Demographics could be Apple's best friend
on
Moving to Mac Made Easy
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· Score: 2, Insightful
America's greying. For the home market that means a group of consumers with different expectations about computing -- they'll want ease of use, and they'll have less patience with the labyrinthine kludge that is the Windoze OS.
Anyone who's had the pleasure of showing senior citizens how to surf, word process and e-mail will know that 99% of the Windoze shell is irrelevant to this demographic, and worse, gets in the way of finding and doing what they need. The older users I've seen are excited by the potential of technology, and they turn on to it avidly. It's criminal that the majority of them are stuck trying to deal with Windoze. OS X is a natural for this market segment.
On the other hand there could also be a future in designing tunnel-vision apps and shell replacements for older people, stuff that narrows down the gui and weeds out the extraneous, that winnows Windows into something useful for them.
Look, I know this is a minority taste. But what can I say? I've played so many generic games that I can hardly tell one from the next any more, so much have their conventions and cliches blurred together into one giant big congealed blob. Apologies to fans of blob gaming.
I want an MMPORG set in George Romero's universe featuring AI-controlled flesh-eating zombies who grow in number with each passing gamecycle and against whom I and the other players fight a persistent battle for resources, territory and survival. I want it to be as grim yet mordantly funny as Dawn of the Dead, emphasizing both communal action and blood-curdling thrills.
Yes, Resident Evil Online is pointing in this direction, but it's severely limited to small-scale squad play. Give us whole cities with thousands of human players banding together against stiffs. When there's no more room on Counterstrike servers, the dead will walk the earth!
Seeing this mod brings back twenty-year old memories of our geek squad exerting our muscles to load a Control Data 160-A into the back of a truck for shipping to our high school. Given that the console weighed a ton, that our sole physical exercise in those days was loading paper into the TTY, and that our only helper was the septuagenarian priest who'd arranged with his executive buddy for the donation, it still amazes me we weren't all squashed.
What a beauty it was with its sleek Austin Powers space-age styling: banks of switches (RUN / STEP), flipping numbers, and polished steel head. Moddable? Wouldn't make a bad coffee table, come to think of it...
"...FreeBSD is the OS of choice for sysadmins who're well past the 'gee wizz aint this cool' phase of their computing life"
Listen to the man, young whippersnappers. After you've printed out a stack of Fortran cards, carefully taped them up on the wall, and kept stepping backwards until a nude Farrah Fawcett Majors smiles back at you....well, that kind of magic only happens once in your life.
What the article mentions but never brings together is the ability of the player to win the game through peaceful(ie: not killing people) or criminal means."
It's also possible to buy a girl dinner because you think sooner or later she's going to run into trouble supporting those giant breasts with that rail-thin body.
From C/Net's panting "news" story (complete, like all good journalism, with clickable multiple views of the laptop):
"Chances are you missed the big coming-out shindig this week at the Porsche Design Boutique in Beverly Hills, attended by F.A. Porsche himself (along with Anthony Edwards, Herbie Hancock, and other 'luminaries')."
"In this interview, the Grammy and Emmy-winning musician, singer, songwriter and producer explains how he caught the bug for technology,
how Macs and virtual instruments have taken over his studio, how mixing in surround has enhanced the live tour experience and how he feels technology can be used to take the world to a higher level."
Careful, Herbs. Angry Mac fundamentalists will be smashing your records like holy rollers trampling Beatles albums.;-)
First they came for the Nazi memorabilia sites
And I did not speak out
Because I am not a Nazi, and frankly, only fetishists want such shit, anyway.
Then they came for the anti-abortion sites
And I did not speak out
Because I am not a loopy right winger, and those assholes can plan their violent clinic disruptions somewhere else.
Then they came for the white supremacist sites
And I did not speak out,
Feeling, as it were, a bit under-sympathetic toward those sewer-dwellers.
Then they came for me.
I used to run a site selling Beanie Babies that played a midi version of "Wish Upon a Star" while you shopped.
And even I'm forced to admit I got what I deserve.
