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Panther Released into the Wild
u2fan00 writes "Those fortunate enough to have an Apple Store near them were in for a treat last night -- crowds! Oh, and also Panther. Check out the local reactions, photos and stories from some stores across the nation."
would life crumple if one were to avoid the crowds and pick it up the next time you happen to be near the electronic store?
Life would crumple, because it wouldn't be as much fun.
These people aren't lining up and throwing parties because expose and fast user switching are going to change their lives. They're throwing parties because they want to throw parties, and the release is a good excuse to get all the mac users out there for some fun.
The guys who wait in line for an hour are not spending an hour of their lives to get OS X a day earlier, they're spending that hour hanging out with friends, making new friends (they all have something in common-being fans of the os-so it's a good way to meet people), and enjoying themselves.
The "cult of consumerism" is a real problem only insofar as consumers allow themselves to be exploited. Some may argue that Apple's policy of charging full price for annual upgrades is exploitative, but there are many who feel the pricing isn't unfair. Do the math, and it actually beats the cost per year of Microsoft's professional (ie, no product activiation) versions of windows. Apple is not a designer clothes brand selling the same materials from the same foreign country with a more famous label and a tripled price. Neither is Apple a monopoly gouging consumers without alternatives. The consumers in this picture are lining up like partiers outside a club. Look elsewhere if you want to find cattle.
For a hint as to where to look, try Keenan's recent paper, "Modern Dynamics in Consumerism: The Brand as a Proxy for Tribal Identity." It's an intriguing look at the effect of corporate branding on individuals' social lives. Certain social circles share a disturbing number of characteristics with cults, and the cult paradigm is a useful tool in analyzing how the most materialistic among us operate.
But getting back to the party at the Apple store, it worked really well for me, Panther wasnt the only cat I picked up. While we were hanging out waiting for the release, I ran into a girl who was touching up the digital version of her latest painting on her powerbook, and we ended up, um playing with our new kitties together after the party. You have no idea how hard it is to meet other lesbians who aren't raving, battle-axe-wielding, death-to-all-men feminists these days.
So, while the "cult of consumerism" is a real force in modern American society, the Panther release is a very poor example to use. It's just a case of people using a convenient excuse to have a little fun.
p.s. pickup games of medal of honor over airport with the rest of the line rock!
i think tim berners-lee'd have something to say about that.
While some of the effects I listed were exacerbated by the presence of the web and the net, I note that Fido didn't destroy everything even though it had a lot of the characteristics of today's Internet. (in fact we had an Internet gateway back then in Net 107 heh heh)
Microsoft, on the other hand, with preinstalled software and draconian licensing, as well as the desire to kill off all commercial competition in most markets, and making those who were in the tools business hang on with their fingernails to solvency (thinking Borland here), pretty much killed the shrinkwrap market for OS and applications. The net effect of this was to invalidate the whole reason for building your own box (for anyone but a hardcore geek) and even thinking much about office suites and the like - it's all Microsoft now. For that matter, the rise of OSS tracks this very action - if you can't compete commercially with them, the only resort is to compete for free. In some respects it's the transition from a business/hobbyist market to a utility. Computers are like the phone now, just less reliable. I don't think this is necessarily a good thing either, mind you.
Without the monopoly dominance, we might have had a chance of preserving the hobbyist nature of the net and computing in general. We were basically exploited to provide Microsoft with 60 billion in the bank, while running around willy-nilly fixing computers and patching for worms and cleaning up infections. Now it's 2003 and the hobby I used to love doesn't exist anymore. It sucks ass.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.