There Aren't Any Respectful Ways to Say 'Your Computer Sucks'

Charlie Brooker's anti-Mac rant on the Guardian blog, inspired at least in part by the UK version of the 'I'm a Mac; I'm a PC' ad campaign, has been ruffling some feathers (on the other hand, it also inspired Alison to track down this Mac/PC slash site). I love my Mac dearly--even more so now that I'm working and forced to use a Windows machine most of the day--but Brooker's screed is so obviously calculated to enrage that I can't be bothered to react to it. It's the equivalent of a middle-schooler shouting 'poo!' at the top of his lungs, and Brooker's irate--not to say hysterical--anti-Mac and -Mac-users arguments are so absurd that the entire piece goes right through aggravating and out the other end into funny.

Where Brooker does have a point, however, is in his criticism of the ad campaign. I haven't seen the UK version, but even though I find the US originals quite funny (although their effect might have been lessened had I known that John Hodgman, who plays the fuddy-duddy PC, is a cast member on The Daily Show), there is something almost cringe-inducing about the smarminess with which the Mac and PC present their various strengths and weaknesses (PCs are good for work stuff, Macs are good for creative stuff is both a vast oversimplification and not actually true, and if I never hear the 'there are less computer viruses for Macs' argument again, it'll be too soon). Funny as it is, the campaign associates Mac use with condescension.

The only problem is that, much like Brooker's suggestion that a proper operating system should be cumbersome and hard to figure out, this is an argument from another decade. Mac ads have always been smarmy and condescending (and as for being simplistic: they're ads. They're trying to sell you something. Specifically, these ads are trying to get you to replace a cheap appliance with a more expensive one which will, in the short run, cause you some trouble as you scramble to track down equivalents to your existing software and deal with compatibility issues with the rest of the PC-using world. Simplistic is baked right in). Their basic gist is that the only reason to use a PC is not knowing any better (or, alternatively, being afraid), and since this is the thrust of the company's argument, it's hard to get away from a condescending tone. The best you can hope for is to cloak that condescension in the kind of humorous tone that the 'I'm a Mac; I'm a PC' campaign has been consistently hitting.

Not to mention that anything that follows up on this is almost automatically an improvement.

A 30 Second Demonstration of Why I Don't Use PCs

My aunt, a self-employed architect and workaholic, bought a new flat screen for one of her office computers. My brother and I visited her this afternoon and, while admiring the new peripheral, he changed its resolution to one that the screen couldn't handle. The result? A black screen with the legend 'out of range' and no way to access Windows in order to change the resolution back apart from hooking the computer up to another screen.

So, basically, not only did the screen's software react to a bad resolution command in a way that rendered the computer unusable and had no obvious fix, but fucking Windows has no safeguard against the user giving such a bad command in the first place. There was absolutely no indication that the screen currently hooked up to the computer couldn't handle all of the resolutions that Windows' control panel offered, and the operating system didn't block the command once it was given.

In conclusion, I love my Mac.