I have had precious little to say of late because (a) I’ve been unwell and on some serious medication, (b) it’s been the silliest of silly seasons for some years, and (c) my laptop is at least as unwell as its master, if not more so.
My lovely 3½-year-old PowerBook G4 1.33GHz 12″ keeps crashing with messages such as:
Unresolved kernel trap(cpu 0): 0×300 – Data access DAR=0×0000000000000000 PC=0x000000000002C334″
so I’m sure you can appreciate the gravity of the situation. (I am reliably informed by t’Internet, by the way, that this means the pooter’s memory is – in technical jargon – knackered.)
What I really want is a nice, new, shiny MacBook Pro 2.4GHz 15″ but the Minister’s Wife won’t wear it. She feels – and can you believe this? – that replacing rotten window frames and sagging lounge furniture is more important, particularly when we have a “perfectly good” (sic) Hewlett-Packard laptop I could use instead. (I could use it, if I wanted to wait half an hour for it to boot up; attract 20 viruses, Trojans and bits of malware an hour; and have it crash three times a day because Microsoft Is Shit.)
I have reluctantly compromised by ordering a new gigabyte of Mac memory and a tiny Phillips screwdriver, in the hope that I can hamfistedly break into my pride and joy and replace the faulty stick of memory without knackering the unit even further.
If that doesn’t work I shall, of course, drift further into a depression, particularly in light of the discovery yesterday that the current exchange rate means I could currently buy my inamorata for a 23% discount ($2,499 in the Yankee States of Doodle against £1,599 here) if I (a) cashed in my Virgin Atlantic Flying Club miles, and (b) successfully smuggled the new unit through Customs on my return. If you ask me, it’s absolutely worth the risk of a criminal record and the damage to the environment.
You can keep your overhyped and overrated iPhone and your equally-overhyped but less overrated (though nevertheless inadequately capacious) iPod Touch but, to paraphrase National Treasure Jarvis Cocker(TM), thinking about the MacBook Pro just makes me wanna come.
And mention of National Treasure Jarvis Cocker(TM) reminds me that I am considering introducing a new occasional publication by the Ministry (to fill the gap left by togger), to wit: The Finest Individual Moments In The History Of Popular Music.
The intention would not be to wax lyrical about particular songs or artistes (for it has already been established that I am actually really rather crap at writing about music), but to highlight those little moments within recordings that, as the C&C Music Factory would have it, make you go, “Hmmm.”
More in due course, if I can think of more than four or so such moments.
But enough about me. How are you?
D’you know Minister, you must have been reading my mind, as I’ve been meaning to post a Mac rant for a while. I particularly wanted to leave this link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2006031,00.html
to see how the Minister reconciles the content therein with the fact that he’s quite a fan of Charlie Brooker.
I would post the rant, but he’s pretty much said it all. I’ve already upgraded the RAM on my computer a while ago. I bet it cost a fraction of the price of yours. And it really was a simple affair (although getting an anti-static wristband or similar is apparently an advisable thing to do). I’ve also put an extra hard drive in. About 300 gig (I lost count after the first 250) and cost about 80 quid. Come to think about it I’ve also put a dual layer DVD burner in as well. Again, it cost buttons and was done in a matter of minutes. These are all things that Steve Jobs would not approve of.
But as it is I feel like I’ve got a bit of a head of steam up, so here goes.
The iphone has to be the biggest load of cuntitude in quite some time. The technology is at least a year old. But what I really can’t understand is why everyone is going apeshit about it. It’s got a touch screen, you can surf the net, it interacts with your computer, and can play mp3′s. Whoop-dee-doo. My phone can do that, and I’ve had it six months already. In fact my phone before that could do all that as well. And it had a slide-out qwerty keyboard and handwriting recognition in the PDA part of it. I had that phone for 12 months as well. It wasn’t a Blackbery either.
People are saying that it will be really easy to use and send text messages because it has a touch screen. Well having had a touch screen phone for the last 18 months I have to say the least satisfying element of the phone is in fact the fucking touch screen. You can’t “feel” when the phone has responded to my indelicate prodding. I’ve never sent a text with the screen and if I could, I’d find a way to use the SLIDE OUT QWERTY KEYBOARD to phone as well.