Far more honest to say: Apple says crap video subsystems in its iBooks with utter disdain for buyers wishing better than crippled low-range outdated cards.
What's striking about CS is how its utter dominance has so changed the FPS landscape, inspiring competitors to churn out one military sim clone after another and even altering Valve's own strategic plan. Ages ago, Valve was to have released its new Team Fortress game. But why would it ever wish to to do that when CS is crushing any and all competition (and on outdated technology at that)? Better to just release Steam, sit back, and relish the luxury of a prolonged development cycle; nice work if you can get it! When the fans tire of CS, Valve can release its next (by that time) much-honed product.
But while CS gives Valve time to fiddle and tweak, in another respect it's bad for the gaming industry. The mod's amazing success discourages innovation even at the very developer whose original great innovation led, inadvertantly, to its one day being out-innovated by a fan. Meanwhile, every kid who's playing CS 24/7 isn't buying new product. Given the quality of most product out there, you can hardly blame them, but it would be nice to see something approaching the mid-to-late 90s period of game creativity; sadly, we probably won't any time soon, and CS is one reason why.
When you've sold as many computers as Apple, you don't need to bother with silly trade shows attended by weird fetishistic pasty-faced guys who like *white* keyboards, fer chrissakes.
Which is why Apple's withdrawing from its usual pansy orbit and taking its machines to a whole new market segment that *really* understands high performance:
NASCAR!
Steve Jobs is said to have decided that Apple will pull the ultimate switcheroo - dump its installed customer base for one "that knows the value of a unisex Led Zeppelin halter top." There seems also to be something to accounts that director Errol Morris has vowed that if he is asked "to shoot one more commercial featuring ovulating 14-year olds who can't turn on a PC," the documentary filmmaker will "hang myself."
The revised appearance schedule reflects the growing sense of testosterone at Apple in the wake of its industry-dominant Switch campaign, feeding rumors that a new product, the Masculintosh, is in the wings.
Most modding leaves me wondering if there isn't a need to start a toll-free counseling hotline to talk the poor souls off the ledge and back into the building. There are some interesting exceptions, but come on -- there's a very good reason computer geeks aren't sought after as a class for their visual aesthetic. Pocket Protector 101, anyone?
The current specimen is...kind of nice and translucent and red...like some sort of calcium-depleted hooker's nails. Two stars out of ten, and one of those is for being ballsy/stupid enough to "pre-install" a pile of software and advertise it here.
Critics say the burgeoning industry is creating millions of zombified addicts who are turning on and tuning into computer games, and dropping out of school and traditional group activities, becoming uncommunicative and even violent because of the electronic games they play.
Tsk tsk. Unlike TV, of course, which promotes intimacy, critical thinking, and feelings of peace and contentedness.
It's not hard to see what has the cultural police so alarmed: at last, a form of electronic engagement even more powerful in its spell than TV has arrived to offer young people a reality of their own shaping. And while it's hardly arguable that playing Counterstrike all day is better for you than sitting in front of a TV, there is a key difference.
Counterstrike -- or almost any online game -- can't really be used to indoctrinate. Not yet, anyway (although you might argue that running around with guns killing others for round after round is a type of indoctrination, the fact is that it's largely devoid of political context, and experientially it's all for self-aggrandizement, anyway; however, cf. the US Army's recent slippery entry into this market as the progenitor of the politicization of the FPS game).
The main problem is that you can't use Dan Blather or Brit Spume to convey the wishes of the oligarchy just when the kids have been left perfectly mollified by hours of braindead sitcoms. Cocooned digitally with only pixels and urges to guide them, they're neither being told how to think or what to buy. Online gaming is too much beyond the control of our masters.
That's intolerable to a nation that regards workaholism as the ideal state of being. It also offends our puritan traditions; next to serving your boss, only God is supposed to suck up so much of your devotion. Watch for more efforts at social control coming from such kissing cousins as Joe Lieberman and Jerry Falwell in the near future. The first step will be to apply the social definitions of addiction, whereafter, as long as the present administration is in office, you may see a faith-based solution offered for your Quake jones...
