There’s “a wonderful rant against Macs”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2006031,00.html and their owners (me, Kieran, half the rest of CT) from Charlie Brooker in the Guardian today. Daniel will be pleased. Brooker concentrates on Apple’s odd decision to use David Mitchell and Robert Webb in their ad campaign (and helpfully, the ads appear on the same page, at least to UK readers and maybe to the rest of you).
bq. 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.
{ 38 comments }
jimminy 02.04.07 at 10:53 pm
yes I thought that was strange too. Jez in peep show is fundamentally a bit of an idiot, plus, the kind of people that like peep show tend to be intelligent types who will identify more with Mark. so basically they’re marketing macs to idiots.
Jacob Christensen 02.04.07 at 11:18 pm
If we leave aside the funny stuff, Brooker has a point:
A Mac is a computer. An iPod is a digital music player. But on the other hand: Apple has been very succesful with creating and perpetuating the mac-subculture.
Declaration of interest: I’ve been a mac-user since 1991. I’ve owned an iPod since 2003. Consequently, Macs haven’t been cool since 1991 and iPods not since 2003.
brock 02.04.07 at 11:25 pm
Brooker writes:
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.
Brooker doesn’t mention what OS he runs on his PC, but I submit that if he’s running Windows, and not Linux or *BSD, he has no ground to criticize Macs and Mac users in this way.
Matt McIrvin 02.04.07 at 11:57 pm
His observation about the ad campaign is interesting, in that its American variant gets almost the same reaction from everyone who recognizes the hilarious John Hodgman, the actor playing the PC. I’d much rather hang out with Hodgman than with that guy playing the Mac, whoever he is this time around.
That said, his actual anti-Mac points are the same tired nonsense that flamebaiters post to the comment boards of Mac fan sites every day. The current Mac user base includes a lot of technically adept people who were attracted to Macs by the introduction of the BSD-based Mac OS X several years ago; at its core, a modern Mac is a Unix-based system, a supremely geeky and hackable thing. The application suite that ships with Macs is generally easy to use, but active contempt for that is the worst kind of user-interface-as-intelligence-test elitist idiocy.
The attack based on single-button mice is also quaint; most Macs ship with single-button mice, and the OS is designed so you can use it with a single-button mouse, but they’ve supported ordinary USB multi-button mice seamlessly for years, in more or less the way a PC user would expect. (That Mac notebooks have only a single trackpad button built into the case is, I think, a slightly more valid complaint.)
Frowner 02.04.07 at 11:59 pm
PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers.
It’s funny, but that was the impression I’d gotten from the US commercials, merely by watching them on the computer with the sound off. (I could tell that listening to the actual dialogue would drive me to violence). I don’t see a lot of ads, but I’m pretty sure I hate this one more than any other of recent memory.
I mean, it’s just “creative type” wish fulfillment–the bad guys are silly and stupid and chubby and badly dressed and whitey-mcwhiteperson, but the good guys are all skinny and hipstery and white-but-not-as-white. All it makes me think of is temping in my youth at an ad agency, and what unutterable lazy, greedy, self-regarding prats almost all those people were.
And it’s worth noting that technology here is male and white, but particularly pernicious male and white–like, the men get to be actual people. If the technology was coded as female, it would be an airbrushed super-model. (In fact, that’s probably part of why it’s male–it’s okay for men to be average/homely, but they couldn’t show an average/homely woman on our precious televisions because the screens would crack or something.) And both people are white, but there’s what you might call the hipster rhetoric of race involved, where there’s “making fun of stereotypically white people” without any commitment to anti-racism.
See, I know we’re supposed to be all clever and ironic now, so it’s okay to make commercials which–at the discursive level–have really crap values, because we clever ironic viewers are supposed to see through them. “Ah ha,” we’re supposed to think, “This commercial is full of bad values, but I know that those bad values are bad, so I just sit back and enjoy the joke.”
Which is why the world is now fair, and all men glad and wise.
Shorter version: I went from being Mac-positive to being vaguely Mac-negative as a result of this campaign.
Frowner 02.05.07 at 12:02 am
Oh, I should add that I use a Mac (with two-button mouse) for the “creative type” part of my work. But I resent it now.
Matt McIrvin 02.05.07 at 12:02 am
By the way, I do not mean “hackable” above in the sense of “vulnerable to security intrusion”, despite what Bill Gates is trying to make people believe.
Matt McIrvin 02.05.07 at 12:12 am
And it’s worth noting that technology here is male and white, but particularly pernicious male and white—like, the men get to be actual people. If the technology was coded as female, it would be an airbrushed super-model.
For an example of this, go on YouTube and look for the horrible parody of this ad campaign made by the videogame-centric cable channel G4 (jokingly identified as a Nintendo ad), in which they personified an XBox and a Wii respectively as a fat, geeky woman who speaks in complete sentences and a skinny, ditzy woman in hot pants who spouts double entendres.
Bill Gardner 02.05.07 at 3:22 pm
The golden age was when I had an SE/30 on my desktop that I used to open terminals to the departmental unix boxes. Perl, S, and LaTeX did it all.
