My new appellation
“I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.” - Charlie Brooker, writing in The Guardian.
I will confess to feeling a little confused, not to mention overwhelmed. Have I joined a strange new cult, full of benevolent smiles of recognition and secret handshakes? Have I, alternatively, signed my name in blood on the application form to become a citizen of the most evil of evil empires? Or have I just bought a shiny new piece of consumer technology, but singularly failed to grasp what all the fuss is about on either side of the argument?
Hopefully it’s the last of the three, although I do feel myself increasingly powerless to resist being drawn into the realms of hype and hyperbole. Oh, but you see it’s so beautiful. So perfectly designed. So inspiring. So user-friendly. So intuitive. So shiny. So sleek. So. Just so …
Ahem. Please control yourself. No dribbling in public.
The past few days have been full of more than a few palpitations, as I have found myself spending a shockingly vast amount of money - significantly, though, not real money, but rather the sort of hire purchase loan agreement sums that don’t count as tangible pounds and pence either in my pocket or in my sweaty palms - on buying a MacBook Pro. An Apple computer. Mine, all mine. Well, mine in three years time. Until then, Apple Financing and I will just come to a mutually beneficial agreement where I get their laptop and they get a portion of my soul on a monthly basis. Which seems fair, all told.
Geek interlude: If you’re a normal person, please look away now. Gone? Right. 15.4” matte screen, 2GB memory, 160GB hard drive and, er, some sort of processor type thing of no doubt amazing speed, since you ask. These details were helpfully provided for those of you who care about such things, and would only have asked in the comments if I hadn’t told you. Happy now?
This morning, the credit agreement turned up in the post, following a nervous ten minutes spent hanging on the phone on Friday morning, during which I swore I was about to hear the fateful and demeaning utterance: “I’m sorry, but there appears to be a slight problem with your application for financing. You’re broke, aren’t you?” But no. Not a word of it. They couldn’t have bent over any more backwards to give me what I wanted without fracturing something nasty in the process. And what I wanted was an Apple Mac. Now. Give me it. Give me shiny technology. Mmm.
Oh dear, I can feel that telltale trickle of saliva again. Excuse me just a moment whilst I embarrass myself by dabbing at my mouth with a moist tissue.
Finally, all those long, lonely years of loitering suspiciously on the Apple stands at various trade shows are over. No more shall I feel the need to avoid the gazes of security staff as I reach out and touch those sleek surfaces, stroking computers in ways that most right-minded people would probably deem offensive. No, now I will be able to indulge such lustful tendencies in the privacy of my own home - and when I finally receive the item in question, that is very probably what I’ll spend the first few days doing: drooling in an unseemly manner. It could well be a whole week before I even dare to gently open its virgin lid (as it were) and corrupt the keyboard within with the touch of my filthy, unworthy fingers.
I sense that I’m getting slightly carried away again. Look, all I did was buy a computer. A heap of plastic, metal and microchips put together in a superficially appealing fashion. It’s silver-grey in colour. Much like my current laptop, in fact. It’s nice. It cost an almost disgraceful sum of money. Hopefully it won’t have an internal fan that sounds like a small jumbo jet is attempting to taxi down a runway inside the CD compartment. I’ll have to get new software. And accessories. And feed it premium cat food and saucers of milk on a regular basis so that it continues to purr at me. Or something.
The MacBook Pro arrives in a few days. Things may then go rather quiet for a while. The only sound you’ll hear from this direction will probably be sighs of sheer contentment. Who needs relationships with real people when you’ve got Apple products?
Footnote: Having waxed lyrical with such fulsome praise, it has to be said that those new Apple Mac ads featuring Mitchell and Webb are worrying me. Worrying me a great deal. Considering that the duo’s comedy star has been in the ascendant for quite some time, why had no one who knows me thought to inform me before now that I sound exactly like David Mitchell? Exactly like him? And, worse still, that I appear to have borrowed his hair? I think we should be told.