I hate Macs

[Mark M Lambert]

Great opinion piece in The Guardian today:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2006031,00.html

I hate Macs


Charlie Brooker Monday February 5, 2007 The Guardian

Unless you have been walking around with your eyes closed, and your head
encased in a block of concrete, with a blindfold tied round it, in the
dark - unless you have been doing that, you surely can't have failed to
notice the current Apple Macintosh campaign starring David Mitchell and
Robert Webb, which has taken over magazines, newspapers and the internet
in a series of brutal coordinated attacks aimed at causing massive loss
of resistance. While I don't have anything against shameless promotion
per se (after all, within these very brackets I'm promoting my own BBC4
show, which starts tonight at 10pm), there is something infuriating
about this particular blitz. In the ads, Webb plays a Mac while Mitchell
adopts the mantle of a PC. We know this because they say so right at the
start of the ad.

"Hello, I'm a Mac," says Webb.

"And I'm a PC," adds Mitchell.

They then perform a small comic vignette aimed at highlighting the
differences between the two computers. So in one, the PC has a "nasty
virus" that makes him sneeze like a plague victim; in another, he keeps
freezing up and having to reboot. This is a subtle way of saying PCs are
unreliable. Mitchell, incidentally, is wearing a nerdy, conservative
suit throughout, while Webb is dressed in laid-back contemporary casual
wear. This is a subtle way of saying Macs are cool.

The ads are adapted from a near-identical American campaign - the only
difference is the use of Mitchell and Webb. They are a logical choice in
one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since
they are best known for the television series Peep Show - probably the
best sitcom of the past five years - in which Mitchell plays a
repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding
poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, "PCs are a bit rubbish yet
ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers." In
other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.

I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I
even hate people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs
are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for
scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers
for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.

PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people. You can build your own
from scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to
slap it to make it work properly, just like the Tardis (Doctor Who,
incidentally, would definitely use a PC). PCs have charm; Macs ooze
pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, "I
hate Macs", and then I think, "Why has this rubbish aspirational
ornament only got one mouse button?" Losing that second mouse button
feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be
standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts
while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands. But then, if
the ads were really honest, Webb would be dressed in unbelievably po-
faced avant-garde clothing with a gigantic glowing apple on his back.
And instead of conducting a proper conversation, he would be repeatedly
congratulating himself for looking so cool, and banging on about how he
was going to use his new laptop to write a novel, without ever getting
round to doing it, like a mediocre idiot.

Cue 10 years of nasal bleating from Mac-likers who profess to like Macs
not because they are fashionable, but because "they are just better".
Mac owners often sneer that kind of defence back at you when you mock
their silly, posturing contraptions, because in doing so, you have
inadvertently put your finger on the dark fear haunting their feeble,
quivering soul - that in some sense, they are a superficial semi-person
assembled from packaging; an infinitely sad, second-rate replicant who
doesn't really know what they are doing here, but feels vaguely
significant and creative each time they gaze at their sleek designer
machine. And the more deftly constructed and wittily argued their
defence, the more terrified and wounded they secretly are.

Aside from crowing about sartorial differences, the adverts also make a
big deal about PCs being associated with "work stuff" (Boo! Offices!
Boo!), as opposed to Macs, which are apparently better at "fun stuff".
How insecure is that? And how inaccurate? Better at "fun stuff", my
arse. The only way to have fun with a Mac is to poke its insufferable
owner in the eye. For proof, stroll into any decent games shop and cast
your eye over the exhaustive range of cutting-edge computer games
available exclusively for the PC, then compare that with the sort of
rubbish you get on the Mac. Myst, the most pompous and boring videogame
of all time, a plodding, dismal "adventure" in which you wandered around
solving tedious puzzles in a rubbish magic kingdom apparently modelled
on pretentious album covers, originated on the Mac in 1993. That same
year, the first shoot-'em-up game, Doom, was released on the PC. This
tells you all you will ever need to know about the Mac's relationship
with "fun".

Ultimately the campaign's biggest flaw is that it perpetuates the notion
that consumers somehow "define themselves" with the technology they
choose. If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says
something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a
personality. A mental illness, maybe - but not a personality. Of course,
that hasn't stopped me slagging off Mac owners, with a series of
sweeping generalisations, for the past 900 words, but that is what the
ads do to PCs. Besides, that's what we PC owners are like - unreliable,
idiosyncratic and gleefully unfair. And if you'll excuse me now, I feel
an unexpected crash coming.

This week: Charlie watched some episodes of Larry Sanders (on his PC).
He played the customised Fawlty Towers map for Counterstrike (on his
PC). He listened to the Windows startup jingle every 10 minutes as his
PC repeatedly rebooted itself.
-- 
Mark M Lambert  <mark at marklambert.net>