Unfortunately for Apple, Kim Jon-un understands only some of the aspects of the Apple religion and not others.
Kim has understood the concept that stealing other people’s ideas and pretending you invented it is the way forward so he has ordered his Linux based Red Star OS to be redesigned to look more like Apple’s Mac OS X.
But he has also broken the other major rule of the Apple cargo cult which is that what ever product is sold needs to make a lot of money for Apple. It is unlikely that Apple’s patent lawyers would last very long in North Korea before they found themselves before an anti-aircraft gun firing squad.
But Apple should feel flattered that its OS approach fits into Kim’s approach. After all they have a lot in common. Both are paranoid autocratic institutions dedicated to brainwashing their followers into a locked in universe where nothing works but no one admits it.
Interestingly enough both operating systems have software which mucks around with the time. The software uses a calendar which counts years from the birth of Kim Il-Sung, making 2014 the 103rd year. Apple software has problems with leap years. Both regimes also tend to brick those who do not do what they are told, although Kim's method of bricking those who do not do what they are told is a little more lethal.
Apps are packaged using a Mac-like folder structure as well, with ‘contents’ and ‘resources’ folders within the application folder.
Versions 2.0 and 3.0 of Red Star both use a modified version of the open source KDE interface, the older software had a different look and feel more akin to other Linux distributions such as Debian. To run the current version of the OS a minimum of a Pentium III 800MHz with 256MB of RAM is required, along with 3GB of hard disk space.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has been shown to be a fan of Apple computers in the past, having been pictured last year working at a desk with an iMac.
Apple complies with trade embargoes that forbid the sale of products to the country so it is not clear how he got his paws on it. We cannot imagine he would queue up with the rest of the fanboys.
