"Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults" | Hacker News Reader

"Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults"

guardian.co.uk

26 points_hgt138 comments

Disclaimer: I own one iBook, 2 PCs (Windows) and 1 EEE laptop (Linux).

This article is so woefully ignorant and presumptuous; it really takes away from what could have been a hilarious tongue-in-cheek piece.

Everyone is certainly entitled to their own rantings, opinions and preferences, but attempting to back up said opinions with unfunny blanket statements and ignorance doesn't really help anyone or provide any sort of entertainment.

A good comment from the original thread:

  "Mac users - before you get all indignant and start
  proving Charlie's point here, lighten up - it's 
  funny! Mac users have a sense of humour too you 
  know, so please, please don't bother to 'correct' the
  misinformation here - it's just a humourous opinion. I
  sometimes think I'd ditch my Mac simply to avoid being
  associated with these insecure earnest types - but then I
  use Windows for five minutes and realise I'm stuck with
  them, unfortunately."

> "Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults;"

Terminal.app ?

> "[Macs are] computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work;"

But don't Macs have a larger share of the 'technically-minded-user' / 'geek' (whatever) market than Wintel ? Also, I feel more patronised by the kind of messages Windows puts up on the screen than by the ones OS X gives you.

> "Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?"

I type this on a Mac equipped with a multi-button + scroll wheel mouse (no driver installation required).

"But don't Macs have a larger share of the 'technically-minded-user' / 'geek' (whatever) market than Wintel?" Not in my experience... do you have the data to back that statement up?

I'm pretty sure that here on Hacker News there's a pretty even split between Linux and OSX. There's even a pg essay on this phenomenon written a few years back that I'd link for you if I weren't on an iPod touch.

Edit: this should be it:

http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html

>> "[Macs are] computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work;" > But don't Macs have a larger share of the 'technically-minded-user' / 'geek' (whatever) market than Wintel ?

There's widely used OS's besides what Apple and Windows have, ya know?

Just because Wintel sucks doesn't mean apple also sucks.

btw Wintel is for " ignorant button mashers too dumb/lazy/uninterested to learn how proper computers work;

Apple doesn't even make a single-button mouse any more. The only mouse they make is the Mighty Mouse (which is in my opinion garbage, but that's beside the point).

>> "Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults;"

>Terminal.app ?

You sir are a sadist or a satirist. Terminal.app is awful!

Have you tried Terminal.app recently? It used to be awful, but current versions (Leopard) are great for me. I stopped using xterm completely and haven't had any issues.

Out of curiosity, what replacement to Terminal.app would you recommend? Bonus points if it doesn't involve running X11.

I do use terminal.app for work. But http://riffraff.livejournal.com/356503.html is better for play. :)

iTerm? Works great for me.

a. you sound like a pc.

b. charlie brooker, go google him.

I half want to upvote you and half want to downvote you..so instead I'm going to comment: google him indeed.

I just spent a few minutes reading/watching some of his stuff and it's more amusing than this "I hate Macs" one, which I thought wasn't that great, whatever his overall point was. Maybe it's just bias on my part for probably having greater technological knowledge than him, but the same would probably apply to most of us here.

I feel the same. He is a well known British comedian, but probably unknown in the US. This article (which is not his best) is no more than one of his satirical rants. Some people here are taking it way too seriously :)

"Ultimately the campaign's biggest flaw is that it perpetuates the notion that consumers somehow "define themselves" with the technology they choose. If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe - but not a personality."

Apple's genius is that almost everyone has this affliction as for what clothes they wear, car they drive, house they live in, and you can make money applying it to the technology they use.

Apple's attempts to turn a computer into a style accessory have also brought out a lot of resentment in some people. When things suddenly becomes fashionable, they tend to become heavily commercialized and flooded by people whose interest seems superficial, and it adds a lot of noise to the community. (It's sort of like the "Eternal September" effect. (http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-...)) I think this is a large part of why some people gripe about Macs / Mac users being pretentious.

He is right on about the choice of Mitchell and Webb. When I first saw the UK Mac ads I thought: really? Jeremy is the Mac!?! They are making the anti-Mac people's point for them.

Also, relax. The overreaction here is stereotypical. This is an attempt at a humourous rant meant for a general audience. If you know what Terminal.app is you are not in the target audience.

p.s. All the Peep Show episodes are on Youtube - check out a few to see the character most widely associated with Robert Webb: http://www.runciter.net/peep-show-episodes.html. A lot of other great British TV is on Youtube too. They seem to have much less of a problem with uploaded episodes on the net.

It is rather simple to poke fun on operating systems, be it Windows, Linux or OSX. It is also rather simple to poke on hardware in Macs versus PC's.

There are 2 things that makes me want to buy another Lenovo Thinkpad the next time (I am currently on an older X40 thinkpad): Hardware specs and Ubuntu.

The hardware specs on a price-comparable Lenovo/Mac makes the Lenovo win. Granted it may have less cache, but it doesn't run hot and have to clock down the CPU (I'll bet this happens on the AIR macbooks). Lenovos have better screen resolution (but OSX has the cool rendering patents). I am amazed by the stability of my current Thinkpad.

