Microsoft’s grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac?
I admit it: I’m a bigot. A hopeless bigot at that: I know my particular prejudice is absurd, but I just can’t control it. It’s Apple. I don’t like Apple products. And the better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them. I blame the customers. Awful people. Awful. Stop showing me your iPhone. Stop stroking your Macbook. Stop telling me to get one.
Seriously, stop it. I don’t care if Mac stuff is better. I don’t care if Mac stuff is cool. I don’t care if every Mac product comes equipped a magic button on the side that causes it to piddle gold coins and resurrect the dead and make holographic unicorns dance inside your head. I’m not buying one, so shut up and go home. Go back to your house. I know, you’ve got an iHouse. The walls are brushed aluminum. There’s a glowing Apple logo on the roof. And you love it there. You absolute MONSTER…
I know Windows is awful. Everyone knows Windows is awful. Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it’s there, and there’s nothing you can do about it. OK, OK: I know other operating systems are available. But their advocates seem even creepier, snootier and more insistent than Mac owners. The harder they try to convince me, the more I’m repelled. To them, I’m a sheep. And they’re right. I’m a helpless, stupid, lazy sheep. I’m also a masochist. And that’s why I continue to use Windows – horrible Windows – even though I hate every second of it. It’s grim, it’s slow, everything’s badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn’t change it for the world, because I’m an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life.
That’s why Windows works for me. But I’d never recommend it to anybody else, ever. This puts me in line with roughly everybody else in the world. No one has ever earnestly turned to a fellow human being and said, “Hey, have you considered Windows?” Not in the real world at any rate.
RTFA. Witty, bright, insightful on many levels – even if Charlie Brooker doesn’t answer all of his own questions.
I don’t have words sufficient to describe how much I fucking hate those fucking people.
Sorry for saying the word “fucking” on your blog but if you didn’t want me to say it, you should never have posted that fucking horrible fucking video!
I do agree with the author about Mac stuff and Mac people but their smarminess has at least an echo of cheap carnival style. I find them irritating — but I don’t fucking hate them.
Cinaedh
September 28, 2009 at 7:22 am
I’ll let it slide – this time.
Though I prefer the BSG version, e.g., “fracking”
eideard
September 28, 2009 at 8:49 am
Thank you, Eideard! That’s very open-minded of you. I do try to be polite but sometimes only the current Anglo Saxon spelling of the word feels exactly right.
After you being so gracious, I hate to get picky about the spelling but ‘frack’ was the pseudo-word used on the original BSG, I think.
Then I saw it written on a bulkhead in the most recent BSG and it was spelled ‘frak’, which surprised me.
I looked it up on the ‘Net and apparently the current BSG crew wanted to retain it as a ‘four letter word’, so they changed the spelling.
Any way you look at the spelling though, it’s really just intellectual hocus pocus for American prudes.
I hate to break this to you without a sufficiently lengthy preparatory period but I’m pretty sure Canadians and Mexicans and most of the other people in the world know what frack or frak actually means.
Cinaedh
September 28, 2009 at 3:12 pm
I’m a “traditionalist” within the BSG community. I stick with “frack”.
eideard
September 28, 2009 at 3:23 pm
LOL – Now, don’t hold back…
Jägermeister
September 28, 2009 at 3:08 pm