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Self-appointed Apple evangelists are far and away the Valley's most exasperating demographic. Yet I feel sorry for them.

There are zealots for anything interesting in tech — blogging, Wikipedia, digital media sharing, Facebook — but Apple evangelists put everyone else to shame. Why? It's the cross product of two powerful factors:

  • Most evangelists are one-trick ponies. Podcasts. Widgets. There's pretty much one message that they repeat over and over. But Apple gives the Applevangelist a new and totally different reason that Apple is changing the world every six months. A year ago, Apple TV was going to destroy cable and video rentals because "people want to own videos, not rent them." Then it was the iPhone. Then a new Mac operating system. Now, Apple TV is rumored to be planning video rentals. Never mind the contradiction, this is going to change everything!
  • Apple arms its evangelists with shiny consumer gadgets they can wave in your face. Open sourcers are another group who also have a new open-version-of-something every six months. They can also stretch it to apply to any free service, such as Wikipedia or blogs. But open source products such as Google's Android mobile software are nebulous, cloud-like entities compared to an iPhone. And at Apple prices, the evangelist has a lot of buyer's justification to do for all that money he spends. By contrast, an open-sourcer only needs to justify all the time he spends configuring his Linux box — time he can't spend pushing you to get one.

Still, I feel sorry for the Apple pushers. Because as Apple has figured out, they're utterly unnecessary. Steve Jobs ignores the blogosphere and fanboys, does what he thinks is right, and advertises the result on broadcast television. In fact, the best way for fanboys to get me to replace my BlackBerry with an iPhone is probably to stop trying. Apple's products sell themselves better than an overbearing guy in a "Geek Pride" t-shirt ever will.

(Photo of actually-pretty-likable Apple fan Chad Hutchins and his iPhone by Chad Hutchins and his iPhone)