Now I have all that back, on a laptop (with Perl –> Ruby and S –> R + STATA upgrades). All this, and a Fisher-Price adult activity box!
http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html:
“All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple’s low point in the mid 1990s. They’re about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.
The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know?
I got a Powerbook at the end of last year. When my IBM Thinkpad’s hard disk died soon after, it became my only laptop. And when my friend Trevor showed up at my house recently, he was carrying a Powerbook identical to mine.
For most of us, it’s not a switch to Apple, but a return. Hard as this was to believe in the mid 90s, the Mac was in its time the canonical hacker’s computer.”
kb 02.05.07 at 4:13 pm
Wow. That column is the stupidest piece of passion out of all proportion to accuracy or importance I’ve encountered in weeks, Fox News not excluded.
Even when I wasn’t a Mac user, I have never understood why hating Macs with that kind of venom is socially acceptable amongst computer users, when hating anything else along similar lines would result in you being told to shut up and possibly look into serious medication. It’s a damn computer; if you don’t like the way they work, don’t use them.
gdr 02.05.07 at 4:14 pm
Remember that this is the Charlie Brooker of TV Go Home. Unfair criticism is his stock-in-trade, and that’s why we love him, the sweetie.
Kieran Healy 02.05.07 at 4:14 pm
The golden age was when I had an SE/30 on my desktop that I used to open terminals to the departmental unix boxes.
A few years ago I stayed in the house of a Nobel prize-winning physicist, and in his study the only computer was a Mac SE, with the (satisfyingly heavy for its size) Nobel Medal sitting next to it on the desk.
Peter 02.05.07 at 4:34 pm
10,000 PC users signed an online petition strongly defending Windows, but the petition was lost when all the PC’s crashed.
Katherine F. 02.05.07 at 5:05 pm
You didn’t hear about it from me, but Mac/PC slash, anyone?
*cough*
Eli Rabett 02.05.07 at 5:05 pm
Well MACs are cool. I have a MAC mini sitting on my desk, the size of a Burger King styrofoam box and it does not heat the room. Which is too bad, as the room needs heating today.
Daniel Nexon 02.05.07 at 6:00 pm
I guess this starts to answer the questions I, unaware of this CT thread, posed while trying to ignore the Super Bowl.
Randolph Fritz 02.05.07 at 6:00 pm
Linux boxes are “ramshackle computers of the people.” PCs are creepy accountants that keep watch on you, who play games *really hard* to forget their working lives.
Sean 02.05.07 at 6:04 pm
Fact are facts and wishing they weren’t so doesn’t make them go away.
Macs are more than a simple tool … they are an asthetic that feeds the soul. In contrast, PCs are tools and so are the people who use them.
mds 02.05.07 at 6:06 pm
Hard as this was to believe in the mid 90s, the Mac was in its time the canonical hacker’s computer
Yeah, I love how end-user modifiable the iMac is. One can even add memory modules!
(Ducks)
Of course, all this means is that it’s simply not a computer for inveterate tinkerers, like a PowerMac or a PC. And once one adds Fink to a Macintosh, it’s like having a nice Debian box, but for twice the price.
(Ducks again)
You know, over on Slashdot, this article would be tagged as flamebait. Can’t we all just get along, like leftist sociologists and the physical sciences community?
tyugg 02.05.07 at 7:06 pm
I know that at least for Americans who have been in school at some point in the past decade and a half, we have fairly decent reasons to be pissed at Macs. For the majority of this period, and continuing to the present, the average Mac owned by a high school or university is slow, buggy, stalls constantly, crashes frequently, runs standard software poorly, and does not have most of the simple commands that PCs do. And yet for some reason high schools and colleges own vast numbers of Macs. Ugly, ugly, Macs. In the computer lab I am in right now, all of the PC and Ubuntu systems are taken, but only about half the Macs are in use. Why? Because they suck.
I say this was mostly in the past, but even today it continues. Two days ago I was in a lab using someone elses Mac, and they still had one of those awful mouses with no buttons. Firefox did not have any of its normal context-menu shortcuts or keyboard shortcuts. It took forever. Eventually I got so fed up I had to find a PC. It was running a pre-XP operating system, but it was still better than the OSX Mac.
So many people have been subjected to other people’s moronic institutional computer choices, and in response they hear some drivel about how great the Mac is for this reason or that reason, and how the fantastic ugly Mac computers are actually really attractive.
Michael M. 02.05.07 at 7:42 pm
I inherited one of those lampshade iMacs last year. It was interesting to play around with, though the 1-button thing drove me crazy at first, until I got used to it. But it runs OS 10.2, and to update to what I believe is still the current, OS 10.4, I would have to add more memory. Thats a lot of bucks. Meanwhile, the number of apps that will run on 10.2 dwindles dramatically, and not even Apple provides anything remotely current for it except iTunes (for instance, it will only run an early version of Safari, which is hopelessly outdated). So while I was thinking about buying a Mac for myself, this whole experience made me realize just how money-hungry Apple really is and how expensive a Mac is over the course of what might be considered a reasonable lifespan for hardware. Fine if you’re rich, I guess, though frankly I can’t see wasting the money however much you have, when Debian GNU/Linux and FreeBSD are both so much more powerful and flexible than OS X.