Otherwise the game is a bit like watching an industrial robot beat the crap out of Mike Tyson, OK so it might be fun to watch but it is not real sport.
Nice post.
Consider, also, what fun it would be to watch Tyson fight the industrial robot if Tyson were allowed to have bio-mechanical augmentations implanted (or, more likely, encasing or replacing limbs).
Not only would it be fun to see the match-up of man-machine vs. machine, but it would at once revive a formerly brilliant boxing career unfairly reduced by the inevitable dulling of the years. And not merely Tyson's: any great fighter could come back, even Ali. Why should the long fight end just when the fighter has amassed such enduring familiarity with the circumnavigation of pain? Think of the gargantuan clashes to be waged in the ManBot Leagues; think of Don King with an eight foot high bionic hairdo!
If you took a look at the hilariously preachy UI reference material for developers that was linked on Slashdot recently, you could see this coming. Apple is convinced that Aqua is the only approach to computing that you'll ever need.
Ironically for the company that once portrayed itself as the rebellious liberator in a 1984-ish PC world, the emerging new design philosophy is fantastically overbearing. Apple loves to play the meddlesome know-it-all. Not totalitarian, exactly, just super fussy -- the corporate equivalent of, say, Felix Unger. Let's call it Prig Brother.
Want an upgradeable system? In a world of fast-changing hardware, you just might. Sorry: the $2000 models on the "lower" end simply aren't. When I complained about bilking consumers for underpowered GeForce 4 MX video subsystems on a mailing list recently, an Apple proselytizer peeped, "What do you want? They're not upgradeable." And that sort of servile response is why they aren't.
Want to modify the UI? Hands off, please, it's perfect. As with the white keyboards whose preternatural cleanliness suggests nothing so much as neurotically wrapping furniture in plastic, Apple can't have you getting your UI dirty. By this time, the new Mac owner begins to understand why the "i" in iMac and iBook is in miniature; you're as nothing next to the Product or the Company.
Surely the "Switch" ads promised something else. Or did they? Look again. You are instructed to turn to a suite of applications that "just work," as if no other software anywhere else ever works. And probably, for the geniuses in the ads who can't turn on a PC without needing shock therapy, their PC software *didn't* just work. These are ads that posit computer users as helpless victims needing rescue. And as everyone remembers from swimming class, your friendly rescuer may just have to bop you over the head if you struggle. The subtext of the "Switch" campaign is in keeping with the anal approach to hardware and the GUI: you, the emancipated peon, are encouraged to weep your tears of gladness that Prig Brother will come to your rescue by reducing the number of buttons on your mouse and ensuring that your scroll bars are forever blue. Or gray. You have a choice!
OS X looked like a nice change of pace and allowed me to avoid giving any money to Microsoft. That's why I got an iBook. It's working just fine, thanks. Maybe it's asking too much if, since I've paid for it, Apple couldn't just mind it's own business?
That this trend is driven by the religious right is hardly a coincidence.
In the history of film in the US, religion has always stood in the way of expression -- whether informing public censorship (via the Hayes Commission) or merely yoking adherents to a strained choice of "approved" material (the Roman Catholic Index).
No one should confuse what Clean Flicks is doing with personal choice, however. Far from being a benign alternative to state censorship, it's merely a business model that codifies prejudices: Utah is the theory, and Clean Flicks is the method. Whether it is ancient buddhas being dynamited outside Kabul or Kate Winslet's lush breasts digitally masectomized from Titanic, the motive is the same. Such medievalism is aimed mainly at the young, the better to extinguish their impulses for thought and experience.
Beyond revealing the adaptiveness of technology to the unchanging dictates of Puritanism, this trend also points up further fault lines between modern and pre-modern America. The America that approves of AG Ashcroft cleansing the Bill of Rights is also the one that turns to Clean Flicks. Alas, 21st century America romanticizes 17th century Salem, and those of use who do not want to go back in time will have to resist those who do.
