Why I Hate the Mac Commercials September 14, 2006 – Posted in: Aberrant Normalcy

You know you’ve seen the commercial. A stuffy, portly, partly-balding fellow in a suit struggles with his PC, while the hip, slackster, laid-back dude plops out his Mac and gives a hashish smile. And, well, I hate the whole idea of it. Here’s why.

A few weeks ago I was invited out to Williamsburg, Brooklyn for a writers day. If you don’t know, Williamsburg has become the flocking-zone for ultra-hip post-college pre-marriage anti-yuppies whose sole purpose in life, it seems, is to distance themselves from the rest of humanity. They do this via their clothing, their hairstyles, their brand of cigarettes (sort of), and well, their laptop computers. We were in a Williamsburg tea shop which had wireless access. When I had trouble connecting with my Dell PC I asked the counter-girl and she told me the password was something longer than 10 characters — clearly non standard. My friend informed me that he got on with his Macintosh just fine.

I soon headed outside to discover that among the ten or so laptops visible, mine was the only non-Mac in view. (I should also add that I was with non-Williamsburg friends who had Windows laptops, but that would just dilute the point.) And, well, this just irked me because of the following:

It seems as if the people, lets call them trendsters, and Williamsburg is chock full of them, try very very hard to distance themselves from what is perceived as the “uncool” masses. They reject the corporate shuffle and the stifling idea of a suit and tie, but then they fall prey to the very same marketing tricks they so ostentatiously shun. Are you really only cool if you have a Mac? Is that Keanu Reeves look-alike in the commercial really what Mac users aspire to be like?  When I’m in Williamsburg I get the impression that the people are not aspiring starving artists but whiny twenty-somethings born from rich parents who have so convinced themselves of their own cool that they cannot see that they have become a joke.  They have become so trendy that they are uncool.  This is all very Tao.

Anyway, I have friends who live in Williamsburg and they’re not all like this.  So, if you read this, I don’t mean you.  But, really, what’s the deal with the single button on Mac mice?  Do we really need to hit that Ctrl key every time?  I mean are you so cool that you can’t be bothered with useful devices like a right-click button and a scroll-point?  That would, of course, be too corporate.