The Forbidden Fruit
Fri, March 03 2006 - 12:56 AM
By: Tycho

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/03/03

There has always been something illicit about playing for the other team.

Gabriel’s MacBook doesn’t arrive until… they start arriving, later this month, but save for platform-dependent gaming I’ve used my own Mac for every computing task this week. What I have ascertained is not that PCs as we know them lack good design, but that PCs as we know them have hardly any design to speak of.  I’m not trying to be insulting.  Use a Mac for a week, and we’ll talk again.

I have edited autoexec.bat files in order to optimize the amount of available conventional memory, and I liked doing it, liked being the sort of person who could. As a PC user, enduring the grotesqueries of that experience is something that we are actually proud of. It’s come a long way since then, jokes about “blue screens” and what not ring like tired vaudeville acts. But those struggles were certainly real, the battle wounds considerable, and now the skin has grown over it and to a certain extent we think this is just how it is.

I didn’t even understand that’s what was going on until I started to write this. Like men who love the wilderness for its savage and untamed qualities, I believe many of us are drawn to this stark brutality.  That frontier living, the self reliance, the adversity.  The Mac, like The Alliance in World of Warcraft, was easy mode.

I don’t think that the Macintosh was inspired by ancient holy scrolls, found in a sea cave and excised from the original bible by a convocation of priests and wise men.  But I do like it very much.  It is extremely good at what it does, which is to say, exposing functionality.

It’s a big topic.  I’ll go into it on Monday.

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The Tome of Secrets
Mon, March 06 2006 - 07:01 AM
by: Tycho

I’d never used one of the new iMacs before I bought it, and though we’ve added dialogue here to grease the wheels I thought Apple Enthusiasts might be amused to know that I spent almost five entire minutes trying to turn it on.

On Friday I described the PC using a patented “wilderness terminology,” and I wanted to expand on that thought somewhat. I don’t think that every PC user is locked into some kind of self-abusive cycle. I think that for most PC users, particularly gamers with no genuine recourse, their “choice” of platform isn’t really what you’d call an act of volition. It’s the default. I mean, right? It’s what emerges from the tap. All we ask is that it be wet.

In this, it does not disappoint.

The frontier I spoke about, largely a memory now for most of us, has moved on: there are men who abide in those frozen steppes, and their banner is the penguin. I used to “camp” with my cousin in his backyard, we would tie a tarp over a picnic table and in the morning my auntie Shoko (“Sho-chan”) would bring us French Toast. Certainly, there are exceptions. But Windows these days represents roughly that level of “hard livin’.”

There was a period where I did cleave to Windows as a platform, and it was largely as a response. Even when an Apple product set my loins ablaze, their marketing message always steeled my resolve against them. Assuming their “Megahertz Myth” methodology was ever sound, it became less so as PC processors began to skyrocket in speed and performance. Nevermind that AMD used largely the same message, it was about not liking Apple and I became very good at it. What I have come to realize is that even an unctuous, sometimes deceptive clock is still right twice a day. They’ve made an unbelievably transparent computing experience that I actually look forward to. Their willingness to just slough off the antique parts of the platform, though no doubt turbulent for the faithful, have allowed them to package the most genuinely modern computing product on the market.