A couple of good designer laptop covers pictures I identified:

I hate macs


Image by nimboo
thats my trusty iBook G4. I’m a mac user. So, no flames please!

I hate Macs
Charlie Brooker
Monday February 5, 2007
Guardian
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/,,2006031,00.html

Unless you have been walking around with your eyes closed, and your head encased in a block of concrete, with a blindfold tied round it, in the dark – unless you have been doing that, you surely cannot have failed to notice the present Apple Macintosh campaign starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb, which has taken over magazines, newspapers and the internet in a series of brutal coordinated attacks aimed at causing enormous loss of resistance. While I don’t have something against shameless promotion per se (following all, inside these very brackets I’m promoting my own BBC4 show, which starts tonight at 10pm), there is one thing infuriating about this particular blitz. In the advertisements, Webb plays a Mac whilst Mitchell adopts the mantle of a Computer. We know this simply because they say so proper at the begin of the ad.
&quotHello, I’m a Mac,&quot says Webb.

&quotAnd I’m a Computer,&quot adds Mitchell.

They then perform a tiny comic vignette aimed at highlighting the differences between the two computers. So in one, the Pc has a &quotnasty virus&quot that makes him sneeze like a plague victim in another, he keeps freezing up and getting to reboot. This is a subtle way of saying PCs are unreliable. Mitchell, incidentally, is wearing a nerdy, conservative suit throughout, although Webb is dressed in laid-back contemporary casual wear. This is a subtle way of saying Macs are cool.

The ads are adapted from a near-identical American campaign – the only distinction is the use of Mitchell and Webb. They are a logical selection in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious selection in an additional, since they are greatest known for the tv series Peep Show – most likely the greatest sitcom of the past five years – in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-relating to poseur. So when you see the advertisements, you think, &quotPCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers.&quot In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.

I hate Macs. I have often hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Value activity centres for adults computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how correct computers perform computers for individuals who earnestly think in feng shui.

PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people. You can develop your own from scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to slap it to make it work correctly, just like the Tardis (Physician Who, incidentally, would undoubtedly use a Computer). PCs have charm Macs ooze pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the very first factor I feel is, &quotI hate Macs&quot, and then I believe, &quotWhy has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?&quot Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If the ads were truly honest, Webb would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with each hands. But then, if the ads were really honest, Webb would be dressed in unbelievably po-faced avant-garde clothing with a gigantic glowing apple on his back. And instead of conducting a appropriate conversation, he would be repeatedly congratulating himself for looking so cool, and banging on about how he was going to use his new laptop to write a novel, with no ever obtaining round to undertaking it, like a mediocre idiot.

Cue ten years of nasal bleating from Mac-likers who profess to like Macs not since they are fashionable, but because &quotthey are just better&quot. Mac owners typically sneer that type of defence back at you when you mock their silly, posturing contraptions, because in performing so, you have inadvertently put your finger on the dark fear haunting their feeble, quivering soul – that in some sense, they are a superficial semi-individual assembled from packaging an infinitely sad, second-rate replicant who doesn’t actually know what they are undertaking here, but feels vaguely considerable and creative every single time they gaze at their sleek designer machine. And the more deftly constructed and wittily argued their defence, the a lot more terrified and wounded they secretly are.

Aside from crowing about sartorial differences, the adverts also make a huge deal about PCs being connected with &quotwork stuff&quot (Boo! Offices! Boo!), as opposed to Macs, which are apparently far better at &quotfun stuff&quot. How insecure is that? And how inaccurate? Far better at &quotfun stuff&quot, my arse. The only way to have entertaining with a Mac is to poke its insufferable owner in the eye. For proof, stroll into any decent games shop and cast your eye over the exhaustive range of cutting-edge computer games available exclusively for the Computer, then compare that with the sort of rubbish you get on the Mac. Myst, the most pompous and boring videogame of all time, a plodding, dismal &quotadventure&quot in which you wandered about solving tedious puzzles in a rubbish magic kingdom apparently modelled on pretentious album covers, originated on the Mac in 1993. That identical year, the first shoot-’em-up game, Doom, was released on the Pc. This tells you all you will ever want to know about the Mac’s relationship with &quotfun&quot.

Ultimately the campaign’s biggest flaw is that it perpetuates the notion that consumers somehow &quotdefine themselves&quot with the technology they decide on. If you truly believe you want to pick a mobile telephone that &quotsays something&quot about your personality, do not bother. You do not have a personality. A mental illness, maybe – but not a personality. Of course, that hasn’t stopped me slagging off Mac owners, with a series of sweeping generalisations, for the past 900 words, but that is what the ads do to PCs. Besides, that’s what we Computer owners are like – unreliable, idiosyncratic and gleefully unfair. And if you will excuse me now, I feel an unexpected crash coming.

This week: Charlie watched some episodes of Larry Sanders (on his Pc). He played the customised Fawlty Towers map for Counterstrike (on his Pc). He listened to the Windows startup jingle each 10 minutes as his Pc repeatedly rebooted itself.

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