Friday, May 08, 2009

i-Don't Care

There is no real difference between an Apple Macintosh and a Microsoft PC.

There, I’ve said it. May the cool young t-shirt clad things of the Mac world throw their twittering i-phones at me in disgust. I don’t care. May the tweed wearing, goggle-eyed PC aficionados threaten me with their Bill Gates dolls. I still don’t care.

I used PCs for years. I have recently been using a Mac. I’m yet to notice a genuine difference and I have no preference. What may sound like blasphemy to you is pretty obvious to me.

PCs have black or cream functional cubic shaped boxes. Macs have rounded corners and are any colour or even transparent. Woohoo.

PCs accept DVDs on a tray. Macs have a slot in the side. Yeehar.

PC mouses have a wheel in the middle and buttons. Mac mouses have pressure sensitive pads and a strangely erotic nipple in the middle. Big deal.

PC icons are clear and precise. Mac icons are funky and cartoonish. So what?

PC applications minimise and maximise in business-like fashion. Mac applications minimise and maximise dynamically. Yawn.

One of these computers may be fractionally faster than the other at processing binary digits through electronic circuits, but at the end of the day I don’t care what computer I’m using as long as I can send emails, write documents and browse the internet. If one computer can do this a thousandth of a second faster then why would I even notice? I’m not designing space shuttles or modelling the weather.

Whatever the computer looks like on the other side of the screen or inside makes not one iota of difference to whether my boss gets his report on time. If I’m playing a game at home no aliens are getting blasted more efficiently, no cars will drive faster and no Sonics, Marios, pedestrians or prostitutes will react any differently to my inexpert use of a keyboard, mouse, joystick or fake-guitar no matter who makes it.

The differences between PCs and Macs are a triumph of marketing, not of engineering. Marketing is after-all about perception. Cleverly, Apple have managed to position the Mac as the computer of choice for anyone young enough to have never seen a Commodore 64. Apple have seen their profits soar in line with an increasingly affluent Generation Y that have embraced the i-pod, the i-phone and the i-wank to accompany their Mac.

Yet millions of people still successfully use PCs every day. If Macs were really that much better then everyone would be using them.

So face it, the choice between a Mac and a PC is about as pointless as the choice between a Commodore and a Falcon. There’s no difference between them either.

Get over it.

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Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Movie Rankings 2008

1. Slumdog Millionaire *****
2. The Dark Knight ****1/2
3. Charlie Wilson’s War ****1/2
4. Burn After Reading ****
5. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead ****
6. Tropic Thunder ****
7. Lars and the Real Girl ****
8. There Will be Blood ****
9. Frost/Nixon ****
10. In Bruges ***1/2
11. Get Smart ***1/2
12. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ***1/2
13. The Counterfeiters ***1/2
14. American Gangster ***1/2
15. Mongol ***1/2
16. Iron Man ***1/2
17. The Wackness ***1/2
18. Body of Lies ***
19. The Bank Job ***
20. Quantum of Solace ***
21. In the Shadow of the Moon ***
22. 3:10 to Yuma **1/2
23. Taken *1/2

Movie Rankings 2007

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