Better broken Windows than life with Mac monks

[Vajras]

 

I ADMIT it: I'm a bigot. A hopeless bigot at that: I know my particular prejudice is absurd, but I just can't control it. It's Apple. I don't like Apple products. And the better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them. I blame the customers. Awful people. Awful. Stop showing me your iPhone. Stop stroking your Macbook. Stop telling me to get one.

Seriously, stop it. I don't care if Mac stuff is better. I don't care if Mac stuff is cool. I don't care if every Mac product comes equipped with a magic button on the side that causes it to piddle gold coins and resurrect the dead and make holographic unicorns dance inside your head. I'm not buying one, so shut up and go home. Go back to your house. I know, you've got an iHouse. The walls are brushed aluminum. There's a glowing Apple logo on the roof. And you love it there. You absolute monster.

Of course, it's safe to assume Mac products are indeed as brilliant as their owners make out. Why else would they spend so much time trying to convert non-believers? They're not getting paid. They simply want to spread their happiness, like religious crusaders.

Consequently, nothing pleases them more than watching a PC owner struggle with a slab of non-Mac machinery. Recently I sat in a room trying to write something on a Sony Vaio PC laptop which seemed to be running a special slow-motion edition of Windows Vista specifically designed to infuriate human beings as much as possible. Trying to get it to do anything was like issuing instructions to a depressed employee over a sluggish satellite feed. When I clicked on an application it spent a small eternity contemplating the philosophical implications of opening it, begrudgingly complying with my request several months later. I called it a bastard and worse. At one point I punched a table.

This drew the attention of two nearby Mac owners. They hovered over and stood beside me, like placid monks.

''Ah: the delights of Vista,'' said one.

''It really is time you got a Mac,'' said the other.

''They're just better,'' sang the first monk.

''You won't regret it,'' whispered the second.

Leave me alone, I thought. I don't care if you're right. I just want you to die.

I know Windows is awful. Everyone knows Windows is awful. Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it. It's grim, it's slow, everything's badly designed and nothing works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn't change it for the world, because I'm an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life.

That's why Windows works for me. But I'd never recommend it to anybody else, ever. This puts me in line with roughly everybody else in the world. No one has ever earnestly turned to a fellow human being and said, ''Hey, have you considered Windows?''

Until now. Microsoft, hell-bent on tackling the conspicuous lack of word-of-mouth recommendation, is encouraging people - real people - to host ''Windows 7 launch parties'' to celebrate the release of, er, Windows 7.

To assist the party-hosting massive, they've uploaded a series of spectacularly cringeworthy videos to YouTube, in which the four most desperate actors in the world stand around in a kitchen sharing tips on how best to indoctrinate guests in the wonder of Windows. If they were staring straight down the lens reading hints off a card it might be acceptable; instead, they have been instructed to pretend to be friends. The result is the most nauseating display of artificial camaraderie since the horrific Doritos ''Friendchips'' TV campaign (which caused 50,000 people to kill themselves in 2003, or should have done).

It's so terrible, it induces an entirely new emotion: a blend of vertigo, disgust, anger and embarrassment that I like to call ''shitasmia''. It not only creates this emotion: it defines it. It's the most shitasmic cultural artefact in history. Watch it for yourself.

Still, bad though it is, I vaguely prefer the clumping, clueless, uncool, crappiness of Microsoft's bland Stepford gang to the creepy assurance of the average Mac evangelist. At least the grinning dildos in the Windows video are fictional, whereas eerie replicant Mac monks really are everywhere, standing over your shoulder in their charcoal pullovers, smirking at your hopelessly inferior OS, knowing they're better than you because they use Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard. I don't care if you're right.

I just want you to die.

GUARDIAN

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/business/better-broken-windows-than-life-with-mac-monks-20091102-htjw.html

[Drudge]

Stale. That one has been doing the rounds of the Net for several months now. The SMH must have had some spare space to fill. Shame they didn't make the provenance clear.

[Mike Mitchell]

Forward a link to Media Watch. They might run it, they tend to like those plagiarised pieces.  biggrin

[Scott]

Relating to the content rather than it's source for a bit, I rather somewhat agree with the opening paragraph.  It also lines up with this Slashdot comment I read the other day:

A friend of mine thought he knew the difference but after he found out that he couldn't upgrade the video card of his 24'' Apple he decided to turn it to a tv/media center for his bedroom. He listened to my advice to upgrade the PSU of his crappy Pentium system, install a low cost RAID array, get a modern 3D card, upgrade the memory to 4 GB and finally get a high quality Unicomp keyboard and a 26'' led monitor. Except for the monitor, the upgrades cost him little and his old machine feels twice as fast as the Apple.

He is fuming with Apple because he would really like to play a few modern games but the video card of this model cannot be upgraded. (He didn't research that possibility as he never thought it possible to get a desktop system for 2500 Euros with a crappy portable MXM video without the option to upgrade.)

So he often comes to my apartment just to play Gothic III on my watercooled system which by the way cost only 1500 Euros and turns his Apple to dust.

A year ago, he was about to buy a MacBook but I saved him from that mistake by asking him to compare an equally priced Lenovo. He was blown away and I think this is the time when the Apple myth started fading on him.

I am sure you are not convinced, correct? And this is my point: Apple is right. Their secret recipe is no longer how to make great computers but how to make their users feel superior. "The difference between a Mac and crappy PC" in the eyes of a Mac user is that the PC is crappy by nature while the Mac is not. It's a delusion, but one that feeds Apple since the 90s.

Sorta echoes my thoughts on Apple vs everything else.  No offense to any Apple users of course - I've got some Apple friends who are pretty good mates (with exception to when talking about computers because they usually end up as how Mac is better than *).

[Wang Solutions]

Heck, I don't care where that post came from. it sure gave me a chuckle today! +1 Vajras

[Rob]

On the subject of Macs, I had a chuckle the other day.
My niece bought a brand new Mac book because she was sick of all the problems she was having with her old notebook. She uses it for her business & internet access is essential. Fired it up for the first time & it wouldn't recognize her Bigpond wireless connection. She called Big Pond and after spending about 15 minutes going around in circles with an automated phone menu she finally got to speak to a human being.
Unfortunately it was an Indian call center with crap phone lines. After another 15 minutes or so of both of them repeating themselves several times any time they had to say something, they finally told her that they don't support the latest version of Mac OSX yet.
So then it was on the phone to the Apple shop. They told her as a temporary fix until Bigpond gets up to speed she could install a Windows partition on the hard drive. To do this she had to use Boot Camp which is apparently a Mac Utility.
She ran Bootcamp which asked her to print out instructions before proceeding. Connected her printer, which it recognized straight away, but unfortunately it wouldn't print until she downloaded updated drivers, which of course she couldn't because it wouldn't connect to the net. So back on the phone to Apple who talked her through it. Then she started installing Windows until it got to a point where it encountered a disc error. So she tried to eject the disc to clean it but the Mac wouldn't spit it out no matter what she did. So she rebooted & it started all over again. It would get to a point, encounter a disc error, ask her to remove the disc, but refuse to give it up, so then she'd reboot again & so on.
She eventually gave up & took it into the Apple Store for them to sort out, along with my one & only Windows disc still in it's innards.
So it sort of destroyed the simple to use & reliable Mac myth for me  ;D

[Tixx]

macs suck bigtime.

the end

:)

[johng1]

I think these guys need to get a better technician,