But what really gets my goat (and demonstrates the myth that Apple and Steve Jobs are just really cool hippies who go with the flow) is that you cannot put any of your own software on it. What the fucking hell is that all about? People who buy Apple shit are the type of people who, if sent out to buy food, would volubly tell you they were exercising free will by refusing to go to a supermarket and go to McDonald’s instead, because it works straight out of the wrapper.
The best thing about my phone (which runs PocketPC 5) is, as Charlie Brooker says, I can mod it to shit. I have a very advanced contacts database, a fabulous bit of PIM software, an RSS and PDF reader, sat nav and a project organiser on it. Each of these I put on myself, after trying out two or three different competing products and choosing which one I like the best. For fucks sake, I’ve got software to teach myself to read music on my phone!
You will not be able to do any of this with an iphone, and Steve Jobs doesn’t want you to do that. Nor does he really want the Minister tinkering round in the gizzards of his machine.
And what is the point of the itouch? I don’t have an ipod (death of the album, utterly antisocial and also would cause me to miss too much potential dialogue, and don’t get me started on people who say “but I just couldn’t live without my music” – YES YOU COULD YOU CUNT – IT’S FOOD AND WATER YOU CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT), but even I could see that the memory on the itouch was pretty pointless.
A friend of mine and the Minister’s (let’s call him “Fabulous”) once waxed lyrical about how his Mac even knew what colour his ipod was when he connected them. Isn’t that like marvelling at the fact your Honda carburettor seems to know exactly when you push your Honda accelerator pedal?
For me that final analogy really lies at the heart of the argument though. Windows is software and Mac is hardware. Windows is a map: Mac is the car. The nice thing about Windows is that you get to choose your own means of transport. The hippy Steve Jobs isn’t so permissive.
Oh, and I don’t get viruses on my computer either. I chose a very good antivirus software that also makes mincemeat of spam as well.
I’ve read several pieces on hacking and they all conclude that it’s not that Macs are immune to viruses, it’s just that hackers can’t be arsed to do it. If you write a hack to get in to PC’s, you’ve opened up 90% of the world’s computers potentially.
And finally, I’m writing this on a laptop we proucly bought from Aldi. I got my PC from there as well, and they’re both ace!
In answer to your first question, I’ve been doing this.
http://www.henrystewart.com/conferences/september2007/C071360/programme.html
Don’t laugh.
I also hate Macs. This is 40% because I haven’t got one, 20% because they are absolutely abominable for games (which my son and I play a lot, in the absence of a console in the house), 20% because I hate poncy bollocks and 20% because the people who do have them are usually so rimming felching donkey-punching dirty-sanchez-ing cleveland-steamer-ing fucking cunting smug about it.
I don’t think it is one of Charlie Brooker’s stronger pieces but, for the record, I am not a Mac evangelist and I think the Mitchell & Webb adverts are genuinely awful. (Mind you, I think Mitchell & Webb are the most overrated double act since those idiots from Little Britain finally managed to shake off the memory of Rock Stories With Jamie Theakston.)
If you think I own a Mac because I have no personality, fair enough, though I thought you knew me a little better than that. I use Windows because I have to for work but, of choice, I would choose a Mac over a PC running Windows anytime.
I don’t own a Mac because I think it looks pretty (it does, though there are some equally attractive PCs – particularly laptops – out there amind the gazillions of utilitarian bricks); I own a Mac because the Mac operating system is a hundred times more reliable and much more intuitive to use than Windows, and the software designed for the things I want to do with my computer is better on a Mac.
I very rarely play games on my computer. If you are a gamer, you should not buy a Mac: buy a console or a PC instead. I’ve got Football Manager, chess, a couple of card games and that’s about it. But that’s all I want.
I own and listen to a lot of music; I do quite a bit of audio editing; I like to play around with the photographs I take and manipulate those images; I attempt occasional creative writing; and I hammer t’Internet.
