The Lure of the Dark Side

For the past month the Dark Side of the Force has been trying to lure me in. In case you’re not aware of what the Dark Side is let me explain. The Force, as in Star Wars, is the power that controls good and evil. In the hi-tech world there is the Good Side, exemplified by Open Source Linux and Android, and the Dark Side, ruled by the two Evil Empires, MSFT and the iFruit company.

Late last year I was visiting my son and his family and I saw the Dark Side at work. My son had succumbed to the siren song of evil and had bought into the iFruit myth. He and his wife had iPhones, she had an iPad and they bought a Mac for Christmas. Why would they do that when they had perfectly good Android Smartphones and several laptops and netbooks already in place? Beats me!!

Then I went to CES and saw some really cool products, all of them requiring iOS or Win8. Since then we’ve received several of them to review and rather than doing the normal thing which is assigning them to writers who have the hardware on hand to properly test them, I have been tempted to buy new hardware! It may be hard to imagine but I have actually been pricing iPads!! Walmart, by the way, beats everyone else’s price in this area.

Will I finally be lured into the endless abyss of the Dark Side or will I remain a free man using free software? Stay tuned.