Mac vs PC

I have a freshly purchased Mac laptop now, so I’m sure my blogs will come across much more pretentious and snide, a la Justin Long in the commercials. ‘Hey, i’m young, slender, and cute — you’re pudgy and old with a suit John Hodgman! You can’t put your hands in your jeans and dryly make fun of people like i can, you dickless nerd! Take that Bill Gates!’

I felt bad retiring my Dell. It was a soldier. I spilled coffee on it, I crumbed on it (let’s say that’s a verb) with asundry foods, and I threw it around more than Ike tossed around Tina. Last month the hinge holding the screen to the cpu snapped. So, instead of staying firmly in place, it would just impotently flop around like Hefner’s junk. Then the plastic casing started peeling and cracking off the keyboard. Finally my Dell gave up. It was like it said ‘Screw you, bitch, I’m not even gonna waste my time and energy looking for a wireless signal if you treat me like such dog shit!’

My first stop at Best Buy was in the back corner, home of the Geek Squad. I marched there morosely with my old Dell, wondering if she could be resusitated by the Geek Squad equivalent of House, M.D. In all seriousness, I was convinced some fat dude with a Harry Potter fetish would wave a wand or roll a 20-sided die and presto, my shit would be as good as new.

After waiting about 45 minutes in the computer service line, I presented my sad little laptop to a faux-hawked ‘Geek.’ When I told him my Dell was about two years old, his whole demeanor changed. He looked at me as if I were presenting him with a butter churn and a musket.

“There’s probably no point in fixing this. Have you thought about getting a new computer?”

“Maybe, do you guys carry Dells?”

Faux-hawks look of pity morphed into unabated disdain. It was as if I had just asked him what sauce is most delicious on fried baby flesh and do they have any in stock.

“Uh… no,” he said, with a wince followed by the smarmiest of smarmy smiles.

Now, I did just get a brand new Capital One credit card. Since this new card promises ‘NO HASSLES!’, I had a completely false and emboldened sense of entitlement and wealth. I felt like the asshole during family Christmas Monopoly with hotels all over Park Place. Don’t get me wrong, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sort of looking around for some idiot with a video camera saying ‘You find it and we’ll buy it!’

Alas, the only idiots at the La Brea Best Buy were the ones in the blue shirts.

Then I asked the dreaded question no one should ever, ever ask:

“If I do buy a new laptop, should I make the switch from PC to Mac?”

Enter the box of Pandora.

Nerdo went off about the genius of Mac and the evil of PCs like a Windows Vista operated dingo had snatched his baby.

First off, let me just say the pc vs. mac debate is hilarious because EVERYBODY feels a vehement need to offer their expert judgment. Every tech guy not only has an opinion, but it seems like their entire self-worth and philosophy on life is predicated on this opinion. It’s the nerd equivalent of the Ali vs. Tyson argument in sports.

It seems in these debates, no one really cares about what you want or need; they just want you to be aware that they’ve been in the trenches with serious gigabytes and RAM orgies and virus armageddons and lemme tell you what the real scoop is the great unwashed consumer!

Apropos to the current Apple commercials, I couldn’t help but notice that the flavor of the rhetoric rings very similar to the Barack Obama versus John McCain dialectics from last year. Obama is a Mac — hip, young, in touch with the hopes, dreams, and style of today’s youth. Mccain is the pc — archaic, contradictory, trying desperately to hold on to the glory of the 70’s and 80’s… and with saggy balls.

Like Obama, Mac seems to have won the popular vote, with a view stodgy holdouts insisting that it’s all hype and going apoplectic about the mac like it’s a kid on their lawn. ‘Macs are a waste of money. They’re not nearly as strong as a pc. Viruses? To Hell with viruses! When i was a kid, my computer had more viruses than a Bangkok hooker after Labor Day!’

I freed myself from Faux-hawk finally and found other blue-shirted sales rep to help me make a more informed decision. But they were all, seemingly, in sync with the masses:

‘No question, the mac man… (snicker, head nod)… it’s amazing… it’s the change this country has been looking for… (smirk)… if you get a PC you don’t care about black people.’

I love black people, so I bought the Mac. A 13 inch Macbook Pro. I used a Capitalone No Hassles Gold Card that I plan to pay off in 2012, shortly after the Mayan calender ends and the world implodes.

Upon purchasing the Mac, I went from feeling douche-y to feel that I was better than everybody else that had a PC. It was a quick invasion of the body snatchers transformation. I drank the punch, and it had pretty icons and a webcam.

I returned to the Geek Squad to get my data transferred from the amish butter churning device known as a Dell into my Mac. They said it would take 3 hours, but when I returned 8 hours later, it hadn’t budged.

So I found a little asian girl named Jenn and I started ranting and raving about how I was lied to and I need my computer to do research (translation: to google myself).

She was really sweet and listened to my little bitch rant politely and told me she would personally take care of it herself. My heart rate slowed, I apologized, my pupils went back to normal size, and then I noticed that this Japanese geek was smoking hot. I also, vaguely, remembered that I was single now and that single people are allowed to flirt and pick up.

“So I went with the Mac. Good call?”

“You know what they say: once you go Mac, you never go back.”

She grinned with good teeth and smiling Japanese anime eyes. Wow, she was smoking. Maybe the Mac WAS the right call — even hot asians love it!

“I should get your number in case I have any problems with it, huh?” I said. I couldn’t help but third-eye notice that my pick up ability was about as subtle as a meat cleaver to the cranium.

“Sure,” she said. “Call me if you have questions about the Mac.” She scribbled her name and number on a piece of paper and handed it to me with my freshly loaded laptop.

“I’ll be honest, I’m gonna call. But not about the Mac.”

“I know,” she said with a coquettish smile.

I had no rebuttal other than a silent blush, so I grabbed my new Mac, my dead Dell, and I went to the parking lot, thinking about my American computer and my Japanese future ex-girlfriend.

When I got home, I still had the computer but had somehow, with the magic of ADD and absent-mindedness, lost Japanese Jenn’s number.

I tried to see if I could look her up online and that’s when I found out the truth: my internet was down. The Dell was fine, someone had just accidentally unplugged my modem.

Oh well, I can always return the Mac to Best Buy. At least that would give me an excuse to find Jenn’s number again…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 5:26 pm and is filed under All blog entries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.