Apple fanbois are 'MENTALLY UNSTABLE' but you still have to 'SERVICE' them

QuOTW This was the week in which we learned that Apple shop staff have been ordered to "touch" fanbois – even though many the iSlaves appear to hate their customers.

Angela Arhendts, who swapped life at Burberry to head up Apple's retail division, said she expected staff to "service" members of the public.

"How do you make sure they (every customer that you touch) will walk away feeling very different, very positive?," she pondered.

"You know how to service customers, but we are sprinting a marathon right now and it's not going to stop."

Stop, you're making us blush, Angie.

With all this fruity talk, it's lucky that Apple staff consider themselves to be such sexual gods. We say gods on purpose, because according to the grumpy shop worker behind a terribly sexist Reddit post that called fanbois "mentally unstable", there simply are no beautiful iGoddesses employed at Apple.

"They say Apple guys make the best boyfriends," wrote the Apple shop worker under the pseudonym FruitStandSalve. "To be honest, when it comes to hot girls, there's something called the Apple effect. Since we see these girls so much, someone that is mediocre looking turns into a 8. We don't have many hot girls."

Sadly, this week we saw that bigotry is still a problem in the tech world as well as the real one. Tim Cook bravely came out last week, sparking a a furious reaction from dickhead homophobes the world over.

Responses in Russia were particularly ugly, with anti-gay activists tearing down a memorial to Steve Jobs.

"In Russia, gay propaganda and other sexual perversions among minors are prohibited by law," said ZEFS, the backward organisation which organised the stunt.

"After Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly called for sodomy, the monument was taken down to abide to the Russian federal law protecting children from information promoting denial of traditional family values."

Hmmm, we don't remember Cook saying anything about that. He's banged on about a pointless watch which could cost anything up to $5,000... but that's about it. Better luck next time, Mr Homophobski.

One person who holds absolutely no offensive opinions (or many opinions at all, for that matter) is the singer Taylor Swift. However, although she's the poster child for the blandly shiny-happy internet generation, there's one thing she won't tolerate: a dent in her pay packet.

The super-rich pop princess is so set on superwealth that she decided to shun the streaming music service Spotify, which is notorious for paying artists little more than a pittance.

"Rare things are valuable," she wrote. "Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is. I hope they don’t underestimate themselves or undervalue their art."

Ms Swift is perhaps the most benign star of the internet age, yet it's always useful to remember that modern media isn't just all boys, gifs and virtual hugs. Far from it, in fact, because while the nice folk of the world are caning their copy of Taylor's new album, 1989, a good proportion of the blokes of Planet Earth are busily slaughtering whole armies of virtual enemies.

So do computer games make us more violent? Not a bit of it, claimed the researcher behind a study into whether the media makes us more violent.

"Society has a limited amount of resources and attention to devote to the problem of reducing crime," said Christopher Ferguson of Stetson University. "There is a risk that identifying the wrong problem, such as media violence, may distract society from more pressing concerns such as poverty, education and vocational disparities and mental health," Ferguson said.

"This research may help society focus on issues that really matter and avoid devoting unnecessary resources to the pursuit of moral agendas with little practical value."

One thing Blighty should definitely be focusing its attention on is superfast broadband. However, Martin Horwood, Lib Dem MP for Cheltenham, is worried that the countryside will be left out of the 2-megabits-per-second broadband fun.

He said: "The real risk is that neither of the targets will be met in Cheltenham, and if they are not met in an urban area such as Cheltenham, they are unlikely to be met nationwide."

Away from the metropolis that is Cheltenham, we find that 4G network speeds have slumped by 50 per cent in the past year.

The consumer bible Which? said: "We found that average 4G speeds are slowing – from 19Mbps to 10.16Mbps in just under a year. The reason? It’s likely because more customers have signed up to 4G, thus increasing demand on the network and slowing speeds.

"The good news is that as customers continue to sign up, we won’t necessarily see speeds fall any further. That’s because providers are hoisting more masts to cope with the extra demand."

We end our roundup of the week's news with the revelation that Steve Jobs nursed a grudge for the whole of his life.

John Sculley, the former Apple chief who booted Steve Jobs out of the company in the '80s, has said Jobs always hated him.

“We never really talked. Steve Jobs never forgave me – Apple was his baby,” Sculley admitted at the Web Summit in Dublin. So who won in that battle?

We don't think Sculley will have to call Mulder to solve this particular OS X file. ®