Pointless article recommended

Farhad Manjoo, apart from possibility having the hardest journalist name in the world to remember how to spell without looking at it, sometimes writes entertainingly on technology at Slate.

And then, at other times, he's spectacularly trivial.  (No one could forget his jihad against double spacing after periods.)

His latest article, criticising Android phones because they usually include software you don't actually want (oh, and the excruciatingly long time - actually, it sounds like about 10 minutes - it takes to set up a new Android phone) is a good example of one of his poor excuses for a column.

Such pathetic justification for calling a phone "crap" (as compared to an iPhone) has, as you might expect, puzzled some people in comments following:

 This column appears to be a complaint in search of a problem. First, there's nothing remotely unusual, as stated in the first paragraph, about Google making an OS and leaving it up to manufacturers to design devices for it. Microsoft has dominated the PC industry since the 1980's by taking the exact same approach. Likewise, there's nothing inherently better about a device that's "exactly how Apple wants it" as opposed to how some other company wants it. Either way, the device isn't exactly how the user wants it -- and in the case of Apple, there isn't any other way the user can get it either.

And:

I'm an Apple user for a number of reasons, but the "crapware" argument doesn't hold much water for me, given that Apple loads the iPhone with "GameCenter," "NewsStand," "Passbook," "Stocks," not to mention the execrable "Maps," which, while not exactly ads, certainly are crap that I definitely don't need, and that I CAN'T DELETE AT ALL, unless I void the warranty and hack the phone.

The sarcasm is starting to build when you reach this comment: 

Yeah, I hate powerful, inexpensive phones that can easily move proprietary carrier software to the background or root to a base version of the OS. The universal charging port, free apps, open source coding and competitive hardware market just make it worse.
 
Give me an overpriced phone from a price-fixing bully of a company that's outdated on its release and designed for hipsters and the technologically illiterate. How else will I map my drive from an island that doesn't exist to a national park that's in the wrong state?

And gets a bit personal further down:

Farhad's objections aside, I would rather live in the universe of Samsung than the hideous dead world of Apple, with its fetid and rank odor of pancreatic cancer and denial and "All phones must be small" and everything else that I find offensive with that bizarro corporate worldview. Thank god for Samsung, hey? Tomorrow, maybe I'll root again, but seriously I find myself unhampered by what I'm living in now.

I don't have a smartphone of any description, although the cheapie one my wife uses seems perfectly adequate to me.  In the matter of comparing iPads to Android tablets I have firmer views, which I should one day express is a post.  Well I would, except for the fact that my firm view is that neither  one knocks the other out of the ballpark.