Of course I could do all of those things on a PC – indeed, I HAVE done all those things on a PC both for many years before I bought my first Mac in 2003 and subsequently. What I have discovered is that the software available for doing them on a Mac is better, easier and/or quicker to use.
iTunes, Audacity and Photoshop are available on both platforms but Fission, Audio Hijack Pro, iPhoto, FotoMagico and Scrivener (among many others) are Mac-only and beat the crap out of the Windows equivalents. Like you with your whizzy little mobile phone, I’ve tried them – so I know what I’m talking about. Nobody can claim that Internet Explorer is anything other than an abortion of a web browser: Safari (initially Mac-only but now being developed by Apple to run on PCs) is much better, stabler, easier and faster to use, though Firefox (cross-platform and open source) is better still and is my browser of choice.
I can’t speak for video editing – a subject close to your heart – because I have never tried it properly on any computer but I gather that Macs tend to be favoured by most creative luvvy types above PCs (much like the minority Betamax video format in the 80s won out over VHS among professionals). As there was with Betamax (in which the issue was video quality), there must be a reason for that.
Unlike a PC, I don’t have to reboot the Mac every time I install a new piece of software, or tweak a setting, or try to join a wireless network it hasn’t come across before. Mac OS X is genuinely “plug and play”. I don’t have to worry about Mac OS X crashing randomly whenever it feels like it – and I’m sorry but Windows is genuinely appalling on that score.
The virus argument is a red herring and I don’t mind admitting it. The Minister’s family PCs have long had open source firewall and anti-virus software installed on them and (to date) have never been infected with a virus or a Trojan. There are no Mac viruses (viri?) because it’s not worth writing them for a platform that has about a 7% market share – but I’m quite happy being in that particular minority.
If you want a tecchie pissing contest we can have a pissing contest. I’ve got a Terrabyte of extra disk storage, thanks, and my Mac came with a dual-layer DVD burner 3.5 years ago. My 1Gb stick of Kingston RAM cost £60. The Phillips screwdriver was about £2.50 – but I believe that can be used on both a PC and a Mac. So what?
In case you didn’t notice through the foam spraying from your mouth, I said that the iPhone is overhyped. And for the UK market it is woefully under-specc’d. But in the States (where the market is more than two years behind Europe, which is itself more than a year behind Japan – forgive me but I used to work in the industry so I again have an idea about what I’m saying) that is pretty much a cutting-edge mobile. It would have been cutting-edge in Europe, too, at the start of 2005 and that probably explains why it hasn’t been launched in Europe or Japan yet. At least wait until they launch the European version before writing it off as not up to snuff against an entry-level Nokia: if the UK version isn’t a 3G phone, THEN we can all complain.
The inability of the iPhone to support third party applications is disgraceful. It’s precisely the type of anti-competitive behaviour that repulses me about Microsoft. I wouldn’t defend that any more than I defend the iTunes Music Store’s policy of allowing tracks purchased through it only to be played on iPods. Both practices are unconscionable and should be stopped immediately.
Your biggest misconception seems to be demonstrated when you incorrectly say ‘Mac = hardware, Windows = software’. That’s precisely where the problem with Windows lies. A Mac is a computer with an integrated operating system. PC hardware is built by thousands of different firms and configured in a billion different ways and Windows has to be forced to try to work with each configuration. It can’t. It’s impossible. That’s why the Windows software is so bloated, why it crashes so often and why other pieces of software run so slowly on it. A Mac does “just work” but that’s because it has been designed from the ground up.
And five minutes on t’Internet will prove to you that all Macs can be customised just as much as PCs. My problem with installing the new RAM is because I am both hamfisted and inexperienced in such matters. I am very good at switching the laptop on and off, though.
All that said in respect of pooters, I don’t think Apple actually gives a shit about the iPhone. The iPhone, to quote The Register, is playing John The Baptist to the Jesus that is the iPod Touch. Apple’s current success is built solely upon the shoulders of the iPod and it must protect that brand at all costs. The iPod Touch is a good new version of the iPod but is spoilt by (a) its lack of capacity – 16Gb won’t hold many widescreen movies and looks pathetic when launched alongside a 160Gb iPod Classic – and (b) its failure to incorporate an email client alongside its web browser and calendar function. If they get the capacity up (and they will, once they’ve sold a ton of this model over Christmas) and introduce email, it becomes a killer app in my eyes.