But we also have to laugh at something revealed by the Clean Flicks movement -- desire, unquenchable to the last! True religious conviction would lead the devout away from sinful Hollywood product into complete cultural separatism (as indeed the growing Christian entertainment industry would seek to do). But no, the call of experience and the flesh is too strong, even for our Taliban, and they can't resist peeking, once they've scoured the product of all its most obvious and obtrusive remnants, leaving, ironically, only suggestion... As pre-1960s filmmakers would tell you, it was always sexier like that, anyway.
I hate RIAA as much as the next guy, and I am not too happy about MPAA either, but then again, I am not happy about a lot of things really, but that doesn't make me some kind of moral superhero for the people...
Not for "the people," no. But when you uncritically parrot the sentiments of our economic masters, who decree that one must never share one's music, then you become their hero. Or stooge, as it were.
Or maybe you haven't heard: consumers are sheep. Dress up a few celebrities in shepherd outfits, license the latest Britney Spears song, run the commercial 24/7, and before you can bleat, it's a Palladium world.
Here, a freebie for the marketing scum:
"What's that you're doing on your PC, Bob?"
"Hi, Paul. I'm running the newest office productivity software -- and watching special private sneak previews of the new Star Wars movie, with instant updates from George Lucas! And I'm always sure that all my software is legal, healthy and up to date."
"Wow. Can my PC do that?"
"Not if it doesn't do Trusted Computing."
"Trusted Computing? What's that?"
"Trusted Computing is the exciting new way to use my PC without fear of hackers or loss of privacy. See, Paul, Trusted Computing is a lot like like what members of the shadowy sado-masochism sub-culture call a 'butt plug.' It keeps out the bad things like computer viruses and unwanted fluids, even as its firm, lodged presence serves to constantly remind me of who's master! Because I'm not free to do anything wrong, I'm always certain to do what's right!"
"Gee, Bob, sounds great. I'd better look into Trusted Computing, too -- along with a zip-up leather mask for the wife, ha ha!"
Those are nice points, and I have checked them out in person. My gripe is chiefly with the underpowered video subsystem (the ancient GeForce 2 repackaged as the GeForce 4 MX) but bus speed is sorely lacking, too.
I'm sure the iMac is competitive with the Profile, but I'd never consider the Profile. Realistically or not, I'd like to see the next iMac be competitive with, say, a home-built AMD system featuring a GeForce 4 or Radeon 9700. While I love OS X and my iBook, I can't bring myself to pay $2000 for an iMac that's weaker than my aging desktop PC and will be further left behind by a quick, painless $300-$400 mobo and cpu upgrade. When they beef up the iMac, I'll be first in line.:-)
If you want to cripple the instincts for thought and debate in society, there are a number of ways to do so.
Dispatch your press secretary to warn Americans to watch what they say...
Allow your loose cannon of an Attorney General to go to Congress and smear political opponents as stooges who give aid and comfort to the enemy...
Multiply your powers of domestic surveillance, treating the least private nook and cranny as the government's reserve, every technology its appendage...
Demand carte blanche for the executive through expanded powers and reduced congressional oversight...
Marshal the seemingly endless hordes of white conservative male talking heads who overpopulate the TV screens with their ideology, until it seems surely everyone must think in this constipated Father Knows Best manner...
And last, but not least, bring to heel the librarians, those snooty know-it-alls who looked down on you the one or two occasions at Yale when you bothered to check out a book. You didn't read it, anyway -- showed them!
I'd love to see this powering a souped-up version of the beautiful but woefully underpowered iMac. All that holds me back from switching is what you might call the Agony of Id-fluence: if you spend $2000 on a desktop in this era of cut-rate electronics pricing, it damn well better be able to run Doom 3.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who's had the pleasure of showing senior citizens how to surf, word process and e-mail will know that 99% of the Windoze shell is irrelevant to this demographic, and worse, gets in the way of finding and doing what they need. The older users I've seen are excited by the potential of technology, and they turn on to it avidly. It's criminal that the majority of them are stuck trying to deal with Windoze. OS X is a natural for this market segment.
