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Kids All Round the World React Negatively to Old Apple Computers

Kids All Round the World React Negatively to Old Apple Computers
June 17
11:11 2014

In yet another attempt to get a chuckle out of bewildered children, a duo called the The Fine Brothers asked kids and teens to play with an old Apple II computer without telling those kids how to use it first. How did the kids react?

You can just about imagine the hilarity that ensued. No apps. No defined colors. No Internet. Kids were tapping the keyboard trying to get the damned thing to turn on. Little do our children of today understand that the ancient computer beasts had to be fired up by flipping  a switch in the back. What an inconvenience!

Clunky pixelated games are what the children eventually sought, when they realized the blocky computer wasn’t going to offer much else. No music? No YouTube? If you haven’t seen the video, clear your schedule tonight and watch it:

Meanwhile, in China, in a darkened industrial region where a factory called Foxconn is run, there is a shift in plans. The strenuous production of sleek Apple products — the iPhones, iPods, iPads — are to be replaced for a few hours with instructions to build a couple hundred “anniversary” editions of the Apple II computer.

Foxconn designs, develops, and produces products for European, American, and Japanese companies. Their manufacturing prices cannot be beaten anywhere on earth. Peasant children who are forced out of rural areas because of poverty, government restrictions, or by their parents’ hand, end up with the only jobs available. Thankfully, Foxconn also has housing, which streamlines production and offers the kids a communal place to rest during their four hours off of work each day.

Today, there is great consternation among the children. Many have already worked fifteen hours, and a change in plans is not easy. Their jobs are tedious and specialized. There is not much real estate within the iPhone. Each component requires steady hands using micro tools. Attach the widget to the doodad, except with eye-blinding precision. Brush a bit of sealer on the 3.7V 1420 mAh Li-Polymer battery. But don’t solder it to the logic board. Or the cost of the mix-up will be taken out of your paycheck.

On paper, an adept factory like Foxconn should be able to whip out a couple hundred archaic computers in a few hours, yet the shift in gears is cumbersome.

One girl who calls herself Xi jumped out of the tenth-story window in an attempt to escape the hot factory floor, where the smoke of soldering metal and burning plastic sears the children’s eyes and noses. Kids react in the strangest ways.

Xi was caught in a suicide net, punished to work with no pay for a week, and will, if her aberrant behavioral patterns shape up, be allowed to be compensated her usual handful of cents an hour next week.

Steve_Jobs_AppearanceThe net was a surprise. At first she’d thought death was that simple. It felt like life did, except with cooler outside air on your skin, and a bouncy feeling as your body weight was absorbed by the springing elastic netting. There really was a sense of freedom in death.

When the factory’s security scooped her out of the net, Xi wondered still if maybe she’d died and had ended up in hell, which was really just another layer of the life you’d already been living.

That night, though, Xi had a surprise dream. Those who do good on this planet, and have true sincerity and love in their hearts, are said to be visited in their dreams by a prophet, a saint, or a mystic as a sign of encouragement and kinship. Somewhere CEO guru and Apple cult-leader Steve Jobs got wind of this practice, and now, after his death, he’s been using this technique of popping into the dreams of his most forced and dedicated servants to offer a hand and a kind nod that seems to say, “Don’t worry, it gets better when you’re dead.”

[Steve Jobs photo by Chris 73; Foxconn child labor photo by Steve Jurvetson]

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