felt comforting in the last decade. Their style elevates me, their power and reliability I have come to take for granted. Their stores have the innovation and beauty that a renewed Christianity would muster in its churches, if it hadn’t collapsed in a welter of dogma and politics.

While I appreciate the convenience of the Apple Store and am deeply indepted to their knowledgeable staff, entering one gives me the willies. It’s especially scary at the tables set up for little children where you can see kids barely able to walk punching buttons, mesmerized by video screens. There may be innovation there, but I see no beauty, and nothing of the sacred.