I’ve always been over-flipping-joyed that virus has always been a non-computer term for me. I’ve got very little interest in shaping a computer to my will, i just want to complete tasks.

It’s good to see Amadan has an open mind. I do to, but the PCs I play on, dumbfound me when something goes wrong. There’s a lot to do and a lot to find. Obviously part of this difficulty is the little amount of time I spend on them in the first place.

An element of the smugness, no doubt, comes from being there and there and there first in many respects.

As a geek/developer, I find that the Mac makes it harder to get under the hood and tinker with the configuration, but I’m sure there are ways to do it, I’m just not familiar with the system. I heard OSX is built on FreeBSD, and I immediately wanted a terminal and a command line. Took a little browsing around to find the Terminal utility, but once I got there, it was just like being on a Unix system.

The Mac makes EVERYTHING easy. Packages install and pop right onto the toolbar along the bottom. It’s pretty and user-friendly and I think for the computer-as-an-appliance, I can totally see where I’d suggest a Mac to someone who doesn’t know computers if they just want to websurf and blog and listen to music and stuff. Whether it will win my love on the developer end, I don’t know yet. I’ll let you know what kind of perfomance I get from running Windows in Parallels.

All of that aside, the Apple ad campaigns leave me scratching my head — particularly the UK version.

I think the casting must have been the responsibility of someone who was impressed by Sir Digby Chicken-Caesar, but who’s never seen Peep Show. Mitchell is a master at playing the dullard; and while I’m sure that Robert Webb is a wonderful, intelligent person in reality, when I see him on TV I see a delusional idiot. A funny idiot, but an idiot nonetheless. Now I’m worried that I’m going to come downstairs some morning to find that my computer has invited Super Hans to live on my sofa.

The US version has the same casting problem — the PC guy is a lot more likeable than the Mac guy — but at least the actors in the US spots are relatively unknown.

Even more baffling than Apple’s casting, though, is that The Guardian apparently sees one’s choice of operating systems as part of the class war — with the world’s richest man as the populist hero, and the vegetarian hippie from California as the bourgeois aesthete.

I’m reminded of an Evangelical Christian ‘joke book’ I flicked through a few years back. The jokes there, usually at the expense of non-Fundie Christians, were equally lame and unfunny.

I think there’s some kind of connection between the two.

I’ve contemplated changing to a Mac, but I always run into the same barrier I do with a possible change to Linux: What would be the real advantage? There’s not much point in switching unless I’m gaining more than I lose, and switching to a Mac would mean dumping everything I know and starting over again without getting anything I don’t already have in some form.

BTW, the cartoon is indeed stupid. There’s really only two SKUs of Vista that most people will ever care about — Home and Ultimate — and the total number of differences are small albeit significant.

A computer’s a tool, not an altar you worship at. Ditto the OS that runs on it.