On the other hand there could also be a future in designing tunnel-vision apps and shell replacements for older people, stuff that narrows down the gui and weeds out the extraneous, that winnows Windows into something useful for them.
Economic realities for working Americans are far different than for subsidized mercenaries sitting in Japan.
I want an MMPORG set in George Romero's universe featuring AI-controlled flesh-eating zombies who grow in number with each passing gamecycle and against whom I and the other players fight a persistent battle for resources, territory and survival. I want it to be as grim yet mordantly funny as Dawn of the Dead, emphasizing both communal action and blood-curdling thrills.
Yes, Resident Evil Online is pointing in this direction, but it's severely limited to small-scale squad play. Give us whole cities with thousands of human players banding together against stiffs. When there's no more room on Counterstrike servers, the dead will walk the earth!
What a beauty it was with its sleek Austin Powers space-age styling: banks of switches (RUN / STEP), flipping numbers, and polished steel head. Moddable? Wouldn't make a bad coffee table, come to think of it...
From Apple's online "Interview with Herbie Hancock" (August 2002):
Careful, Herbs. Angry Mac fundamentalists will be smashing your records like holy rollers trampling Beatles albums.And I did not speak out
Because I am not a Nazi, and frankly, only fetishists want such shit, anyway.
Then they came for the anti-abortion sites
And I did not speak out
Because I am not a loopy right winger, and those assholes can plan their violent clinic disruptions somewhere else.
Then they came for the white supremacist sites
And I did not speak out,
Feeling, as it were, a bit under-sympathetic toward those sewer-dwellers.
Then they came for me.
I used to run a site selling Beanie Babies that played a midi version of "Wish Upon a Star" while you shopped.
And even I'm forced to admit I got what I deserve.
Far more honest to say: Apple says crap video subsystems in its iBooks with utter disdain for buyers wishing better than crippled low-range outdated cards.
But while CS gives Valve time to fiddle and tweak, in another respect it's bad for the gaming industry. The mod's amazing success discourages innovation even at the very developer whose original great innovation led, inadvertantly, to its one day being out-innovated by a fan. Meanwhile, every kid who's playing CS 24/7 isn't buying new product. Given the quality of most product out there, you can hardly blame them, but it would be nice to see something approaching the mid-to-late 90s period of game creativity; sadly, we probably won't any time soon, and CS is one reason why.
My snub of your cool iMac because it is woefully underpowered is purely a negotiating tactic.
Which is why Apple's withdrawing from its usual pansy orbit and taking its machines to a whole new market segment that *really* understands high performance:
NASCAR!
Steve Jobs is said to have decided that Apple will pull the ultimate switcheroo - dump its installed customer base for one "that knows the value of a unisex Led Zeppelin halter top." There seems also to be something to accounts that director Errol Morris has vowed that if he is asked "to shoot one more commercial featuring ovulating 14-year olds who can't turn on a PC," the documentary filmmaker will "hang myself."
The revised appearance schedule reflects the growing sense of testosterone at Apple in the wake of its industry-dominant Switch campaign, feeding rumors that a new product, the Masculintosh, is in the wings.
Macworld in Boston: laughable.
Macworld in New York: oh please.
Macworld in Daytona: fuggin' A!
The current specimen is...kind of nice and translucent and red...like some sort of calcium-depleted hooker's nails. Two stars out of ten, and one of those is for being ballsy/stupid enough to "pre-install" a pile of software and advertise it here.
When will Apple have a box powerful enough for Doom 3?
Speaking for the great majority who love having all the humor in the world flattened by technical explanations, allow me to thank you.
Critics say the burgeoning industry is creating millions of zombified addicts who are turning on and tuning into computer games, and dropping out of school and traditional group activities, becoming uncommunicative and even violent because of the electronic games they play.
Tsk tsk. Unlike TV, of course, which promotes intimacy, critical thinking, and feelings of peace and contentedness.
