| Thursday, August 31, 2006 |
15:23 - Aww, poor baby
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2010376,00.asp
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How cute! Jim Louderback has been swayed to Stage 1 Mac Fandom: agreeing that OS X is pretty damned cool, and would rule the world if only Apple would stop being so thick as to refuse third parties to license it.
The reasons why they can't do so are legion and have been discussed many a time, so I won't. Just suffice it to say: Nice thought, but Apple doesn't want to rule the world. Jobs holds the One Ring and chooses to keep it well hidden. If he used it as a weapon, he would merely take his rival's dark throne. Not interested. Apple's making plenty of money as it is, and retaining the cachet of being a boutique brand used by the cognoscenti to boot.
Stage 2 Mac Fandom, incidentally, will be where Louderback buys a "Mac Pro PC" and runs it on his desk for a while, as a time-limited experiment; he'll write a series of articles striving to expose the warts of the Mac experience while making a few magnanimous nods to what it does well. Then he won't give it back at the end of the trial period.
In Stage 3, he'll start to appreciate the Mac's hardware design in print as well as in the brainstem, and he'll start touting the merits of various Linux flavors on the Mac, and the Windows virtualization method du jour, as a means of hedging against the jeers of his peers while he seeks for any justification for not having to go back to a Dell boat-anchor laptop. He might at this stage start to use his iPod's original white earbuds instead of a pair of third-party black ones intended to disguise his shame.
Stage 4 is where he will start to defend the actions of Jobs and Apple in his columns, in service of a corporate vision that he's starting to grasp, instead of attacking those actions as the unaccountable blundering of a company that seems able to make untold marvels spring to life only to set them on fire and smash them with axes out of some perverse primate fear of winning in the marketplace.
Stage 5: LouderMac.com.
UPDATE: Maybe Stage 1.5 will be where he stops saying things like "Core 2 Duo Extreme" and "Infinity Loop".
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Brian Tiemann