OSX is not interesting enough for me to warrant the more expensive hardware. Remember, most of my day goes on inside an emacs-session window and Gnome is a fine graphical UI for me. 5 years ago, it would be pain with a PC+Debian or (horrors) windows. But Ubuntu is actually quite hassle-free as an operating system. And if there is a problem (of which I've had none), I know how to dig to the treasure.

But - that does not make Mac's to "Glorified Fisher-Price activity centres". I know a lot of people who swear by them and I can easily interact with them on my Linux-box. Interestingly, many of these are amazingly good computer geeks. I guess showing UNIX APIs into OSX made the difference.

> looking so cool, and banging on about how he was going to use his new laptop to write a novel, without ever getting round to doing it, like a mediocre idiot.

My first mac was a used ibook. The original owner was an author. She wore the letters off the keyboard and wore the hard drive out. Writing a book. This one: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0977351475

I had two thoughts about this article:

1. "Great, Charlie Brooker's back on telly tonight!"

2. "Bollocks, it's a half-arsed article from last February."

It seems to me that he doesn't like macs because they arent like Windows/Intel machines. The whole mouse button argument shows that he's criticising something he hasn't really used. When I first started using a Mac I missed it because I'd never used anything different but now I don't even notice.

His whole article is a reem of comment designed to provoke, with no facts to back up his claims.

By the time I got to this bit where he calls mac users "superficial semi-person assembled from packaging" all I could think was what kind of moron can get a job at the guardian nowadays.

I use the best tool for the job I'm currently doing and in some cases that's my mac and others my PC.

I can get along on a Mac with only one mouse button, but I find that I really do prefer a three-button scroll mouse, which looks very out of place while I use it with my iMac. :)

Careful now! If you feed it, it will come back.

I'm a Mac user. However, those commercials are the first ad campaign so insufferable that I almost wanted to return my product after I bought it out of spite.

I feel like their advertising actually makes it tougher for a nerd like myself to convert to the cult of Mac. It's Unix with an unbelievable GUI, what else could a nerd want? But I still take shit from friends and coworkers who think I bought it so I can put on my ironic Castro hat and head out to Starbucks where I'll listen to Decemberist mp3s and blog for p.e.t.a.

This week: Charlie watched some episodes of Larry Sanders (on his PC). He played the customised Fawlty Towers map for Counterstrike (on his PC). He listened to the Windows startup jingle every 10 minutes as his PC repeatedly rebooted itself.

Methinks its humor, not a real attack on Apple products.

In my mind Macs are somewhat better suited for end users compared to Windows PCs. But if I should speak for myself, after about 11 years of using only Linux I can somewhat manage to use a Windows system even if I search for icons like a stupid for minutes, but can't absolutely use a Mac system... Btw my background is fvwm2 that starts with an xterm without decorations open by default.

Anyway the next week I'll own a macbook since I need to put the apps I'm developing for the iPhone using the open toolchain inside the AppStore, so I need the real SDK, I hope I'll be able to use its interface without too problems...

And about Mac Os X "under the hood" I think it's a cool Unix system and one of the few Unix variants that are actively developed today (where actively means: to add innovation).

"...glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults..." is spot-on accurate. But not the way he means.

Can anyone doubt that his own PC contains a fair number of photos, movies, music, games, etc? Guess what?

How do you think it IS accurate, then? I'm curious to hear what you have in mind.

I can sum up my reasoning for using a Mac in two words:

"Pretty UNIX"

I disagree. Doctor Who would definitely have used a machine that you've probably never seen before. Something quirky that you'd never know how to use if you had never seen it without training. Perhaps an SGI O2 running a customized Slackware... with a WM that he wrote himself by hacking Compiz and WMII together.

Oh, and the rest of the article? Amusing but content-free.

The only thing I found interesting about this article is that there are British versions of the commercials. The rest of it was what pays the bills for (some) journalists - completely uninformed bullshit.

I actually find the writer quite funny, his style is to stretch the "truth" much like Colbert does. Check his TV show about TV shows: http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=charlie+brooker#

I did enjoy some of those. And I probably should have been more clear about "uninformed bullshit." I think opinion pieces by journalists are often meant to provoke indignation by being deliberately facile, because that creates controversy and gets people talking about the article, showing it to their friends, thus increasing readership. Sort of like my comment above ;-)

Maybe I got it from the same source (POET?), because I describe GUI's as Fisher-Technic activity centres.

But I mean it as a compliment: clear affordances and immediate feedback.

Very apt that this is in the Guardian. A newspaper for haters.

Is this guy serious? He can't be serious. I'm going to assume this is dry British humor that doesn't transfer extremely well to text. Otherwise, this is the most misinformed anti-Mac article I've ever read and I hope he gets fired / dies immediately.

Next time I'll recommend he get crashed into by a passenger plane. Too soon?

You guys are bad with sarcasm.

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