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Hello, I’m a Mac. Or at least, as of last Saturday, I own a Mac.
I’m writing this column on my new black MacBook, and my old gray Windows 98 Toshiba is now breathing with the help of a respiratory machine in a retirement home. The old laptop was fine for using applications like Word, but I recently approached it about adding a few new tricks to its repertoire – for example, uploading a website or downloading music – and it responded by turning its screen blue and telling me that a fatal error had occurred. This was always one of its favorite ways to avoid work.
I’m happy as a Mac. Right now I’m writing while listening to a song I just downloaded – a techno remix of “Take on Me” by AHA – and my old computer would never have let me do any of that, partly because it didn’t have the brain power and partly because it hated techno remixes of 80’s pop songs.
Now that I’m a Mac, I’m younger, hipper, cooler, slimmer, sexier, wittier, and more likely to listen to alternative hip-hop than my PC counterpart, who is a fat white guy. If I just described you, I’m sorry, but all you have to do is purchase a Mac and you will instantly lose weight and become vaguely ethnic-looking.
The Mac advertisements prove it. In the ads, a doughy, painfully white man in a suit plays the role of the PC. A younger guy plays the Mac – he’s dressed in a zipped-open hoodie, jeans, and those Vans slippers that everyone seems to own now. The message is clear: if you’re still using a PC, you’re probably the type of person that wears socks under your Tevas, has a farmer’s tan, and watches Brian Williams instead of Jon Stewart.
The commercials are so effective that we’ll probably see copycats soon. If the Democratic Party had any balls, or if they actually stood for what they say they stand for, they’d run a series of “Hello, I’m a Dem” ads. They could go something like this:
DEM: Hello, I’m a Dem.
REP: And I’m a Republican.
DEM: I believe in taxing the rich and raising the minimum wage to help elevate the living standards of the working poor.
REP: Well, I believe we should donate that money to the military, which, by the way, is basically like giving money to poor people because they’re the only ones who seem to enlist anymore.
DEM: Riiight. You know, I actually support trying diplomacy before war.
REP: I’m all for diplomacy, too.
DEM: You are?
REP: Yup. After you’ve wiped out an entire city using robot planes and satellite-guided missiles, there’s really nothing else to do besides be diplomatic about stuff.
DEM: That doesn’t make any sense.
And if the Republicans had any balls, they’d run the same ad, but with Toby Keith playing the Republican, and with an alternate ending in which Keith kicks the crap out of a skinny Democrat played by Jake Gyllenhaal.
But both parties are too boring to do anything other than show their candidates in hardhats reading to school children, all of whom are blue-screened on to a flapping American flag while a stirring string arrangement floats a narrator’s voice through a progression of lies about how the candidate is going to change the nature of politics. If political parties acted more like Apple, maybe young people would actually vote.
Apple has figured out that the best way to get young people to buy technology is by packaging it in cool, shiny plastic. Most tech companies can imitate each others’ advances relatively quickly, so when we go to Best Buy, we find multiple products that essentially offer the same thing. In the tech world, looks and size matter (as opposed to, say, the Rock and Roll world, where Steve Perry kicked serious ass as the lead singer of Journey despite being 4’8” and despite looking like a rat in a black mullet wig).
We like our technology to be small, like a RAZR or an iPod nano, but we also like it to be unique. When I was in the market for a new cell phone, I didn’t want to get a RAZR because
A) everyone else already owned one, and
B) most people seemed to think they were crappy phones
But I did try to purchase a pink RAZR. This speaks volumes about how technology is valued. I was willing to ignore the crappiness of the phone just because it was sleek and unique. Luckily, they were out of stock and I took the free blue and silver Samsung. In retrospect, I’m glad I couldn’t find a pink RAZR – it would have really sucked if every time I used my phone, people automatically assumed I was talking to my long distance boyfriend from Key West.
Maybe Apple’s success starts with its CEO, Steve Jobs. He seems to be a guy who understands technology and marketing.
Sony, on the other hand, is starting battery fires in laptops all over the world and leaving mop-up P.R. duty to its middle-aged white British CEO. Sony shouldn’t have a British CEO. It should have a Japanese CEO. Japan is cooler than Britain. Japanese people have given us sake and sushi, which is a much sexier combination than what the UK has to offer: warm beer and fried pig scrotum (which is actually a McDonald’s Value Meal – number 5, I think – in some parts of Northern England).
Meanwhile Microsoft has Bill Gates, who may be brilliant and generous, but he’s still a programming nerd at heart. I’m pretty sure he wears tapered Dockers with running shoes to work.
Apple has succeeded in aligning itself with young punk culture while companies like Microsoft and Sony look more and more like fat white guys, those inflatable pop culture punching bags we love to drill in the nose.
I’ve had to overcome some reservations to become a Mac-person (for one – Apples do crash. I’ve seen it), but Apple met me somewhere in the middle by adding a right-click to its mice, letting me run Windows, and painting some of its laptops black. We’re relatively happy newly-weds, even if we have a few kinks to work out. A few times my mouse has frozen for five seconds like a deer in a truck’s headlights (I must have caught it wandering toward a kiddie porn site) and twice the MacBook has told me (in several languages) that I must turn it off IMMEDIATELY. I don’t know why it does this. Maybe to ease the transition away from my old Toshiba.
For now, I’m happy to be a Mac. I’ll enjoy it while I can. Because someday I’ll be an old, probably fat, white guy, and then I guess I won’t be a Mac anymore.
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adam@theadamwhite.com |
