The MacWorld keynote always makes a big splash. You can set your watch by it, not to mention the stock market. And even the MacWorld-uninitiated have been dealing with iPhone hype every summer since 2007.

This is all to say that if Apple was going to annoy me, they’ve had ample opportunity well before this iPad thing. But for me, Apple’s hype machine remained a faint noise in the background until my new job in 2007 assigned me a MacBook Pro as a work laptop. Since I’m a longtime Linux user, the Mac OS took some getting used to, but soon I actually started enjoying it. And when I drunkenly dunked my precious Nokia N95 in the anti-hangover water by my bedstand in June of ‘08, I ended up replacing it with a 3G iPhone, which I used for over a year.

I enjoyed it. I got myself a bunch of apps just like everyone else. But about six months ago, the Apple/Google rivalry began over the Google Voice iPhone app.

That did me in. I couldn’t help feeling that Apple was abusing its power as a market influencer, once again moving us away from openness and interoperability. Nobody said this better than Fake Steve Jobs. I got really mad and cancelled my iPhone contract (and my AT&T landline), sold the 3G on Craigslist, sold my MacBook Pro, sold my Apple stock.

It felt really good.

But while I’d realized what annoyed me about Apple’s product policies, I still hadn’t put my finger on why Apple’s hype machine bugged me so much. After all, it’s just a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It doesn’t move me or the people I respect to buy their products.

But with today’s iPad keynote, I finally realized why. After all, tablets are nothing new. Unlike the iPhone, the iPad is hardly a market breakthrough. Tablets? E-book readers? That’s so three years ago. Movies on the go? Wait, doesn’t everybody’s laptop do that now? Last time I was on a plane, it sure seemed like it.

No, what bugs me about Apple is that they’ve figured out how to cater to that particular thing I hate about Americans: tell them [this is good] in the right way, and it becomes true. In the last couple of years, Apple has transformed itself from an innovator of never-before-seen hardware and groundbreaking UIs into a gently smiling, well-connected uncle you see at the family reunion who explains that the groundbreaking tech of the last year is now mainstream enough to buy.

I’m hardly an HP or Amazon apologist. But I hate it when true innovators don’t get their due. I even feel bad for Larry Ellison and his premature invention of the NC. Apple knocked it out of the parck when they invented the iPhone. But what have they done for us lately? Right now, it seems we’re doing a lot more for them.

When I woke up this morning at 7:28, two minutes before the alarm, I sprang into action, the force of that story pushing me forward. My resolve to get up at 7 had weakened in the 11th hour, but now I regretted it as I pulled on my bright yellow hoodie that says “Salisbury Rugby” on the front and “Insane” on the back. In five minutes, I was out the door.

Still, I thought as I locked the door behind me, maybe I’ll be first anyway. Who gets up before 7 to vote? This is San Francisco, after all, and I live in the Mission, a neighborhood of late-sleeping hipsters. Everyone’s disillusioned after 2004 and nobody will be at the polling place, I thought. I walked to the corner of my residential street and, as I approached Bryant St., I heard the bustle of traffic and people. Oh, right, school’s in session, and people who need to be to work by 8 are driving to work along Bryant. But turning onto Bryant proper, the street was crawling with people and cars, including two couples who passed me on the single block of Bryant. One couple had a kid, and I heard the mom explaining, “This is where we vote!”

As I approached the polling place another couple with kid had just entered before me. There was a line. I started to feel the excitement of taking a final exam, in miniature. The poll worker with the list was unfailingly polite, presenting the list to sign and then musically calling out the ballot color to the goggle-eyed teen at the end of the table. The man who went before me was a decline-to-state voter, and he opted for a Democratic ballot.

Once the goggle-eyed teen had slipped my paper ballot (including the pre-detached ballot stub) into its blue secrecy folder and handed me the special pen, I turned to one of the two vacant carrels and spread out my goodies. The ballot was one page, and I saw Obama’s name before I saw anything else. I excitedly uncapped the pen and completed the arrow pointing to his name:

After I was done, I irrationally wanted more names to mark. I consulted my mental short list of “yes” votes (always fewer than “no” votes) and marked the measures as well. Then I reinserted my ballot to its secrecy folder and walked over to the ballot processing machine, a large version of the airline boarding pass eater. I inserted my ballot (number 22) as the older male pollworker with the black eye watched tiredly. He was tearing round red “I voted!” stickers off a roll, and I eagerly indicated that I wanted one. “You want a sticker? There’s one right there,” pointing to the single torn-off sticker I’d overlooked on top of the machine.

“Everybody wants a sticker,” he said wearily.

Nonetheless, from a member of the American press I would expect more. Prefacing each of his three sections with a piece of “journalism” about how, say, the surge had worked — presenting journalistic opinion as fact from which the debate should leap off — would turn the stomach of any old-school journalist. At one point, Mr. Gibson even said, “I’m not here to debate” and then tried to refute Richardson’s claims that the surge had not worked.

Whose job is it to call such behavior into question? ABC News’ editor-in-chief, I suppose, by preventing someone with such loose scruples from leading the debate in the first place. But in the thick of it, when someone is already out there abusing the rules of rhetoric and debate, who will call a Charles Gibson out? None of the candidates did. That would be too risky, I suppose.

But Gibson finally went too far, he was called out, and I see this incident as very instructive. The topic was recession, and Gibson had stepped into the debate again:

GIBSON: …When we are approaching recession, it is consumers who have spent us out of recession in most cases. You’re all talking about letting some of the Bush tax cuts lapse.

SEN. CLINTON: Yeah, but Charlie, the tax cuts on the wealthiest of Americans, not the middle-class tax cuts. One of the problems with George Bush’s tax policy has been the way he has tilted it toward the wealthy and the well-connected.

GIBSON: If you take a family of — if you take a family of two professors here at Saint Anselm, they’re going to be in the $200,000 category that you’re talking about lifting the taxes on. And — (laughter).

EDWARDS: I don’t think they agree with you.

SEN. OBAMA: I’m not sure that that’s — (laughter) –

SEN. CLINTON: That may be NYU, Charlie.

It was the audience who called Gibson out, the real people who were the topic of the debate. That made me happy for the first and only time during the debate. We can stand up for ourselves even when our politicians can’t!

Full transcript of the debate