An interesting rant in The Age today -
Forbidden Apple’s not so sweet
I’m talking to you, Mr iBook-user, sitting in that Lygon Street trattoria, sipping a double ristretto while typing your young-adult novel about teenage vampires with Asperger’s who once danced for Chairman Mao. IT’S TIME TO SHOW YOUR FURY.
I’m talking to you, Madam Apple-Mac-Pro in your South Melbourne editing suite, cutting your four-hour doco on the underwater archaeology of the Mayan Yucatan Peninsula, narrated entirely in original Yucatec. SHOW THE WORLD YOUR OUTRAGE.
I’m talking to YOU, little Ms MacBook-Air, wearing your Elwoody op-shop frock and your Elwoody op-shop buckle shoes, busily using Photoshop to design a fund-raising flyer for an Afghan Refugee Falafel’n'Fattoush Family Fun Night. UNLEASH YOUR ELWOODY WRATH UPON THEM.
Because we are fed up. We meek, mild-mannered Macintoshers are FED UP WITH ALL THOSE FICKLE PC-COMPUTER BULLIES. For decades they scoffed at us with their rancid Hungry Jack’s raw-onion breath. They mocked us in the late ’80s when we tried to run spreadsheets on our little Mac Plus computers and kept getting a “sad Mac” icon because it couldn’t add up double digits. They laughed at us in the late ’90s when we wanted to play cool computer games on our bright “Bondi blue” bubble-gum Macs but the only games available were educational ones, featuring a little kid in pyjamas named Sam, that taught us about weather systems.
But then in 2002 along came the Apple iPod and oh, how quickly did their attitudes shift? Suddenly PC people all wanted to strap an iPod to their jogging arm AS IF THEY WERE ONE OF US. Then in 2007, along came the Apple iPhone and ah, how quickly did their Mac contempt wane? Now they all wanted an iPhone to flash around among their doofy mates AS IF THEY WERE BORN OF OUR ILK.
And now, now, our small long-suffering Mac community has been dealt a final deathblow with the launch of the latest iPhone 3G.
This week at Chadstone I witnessed the downfall of Mac cool with my own eyes which, may I say, look very stylish behind a pair of Danish ProDesign spectacle frames in dark tortoiseshell. I had gone to Chaddy to buy a new iPhone for my wife — not for me, of course, because I’m such an iWanker, I don’t even HAVE a mobile phone. I just tell people: “I don’t like to be contactable all the time; if you need me, it can wait.” But I thought my wife should have one: it might make her a bit more elegant, with a more intuitive interface. Yet when I stepped into the mall — Oh Lord, Our Jobs — I spied queues and queues of iPhone buyers spilling out of every mobile phone shop and electrical appliance outlet. ALL OF THEM LOWLY, FASHIONLESS PC HYPOCRITES (some even appearing to be from non-inner-city locations).
Inside Optus World, hordes of frumpy, gumpy folk were packed tight, pizza cheese still hanging from their chins, touching OUR iPhone touchscreens with their peperoni-greased paws AS IF THEY HAD A RIGHT TO. Outside the Vodafone shop, whole families had assembled, all wearing saggy K-Mart jeans with elasticised waists, and chatting to each other about “the killer iPhone apps” as though they actually UNDERSTOOD OUR MAC LANGUAGE.
Most vexing of all, in the Apple Retail Store itself — our Holy Temple of Jobs — multitudes of anaemic teenage PC gits had gathered, all of them sucking from a Boost Juice and clutching bags of Wii paraphernalia from EB Games, buying top-of-the-range 32GB iPhones AS IF THEY ACTUALLY DESERVED TO OWN ONE. I wanted to rush up to them and yell: “For years you ridiculed us and now you want to bite from the forbidden Apple? No no NOOOOOOOO.” But I didn’t have the guts; they looked so intimidating with their bum-fluffy beards and their feeble cable-conduit arms.
So, arise gallant Macintoshers, arise from your ergonomic office chairs, your non-slip inflatable Pilates balls, your designer milk crates that you bought from a funky warehouse in Richmond specialising in vintage homewares. ARISE AND DEFY THE TREND. We shall not buy this new iPhone: let the commoners have it, I say. Instead, let us maintain our exclusive hip-hop hipness and buy THEIR phone — a Telstra EasyTouch on a $20 plan. And no more iPods either. We shall only buy a Microsoft Zune!
Are you with me, Mac friends? Hello, Mac friends? … Hello?