I love the Apple switcher ads, but to tell the truth, they aren’t very fair. The presentation that Mac’s are cool and PC’s are boring is central to their theme but is simply not true. I saw something in the Cleveland airport last week that drove this point home and made me laugh.
I noticed all of the people working on laptops in the terminal and took special notice of one gentleman working on a particularly nice system: A Macbook Air. The thing that made me laugh was that he couldn’t have looked more like PC from the switcher ads if he tried. If it would have been Halloween day, I would have thought he was making a joke since he looked WAY more like Mr. Gates than Mr. Jobs. To drive the point home even further, he was playing some really low-resolution game that looked like it was written for a Commodore 64. I literally laughed out loud when I saw him.
I have spent some time thinking lately about what’s really cool about computers. Even though I am a huge hardware geek, that is not what makes a computer cool – what you do with your computer is what makes it cool! I have more respect for someone stretching the limits of their 3 year old Dell Latitude producing creative content than for someone with a brand new Macbook Pro that does nothing with it.
The reality is that all current generation hardware has the ability to create some really great content. I’m not talking about how easy or difficult it is to do so because that’s where the argument gets heated. I’m just pointing out that the hardware is plenty capable and most of us need to turn up our creative juices and stretch that ability to the limit to do some really cool things!
Hey now, he was a retro geek chic fashonista getting in touch with his gaming roots playing old skool C64 games via emulator. And that’s cool.
I love it Josh!
Funny you should mention the Macbook air and Dell in the same posting. I had a chance to mess around with the new Dell mini 12 (60 GB version). It’s almost as thin as the Mac air, but costs about a third (if not less) than what the Mac (flash HD version) costs.
I like Macs. I have a Mac Mini and a Macbook. It’s not the styling (specifically the Macbook…yawn), but the fact that I have not had the kinds of problems with them that I had with my PC’s.
But as a light travel computer, I don’t care how much hype and marketing Mac comes out with, the Dell wins.
I chose the Acer One over the Dell Mini 9, but if the Mini 12 had been out it might have been quite different, though the Acer probably would have won out on price and my need for something very small but not a PDA.