It's not hard to see what has the cultural police so alarmed: at last, a form of electronic engagement even more powerful in its spell than TV has arrived to offer young people a reality of their own shaping. And while it's hardly arguable that playing Counterstrike all day is better for you than sitting in front of a TV, there is a key difference.
Counterstrike -- or almost any online game -- can't really be used to indoctrinate. Not yet, anyway (although you might argue that running around with guns killing others for round after round is a type of indoctrination, the fact is that it's largely devoid of political context, and experientially it's all for self-aggrandizement, anyway; however, cf. the US Army's recent slippery entry into this market as the progenitor of the politicization of the FPS game).
The main problem is that you can't use Dan Blather or Brit Spume to convey the wishes of the oligarchy just when the kids have been left perfectly mollified by hours of braindead sitcoms. Cocooned digitally with only pixels and urges to guide them, they're neither being told how to think or what to buy. Online gaming is too much beyond the control of our masters.
That's intolerable to a nation that regards workaholism as the ideal state of being. It also offends our puritan traditions; next to serving your boss, only God is supposed to suck up so much of your devotion. Watch for more efforts at social control coming from such kissing cousins as Joe Lieberman and Jerry Falwell in the near future. The first step will be to apply the social definitions of addiction, whereafter, as long as the present administration is in office, you may see a faith-based solution offered for your Quake jones...
Consider, also, what fun it would be to watch Tyson fight the industrial robot if Tyson were allowed to have bio-mechanical augmentations implanted (or, more likely, encasing or replacing limbs).
Not only would it be fun to see the match-up of man-machine vs. machine, but it would at once revive a formerly brilliant boxing career unfairly reduced by the inevitable dulling of the years. And not merely Tyson's: any great fighter could come back, even Ali. Why should the long fight end just when the fighter has amassed such enduring familiarity with the circumnavigation of pain? Think of the gargantuan clashes to be waged in the ManBot Leagues; think of Don King with an eight foot high bionic hairdo!
Keep your DB2. But I'll take OS X on one of your super duper CPUs.
Ironically for the company that once portrayed itself as the rebellious liberator in a 1984-ish PC world, the emerging new design philosophy is fantastically overbearing. Apple loves to play the meddlesome know-it-all. Not totalitarian, exactly, just super fussy -- the corporate equivalent of, say, Felix Unger. Let's call it Prig Brother.
Want an upgradeable system? In a world of fast-changing hardware, you just might. Sorry: the $2000 models on the "lower" end simply aren't. When I complained about bilking consumers for underpowered GeForce 4 MX video subsystems on a mailing list recently, an Apple proselytizer peeped, "What do you want? They're not upgradeable." And that sort of servile response is why they aren't.
Want to modify the UI? Hands off, please, it's perfect. As with the white keyboards whose preternatural cleanliness suggests nothing so much as neurotically wrapping furniture in plastic, Apple can't have you getting your UI dirty. By this time, the new Mac owner begins to understand why the "i" in iMac and iBook is in miniature; you're as nothing next to the Product or the Company.
Surely the "Switch" ads promised something else. Or did they? Look again. You are instructed to turn to a suite of applications that "just work," as if no other software anywhere else ever works. And probably, for the geniuses in the ads who can't turn on a PC without needing shock therapy, their PC software *didn't* just work. These are ads that posit computer users as helpless victims needing rescue. And as everyone remembers from swimming class, your friendly rescuer may just have to bop you over the head if you struggle. The subtext of the "Switch" campaign is in keeping with the anal approach to hardware and the GUI: you, the emancipated peon, are encouraged to weep your tears of gladness that Prig Brother will come to your rescue by reducing the number of buttons on your mouse and ensuring that your scroll bars are forever blue. Or gray. You have a choice!
OS X looked like a nice change of pace and allowed me to avoid giving any money to Microsoft. That's why I got an iBook. It's working just fine, thanks. Maybe it's asking too much if, since I've paid for it, Apple couldn't just mind it's own business?
