Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2011/11/21/steve_jobs_made_us_sad/

Chief rabbi: Steve Jobs' Apple lust spreads misery, despair

'iPhone, iPad, I, I, I,' says tablet-blasting Sacks

By Anna Leach

Posted in Software, 21st November 2011 10:20 GMT

Steve Jobs has created a consumer society that makes many of us sad because we don't have the latest iPhone, said the UK's Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Speaking at an interfaith gathering attended by the Queen, Sacks compared the iPad to the tablets of the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from the mountains.

“The consumer society was laid down by the late Steve Jobs coming down the mountain with two tablets, iPad one and iPad two, and the result is that we now have a culture of iPod, iPhone, iTunes, i, I, I," he said.

“When you’re an individualist, egocentric culture and you only care about 'I’, you don’t do terribly well.”

The Queen is widely believed to have an iPad. We hope she didn't take his remarks too personally. Baron Sacks said that people were looking for values other than the short-term profit-centric values of consuming.

“What does a consumer ethic do? It makes you aware all the time of the things you don’t have instead of thanking God for all the things you do have," Lord Sacks said, speaking at the gathering last week.

"If in a consumer society, through all the advertising and subtly seductive approaches to it, you’ve got an iPhone but you haven’t got a fourth generation one, the consumer society is in fact the most efficient mechanism ever devised for the creation and distribution of unhappiness.”

He called for people to spend more time with their families and less time drooling over touchscreen gadgets. So is the Rabbi an open-source man, or just a grumpy Windows user annoyed that he can't get his hands on the latest fondleslab? ®