Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Mac
Today, there being no other computers to hand, I used a Mac. A beastly machine it was. The doc bar at the bottom, with its huge icons, obtrusively grinned at me - that stupid grin you expect from clowns or deranged happiness-merchants. In order to make your way around on a Mac, you have to rely on keyboard shortcuts set in stone, and the file menu; both of which are annoying. And that is to say nothing of the irritating aesthetic. The laptop is as white as a corpse, but geeky chic - perhaps it would not look out of place in an Ikea catalogue, targeted at hipsters and graphic designers. Why customers should choose to suffer this pretentiousness on the part of Mac, I can only guess at. There is not the freedom to enjoy customisation of how you operate the system; nor any potential for power-use by way of increased efficiency. Mac holds your hand most of the time, even when you want it to let go; and when you want to do something it hasn't thought of, it gets cross at you. My advice: Mac is best to avoid unless you want to be continually petted on the head as a beginner, or you value the supposed coolness conferred by Mac. However, your hipness comes at a cost; before you can blink, Mac will have your wallet and rob you of your dignity.
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The best way to judge a Mac is to take it apart and see for one's self that it is nothing but a simple Intel laptop without a BIOS. Surely we can come up with a Linux machine that would be equally appealing?
ReplyDeleteThat we can, I am sure. But it might a long time indeed before we could come anything close to the saturation and arrogance of Apple's marketing - if such a thing were desirable. Apart from the packaging, which is integral part of Apple's approach, I suspect a great deal of Apple's appeal lies in the culture and the branding, even when isolated from the product itself.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, Linux culture might grow, and there is nothing to say that the Linux machine will not develop an aesthetic of its own to rival that of Apple in popularity; but one must be patient.