App£e. or Appl€. Ideally you could use the $ symbol but there's no s in Apple. Sure, you can just throw in whatever character you want, but !nevets doesn't make a lot of sense.

what you're shooting for here is a pun. You want something that looks like a regular character, so @pple is kind of cute, but there are two obvious problems. One, it kind of looks like a direct message to pple, which falls apart. &pple isn't bad, but & doesn't have the association with money, so you don't get the pun.

There are a bunch of currency symbols you can use, there's a list here [1]. Check it out ₩₦€v€t$, then all of your currency puns will be money.

[1] http://www.xe.com/symbols.php

I tried going to a 'hacker' meetup in my city. It was disappointing.

I was asking people if they were programmers, the median reaction was "a programmer? oh lord no, I'm a [marketing/UI/non-technical] person".

It seems the term was coopted and gutted by some in the startup scene.

(I'm aware there are legitimate hackers in the startup scene, this was just one particular event in one particular city.)

Is the groupthink in this case laughing at the anachronistic usage of M$?

I was debating on saying Mi¢rosoft, but I decided against it at the last minute. Oh well.

Let's be clear: using the $ was NEVER cool by any stretch of the imagination, it was just a lot more common in the Internet of the '90s. The people who thought it was cool were always the same people who think it's funny to make up derogatory puns for the names of things they don't like, such as "Internet Exploder" or "Crapple". This is a category of humor that will be forever associated with bitter, angry, condescending-yet-clueless, neckbearded, fedora-wearing morbidly obese IT guys with phone holsters and Bluetooth earpieces that continued making "all your base" references well into the 2000s.

Sure, and that's part of the joke. It's also an IT Crowd reference.