Dr. iMac or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Written: May 09 '00 (Updated Aug 28 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Actually works, unlike anything Bill Gates has breathed on recently.
Cons: Accepting Apple as my personal savior is a humbling experience
The Bottom Line: I like it. I really like it.
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| cornelia's Full Review: Apple iMac Indigo 15 in. (M7669LL/A) Mac Desktop |
I have hated all things Apple for so long, and so very vocally, that it literally pains me to admit that I like the iMac. Okay, fine, I love the damn thing, stupid circular one-button mouse and all. I have even willingly stood silent as my longtime Mac-loving friends grasped hands to dance the Hubris Horah around me.
I had been stridently anti-Jobs-and-Wozniak since the days of my pre-DOS 40-pound Kaypro "portable," the first computer I ever owned. When this hardworking steel-cased behemoth was "liberated" from the unlocked (duh!) rusty hatchback of my VW Rabbit one fine summer's day at 91st and Central Park West, I haughtily moved up to the fabulous Epson desktop, which sported the heretofore unimaginable wonder of dual floppy drives. Sure, it didn't have those new-fangled amber letters glowing on its black screen, which were supposed to reduce eyestrain, but I could tough that out. I hooked my Brother Daisy Wheel printer right up to the sucker, and looked down upon all those dot matrix folk, the letter-quality wannabes. I even had kerning, dammit, and this was early 1986.
Then there was the Epson laptop with the periwinkle LCD screen, which ran a blistering 61 whole minutes on a single battery charge. I had moved up in the world from the archaic floppies that looked like 45s in matte black album covers to the cool little colored plastic ones with the sliding metal thingie.
Okay, I won't drag you through every computer-related purchase I've ever made. Suffice it to say that I have long been an "early user," with one rather extreme caveat: I attach myself to forms of technology with all the rigid orthodoxy of an OCD-stricken Luddite, and fight innovation to an extent that verges on the maniacal. I'm a sabot-chucker from way back, which is to say that I'm an adopter, not an adapter--a sucker for a clear and inflexible paradigm, whether or not it makes sense. This is also why I have a soft spot for George McGovern and the glory that is meatloaf. Drop me down in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, and there but for the grace of God would have gone I to Tianamen Square for some Little Red Book arm-pumps alongside my ten thousand closest high school friends.
As such, I pooh-poohed the development of color screens as being for the weak and unimaginative, the mouse a feeble and infantilizing contraption for those who couldn't type properly, and Windows for... well, complete loser idiots capitulating to the patronizing Mac juggernaut. The merest smidgeon of GUI or Wysiwyg I saw as the fall of the empire, the thin end of the MTV imperialist lapdog wedge, and blatant pandering to the lowest common bourgeois denominator.
I fought tooth and nail to stick with my trusty Wordstar in the face of Wordperfect, and then Wordperfect in the face of Word. I'm sure it will hardly surprise you that in my family, we still say "icebox" and "victrola" to describe the Sub-Zero and the CD player. Obviously, I would have been the movie mogul who blithely wagered all on the idea that Talkies would never catch on.
I'm not tremendously technical, but I'd familiarized myself well enough with a number of software programs, particularly word processing ones, that I could muscle through any number of crashes by hitting F1 or F3 dozens of times and reading the arcane instructions therein. I was likewise adept at using "Display Codes" to ferret out the errant carriage return that always snuck in and made my resume want to spill onto a second page.
My introduction to computer thought and culture had been a five-day IBM word processing class in Manhattan (thankfully, the Wang section was full). The basic IBM structural and intellectual framework I imbibed that week has subtly informed all my subsequent software adventures. The class planted in me the idea that things were fixable if you put your mind behind the screen's impassive face and started tinkering.
With Apples, this was impossible. Massive system failures were announced by an adorable little Boris-and-Natasha bomb, thank you very much. This cute-as-a-button icon winked up at you, the hapless user, with a blazing fuse and a smug little attitude like Tonto going "what's this we sh!t, paleface?" to the Lone Ranger when the 100,000 Apache came riding over the horizon.
The "surface" of the system was impenetrable to me, beyond a sort of "Have A Nice Day!" depth. Trying to get at glitches so I could winnow out the little destructive evil bits was like kickboxing with the Pillsbury Doughboy. Sure, those soft and gooey highkicks and uppercuts to the jaw don't hurt much, but pulling your limbs back out of the marshmallow is exhausting, and after a while the piping giggle is literally maddening, as is the stupid hat.
The Macintosh wasn't a computer, it was a malicious vanilla shoebox set on end and stuffed to the gills with Hanna-Barbera outtakes. I despised it and the horse it rode in on. I felt it should be p!ssed on from a great height. I was as appalled to hear that friends had become Mac users as I would have been to see them shave their heads and sell flowers in an airport. How could anybody in their right mind take a computer that could only be fixed by shoving an unbent paperclip into a little hole seriously?
Let me add, however, that it took Bill Gates getting gnarly enough to outrank Nixon in my personal pantheon of ratbastards-from-hell to pry me loose from my decades-long and stalwart PC loyalty. Windows 98 sucked so hugely that it shattered my Gurkha-like devotion to the cause, and wouldn't you know it, the cutest darn little Apple product just happened to toddle onto my desk during a prolonged moment of severe Bill-Must-Die pique and Linux "learning cliff"-induced exhaustion.
Oh, how the somewhat mighty have fallen.
I love this thing from the nifty integral handle on top to the little blobby oval aquamarine speakers near the bottom. It bothers me not a whit that the monitor and actual-computer-guts-that-make-it-really-work-and-stuff are one unit, though it would take a powerful narcotic to induce me to purchase a TV with the VCR built in. That the keyboard is sized for Squirrel Nutkin and Benjamin Bunny doesn't set off my car alarm, nor does the fact that this is, design-wise, the New Beetle of tech--just too cutesie for words. Normally, to paraphrase Hoess (though I always thought it was Goering), when I hear the word "adorable" I reach for my pistol--but this is a twee-ness even I can lose my good sense to. Plus which I couldn't care less that there's no floppy drive--pulleeze! that's why we have zip disks.
I can't help myself. I heartily relish daisy-chaining every possible gadget I can lay my hands on through the USB connectors. I live for the logic of the desktop, the clarity of the interface, and the, gosh, just plain usability of this thing. You really can lift it out of the box, link up the keyboard and mouse, plug it in, turn the damn thing on, and get cracking. It's fast, it's clean, and it's slick, even though the one I'm using is the cheapest model, the low end "Blueberry" with a CD-ROM drive but without digital video editing or DVD capability.
The humble Blueberry has a 350 MHz G3 processor and a tiny 64 megs of RAM, but it's faster than a speeding bullet. Of course I secretly yearn for the monster G4, but I'd like a Porsche, too, and life ain't perfect.
Suffice it to say that I worship the Birkenstocks Steve Jobs walks on water in, though I would have thought that eventuality to be less likely than being kidnapped by pirates and forced to wear voluminous ballgowns on an 18th-Century Louisiana plantation.
Plus, of course, I haven't seen that dopey little bomb icon once. So what the hell, gather up your Green Stamps and any soda bottles with deposits on them and go buy yourself an iMac, if you haven't already. Life is short. Why not spend it with a stupid grin on your face?
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
cornelia
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Member: Cornelia Read
Location: Berkeley, California
Reviews written: 100
Trusted by: 333 members
About Me:
Disorganized mother of twins by day, crime fiction writer by... um... day.
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