FREE PLUG FOR MAC COMPUTERS AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS

As a consumer of computers, by no means a professional computer person or one who knows all that much abut them, the iMAC is the best computer out there and beats the crap out of any regular PC by Dell, or HP or any of the other Big Dogs on the computer block. Those annoying commercials with the cool guy portraying the iMAC computer and the dumpy guy playing the PC aside, they are just better in every way. The operating system takes a little getting used to, but after a week or so you begin to prefer the thought processes of one set of annoying geeks, the dweebs at Apple, over the thought processes of the rest of the annoying computer geeks at the other companies.

Which is basically what an operating system is, a means to deal with things in a way that makes sense. Once you get past the cutesy names and the inside geek jokes inherent in every operating system, you learn to do the stuff on your computer that you enjoy doing and hope that things go as smooth as they possible can. Guess what? MACs don't beak down, they don't crash and are pretty easy to use. Whatever else they do besides what you use them for is beside the point. Who cares? You want to do the things that you like to do, period, amen, and these machines let that happen. The amount of time irretrievably wrenched from your life speaking to smug techies in Customer Support pretty much dwindles down to nothing and you can go about your business not really thinking all that much about your damned computer, which is the whole point.

That's pretty much all you want from a product, that it works. We don't want to obsess with our cars, just have them get us from Point A to Point B in relative safety and comfort. It's only when they start giving us trouble on our way to Point B do we think all that much about them, and when that happens our thoughts are pretty foul and X Rated. It's the same with your toaster, too. All you want it to do is make toast. You don't want to tinker with it, adjust it, de-bug it or spend hours and hours speaking to a toaster rep in Kowloon telling you that you've been making your toast all wrong your whole life and now you just want to reach into the phone and throttle the guy until he gets your toaster back online.

In a sense, it's too bad Apple makes such great products, since their head honcho, Steve Jobs, is such an annoying blowhard who would be fun to ridicule, liver transplant or no liver transplant. It's hard to feel sorry for a guy who is a billionaire many times over and has been for a very long time, especially one as condescending and antisocial as Jobs. He also has a penchant for reinventing his products every 6 months to render the last expensive versions obsolete, as if the world cannot turn without having the latest application on your telephone, with literally hundreds of thousands of things you can have your phone do other that making and receiving calls.

Now if he could only invent an App that replaces his liver function, or an App that provides wardrobe alternatives to black turtlenecks and blue jeans for middle aged cadaverous-looking transplant patients, maybe he'll be on to something and earn another few billion. For this borderline technophobe, I'll steer clear of his overcomplicated telephones but I salute his computers and the extra years added to my life by not having to deal with tech support people trying to tell me what the F7 button is for. I'll be happy to never have to find out. Without the fiasco of ever-changing and increasingly irritating Windows programs clogging up my life and my work, I can just exist with one less thing to annoy the crap out of me. Once you go MAC, you don't go back.