The one fault with the concept of “convergence” is that if you have to do everything on one machine, you can’t (for example) necessarily look at your scheduler/an urgent email someone’s just sent you while having a discrete telephone conversation. (And don’t say “Bluetooth headset” – they have no place outside of a car.) I’ll take a revved-up iPod Touch to act as my MP3 player and PDA and that entry-level Nokia for my phone, thanks, so I can actually use both in a practical situation.
But, really, if you don’t like Macs, don’t use them. Don’t buy them. Problem solved. Chill the fuck out, man.
And don’t get me started on What’s New in Property Joint Venture Documentation. I mean – where to begin…?
Love you too, toots!
re: iphone – I did recognise that you slagged it too, I was simply joining in the stomping.
I do disagree with you about the “windows = software, mac = hardware” point, but we obviously see the same point, but from different perspectives. Nobody owns a Microsoft Computer – they simply don’t exist. However they do own Dell/Axiom/Medion (yay!) that run Windows 1998/2000/XP/NT/Vista on Intel/AMD/Cyrix CPU’s. Etc, etc, etc. You buy an Apple, you get Apple stuff, with only Apple software on it – after all, they are as secretive about their code as Microsoft are. The fact is that yes Microsoft does have to run on a billion different combinations, but I think it’s quite cool that I can tweak my software and ramp my hardware up to the preferences I have. Apple just doesn’t really open those doors. If Microsoft put out their own computers then they I expect they would work perfectly. But they don’t aim to do that. They wan’t to provide the map (or the fuel?) for us to drive our voiture du choix where we choose.
The fact I could upgrade my hardware wasn’t willy waving that I could do it cheaply, more that I could “keep my car on the road” for longer without having to buy an new one, which seemed to be the Minister’s original dilemma.
re: video editing. Yes, the Apple-only Final Cut Pro (FCP) has big fans, but for no particular reason other than media luvvies love their Macs. The professionals actually love Avid (for which you need – and indeed it will only run on – Avid hardware, software and even, for fuck’s sake, an Avid keyboard). I assumed that was because it was intrinsically better than FCP and Adobe Premier/Elements, but when speaking to a member of BBC’s New Media staff he said that that was not the case. The reason Avid is so popular is “lowest common denominator” in that it basically won’t talk to any other machine – Mac or PC included – so if anyone in the chain of command uses Avid, you’re all fucked and have to use it. Having recently been on the sharp end of Avid’s intransigence I can willingly attest to the fact that it’s a cunt that makes Steve Jobs look like the “accommodating” Annabel Chong of the computer world.
A terabyte of extra storage? Fuck me, that’s a lot of pr0n. You know how I said I thought I had enough dirt on you to stop you from overstepping the mark when assisting with my best man’s speech? I just think I’ve got a little bit more. And while we’re on that subject…oh no, it’s just not worth reminding you of the rest of the dirt I’ve got.
And you don’t think it’s one of Charlie Brooker’s stronger pieces? That’s only because you don’t agree with it. After all, I think it’s fucking brilliant.
But just to give it one final wave of the willy, I can check my scheduler whilst having a phone conversation. I can write myself notes etc whilst they are going on as well. I’ve not got it set up for push email, so I can’t be sure about the email thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I could do it as it will run it’s GPRS and cell systems simultaneously (along with wifi etc). You’re fucking right about bluetooth though.
The reason it isn’t one of Charlie Brooker’s stronger pieces (which I agree it isn’t) is because he could have been far ruder, far funnier and far more angry. He censors himself when he realises that there are people out there (Guardian readers) whom he otherwise respects who might hate him and stop reading him.
I don’t have a sodding clue what either of you are on about when it comes to Macs v PCs because it is far too tecchie. I only really “hate” Macs because I don’t have one and most probably never will. But the truth is I don’t really hate them, I just hate that people have to go on about them. If I shopped at Sainsburys, I would hate people who went on about Waitrose. I drive a 1986 Volkswagen Golf GTi, I don’t have a problem with my friend who drives a Lotus, but I would have if he kept saying I should get one. I’d fucking want to fucking kill him. As it is, I occasionally enjoy a ride in it and am happy that he has it and I don’t. When you say “But, really, if you don’t like Macs, don’t use them. Don’t buy them. Problem solved. Chill the fuck out, man.” you have precisely the right attitude. We each have to understand our place in the world.