In the history of film in the US, religion has always stood in the way of expression -- whether informing public censorship (via the Hayes Commission) or merely yoking adherents to a strained choice of "approved" material (the Roman Catholic Index).
No one should confuse what Clean Flicks is doing with personal choice, however. Far from being a benign alternative to state censorship, it's merely a business model that codifies prejudices: Utah is the theory, and Clean Flicks is the method. Whether it is ancient buddhas being dynamited outside Kabul or Kate Winslet's lush breasts digitally masectomized from Titanic, the motive is the same. Such medievalism is aimed mainly at the young, the better to extinguish their impulses for thought and experience.
Beyond revealing the adaptiveness of technology to the unchanging dictates of Puritanism, this trend also points up further fault lines between modern and pre-modern America. The America that approves of AG Ashcroft cleansing the Bill of Rights is also the one that turns to Clean Flicks. Alas, 21st century America romanticizes 17th century Salem, and those of use who do not want to go back in time will have to resist those who do.
But we also have to laugh at something revealed by the Clean Flicks movement -- desire, unquenchable to the last! True religious conviction would lead the devout away from sinful Hollywood product into complete cultural separatism (as indeed the growing Christian entertainment industry would seek to do). But no, the call of experience and the flesh is too strong, even for our Taliban, and they can't resist peeking, once they've scoured the product of all its most obvious and obtrusive remnants, leaving, ironically, only suggestion... As pre-1960s filmmakers would tell you, it was always sexier like that, anyway.
Not for "the people," no. But when you uncritically parrot the sentiments of our economic masters, who decree that one must never share one's music, then you become their hero. Or stooge, as it were.
Here, a freebie for the marketing scum:
"What's that you're doing on your PC, Bob?"
"Hi, Paul. I'm running the newest office productivity software -- and watching special private sneak previews of the new Star Wars movie, with instant updates from George Lucas! And I'm always sure that all my software is legal, healthy and up to date."
"Wow. Can my PC do that?"
"Not if it doesn't do Trusted Computing."
"Trusted Computing? What's that?"
"Trusted Computing is the exciting new way to use my PC without fear of hackers or loss of privacy. See, Paul, Trusted Computing is a lot like like what members of the shadowy sado-masochism sub-culture call a 'butt plug.' It keeps out the bad things like computer viruses and unwanted fluids, even as its firm, lodged presence serves to constantly remind me of who's master! Because I'm not free to do anything wrong, I'm always certain to do what's right!"
"Gee, Bob, sounds great. I'd better look into Trusted Computing, too -- along with a zip-up leather mask for the wife, ha ha!"
I'm sure the iMac is competitive with the Profile, but I'd never consider the Profile. Realistically or not, I'd like to see the next iMac be competitive with, say, a home-built AMD system featuring a GeForce 4 or Radeon 9700. While I love OS X and my iBook, I can't bring myself to pay $2000 for an iMac that's weaker than my aging desktop PC and will be further left behind by a quick, painless $300-$400 mobo and cpu upgrade. When they beef up the iMac, I'll be first in line. :-)
Dispatch your press secretary to warn Americans to watch what they say...
Allow your loose cannon of an Attorney General to go to Congress and smear political opponents as stooges who give aid and comfort to the enemy...
Multiply your powers of domestic surveillance, treating the least private nook and cranny as the government's reserve, every technology its appendage...
Demand carte blanche for the executive through expanded powers and reduced congressional oversight...
Marshal the seemingly endless hordes of white conservative male talking heads who overpopulate the TV screens with their ideology, until it seems surely everyone must think in this constipated Father Knows Best manner...
And last, but not least, bring to heel the librarians, those snooty know-it-alls who looked down on you the one or two occasions at Yale when you bothered to check out a book. You didn't read it, anyway -- showed them!
I'd love to see this powering a souped-up version of the beautiful but woefully underpowered iMac. All that holds me back from switching is what you might call the Agony of Id-fluence: if you spend $2000 on a desktop in this era of cut-rate electronics pricing, it damn well better be able to run Doom 3.