Phanatic 02.05.07 at 9:06 pm
Ernunnos on Livejournal has the best Mac ad idea I’ve ever seen:
Backword Dave 02.05.07 at 9:42 pm
Phanatic, that is pure genius! This best comment on the Brooker thread is “I’m a Linux box, I look like a bit of a smelly hippie, but I don’t cost you anything, I trust you to share things in a sensible manner, and whilst I’m a bit hard to understand sometimes, you know at heart I’m honest and will do my best.” (They’ve lost links to comments for some reason; doubtless to do with censorship.) Sure on my last PC I installed a local webserver, Perl, MySQL, PHP and other stuff – on the Windows side, as well as Suse Linux (which cost less than the partition!). But my Mac has it all. If you use a Mac, get iTerm and don’t use Terminal. UNIX for the people.
Oh and I trash a keyboard a year. Last time mine died, I went round the corner to the local dodgy PC shop. They didn’t do Mac keyboards (25 quid online, but I needed one now!), but they did Windows ones – more robust – and for a fiver. I took the chance. Plug and play peeps!
Now as any real geek knows, the term PC was Apple’s at one time.
Stupidest Brooker comment “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.” Both hands is why I love the Apple mouse; I touch type so thing-key and click feels more natural than ‘where is my hand on this mouse’? And anyway you can buy PC mice for Macs. And, of course, they work.
Do PCs talk now? (By default, of course I got a Steven-Hawking-soundalike package for my old PC.) And games? Have the PC nuts played chess with a Mac? Oh sure, Gary Kasparov would find it dull.
Jonathan Goldberg 02.06.07 at 12:25 am
Normally I love CT. This thread, is well below your usual standard. In fact, its a waste of brain bandwidth.
I’ve worked with computers since the IBM 1620, including both Windows boxes and Macs (this is being posted from a Mac). I mildly dislike all of them, and don’t get excited about any.
Alan Bostick 02.06.07 at 4:13 am
I love my PowerBook, not the least because, when I open a Terminal window, it speaks the languages I grew up using with computers. (Actually that’s not altogether true; I grew up using a predecessor of System V rather than BSD, so I’ve had to learn to say “ps aux” rather than “ps -ef”, but that’s small potatoes.)
It’s interesting timing for an anti-Mac rant in the Gruaniad, given that Windows Vista is being released right now, and Vista is reported to be the “longest suicide note in history.”
pum 02.06.07 at 5:36 am
Fact are facts and wishing they weren’t so doesn’t make them go away.
ajay 02.06.07 at 11:20 am
All said better first by Neal Stephenson, “In the Beginning was the Command Line.”
Cian 02.06.07 at 2:44 pm
This thread has reminded me of why I dislike Mac zealots so much.
As for the actual computers? Some good things, some bad. They’re still pretty rubbish though.
SG 02.06.07 at 3:03 pm
Hands up who chooses their computer based on the software their workplace has available for … ah.. borrowing…
Vanya 02.06.07 at 4:13 pm
“PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers.” Well the same problem exists with the US campaign – Hodgman (playing the PC) is much more likeable than the poser guy playing the Mac.
Morat20 02.06.07 at 7:54 pm
It might be a good idea for everyone to actually read the entire column. Especially the last paragraph, where he makes his point:
Tracy W 02.06.07 at 8:14 pm
Wow. That column is the stupidest piece of passion out of all proportion to accuracy or importance I’ve encountered in weeks
That’s why it’s funny.
Randolph Fritz 02.06.07 at 9:52 pm
“All said better first by Neal Stephenson, ‘In the Beginning was the Command Line.'”
But he was wrong. In the beginning was the loom.
agm 02.06.07 at 10:20 pm
I saw this the other day, and I’d love to share. There are some quite entertaining parodies available, such as the ones at TrueNuff. The one labeled “Performance” explains eloquently why the two guys in the commercials are white.
epk 02.06.07 at 11:12 pm
What I particularly liked was that the first comment after the article was Brooker whining that someone had had the gall to edit his masterpiece. Granted, it sounds like an irritating bit of copyediting, but dear sweet jeebus.
Some sort of memo needs to go out to authors (of all sorts) explaining that it’s unprofessional, tactless, and a bit pathetic to whinge about that sort of thing in public. Take it to the editor, people!
Francis 02.07.07 at 5:55 pm
Most of you need to read the article – or at least the last paragraph and a half.
skeptic 02.08.07 at 7:56 am
Maybe, if the physical scientists are running virtual LISP machines and the sociologists are using Amigas.
skeptic 02.08.07 at 8:09 am
The word according to tyugg:
Shorter tyugg: the machine was badly configured, so the operating system must be defective.
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