The Hardest Part of Buying a Mac

When I was in high school, I had a laptop.  It was the first computer in our family to have Windows XP.  Up until then, we’d had Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Windows Millennium Edition on family computers.  My family was never raised around anything different, least of all Macs. Nobody we ever knew had used Macs.  At all.  I guess it’s just the result of being in smaller communities my whole life, but that’s how it goes.  The only time we were ever exposed to Macs were in quick 30-second shots of them on commercials, and my Dad would always change the channel when they came on.  Not Mac commercials, I mean.  Commercials, period.  He hated all commercials, not just the ones for Macs.  There was honestly a large part of my childhood where I wasn’t aware Macs existed at all.  Everyone was a PC.  Everyone...

Then the 1999 iMac came out, bursting onto the scene with its garish purple pinstripe design, its forsaking of the traditional “tower”, and its minimal number of cords.  A power cord, a phone line, and a keyboard and mouse?  What about the sound cables?  What about the cable that connects the monitor?  What about the 32-pin printer cable?  Wait, you’re saying the printer uses the same slot that the keyboard and mouse use?  Wait, you’re saying the keyboard and mouse use the same slots?  And where’s the floppy drive?  I’ve gotta have a floppy drive!  This whole business is preposterous!  It’s an abomination!  PC society won’t stand for this!

In high school, as the iPod was gaining tractions, my friends and I would talk before classes about how dumb anyone would be to want to own a Mac.  It couldn’t play games, and it was weird, I mean, no right-click?  How could anybody like that?  It was entirely weird, and nobody in their right mind could possibly think that it was a sensible way of using a computer.  Seriously, it doesn’t have a right-mouse button.  That’s just wrong.

Then I got brought in on my high school newspaper staff, and the walls came down.  The entire journalism lab was nothing but iMacs.  Every single computer, lacking a tower.  Every single computer, without a right mouse button.  I had no idea how to react.  It was a world that worked entirely differently than the one I had known before.  I didn’t know how to react to it.  So, naturally, I explored the more accessible parts and then railed against them for not being like Windows.  I have to hold down the control button to right-click?  There’s only one menubar at the top of the screen?  All of the keyboard shortcuts are handled through the button with the apple on it?  I hate this all, it’s so unlike the world I came from.

On a completely different note, I was in debate class since I was a freshman.  If my utter fall into academic mediocrity can be traced back to anything, it’s that class, and its GPA-crushing curve.  It was also, not surprisingly, one of my least favorite classes.  The topics we had to prepare cases for were decided upon by some faraway consortium and argued in a style called Lincoln-Douglas.  Why?  Who knows.  The debates were incredibly stuffy and nobody in the class ever truly cared about the topics we were given, so we never talked about them (I mentioned this class crushed my GPA?).  What we did end up talking about was truly the most nefarious topic of any we could consider in the Nebraskan suburb: gay rights.

Now, there were a lot of kids in this debate class, and new ones cycled in every year, but for as many times as I can remember having an argument on gay rights, memory pushes me into a one-versus-many war of ideas.  That’s probably hyperbole, but honestly, I felt entirely outnumbered in those arguments.  It didn’t matter, though.  I knew, no matter what those kids said, that they were wrong.  Homosexuality was a sin, and it didn’t deserve the same rights as a normal lifestyle.

They kept saying my ideas were “unfounded”, but that’s ridiculous.  My ideas were founded in my childhood, in my upbringing.  My family was brought up by the military; For as long as my brother, myself, or my sister had been alive, my dad’s job dictated where we lived.  All of our schooling up until middle school was literally on a military base.  Almost all of our friends were in the exact same position, and heck, none of us knew any gay people.  We knew what the word meant, sure, but to know an actual gay person?  That’d be crazy.  Not that we’d want to, I mean, if talk on the playground was true, then having a gay friend made you gay, too.

The only time we were ever exposed to homosexuality was on TV or in the movies, and then it was only talked about briefly and in jokes before you would move on to another topic.  As a family, we didn’t know any gay people… Well, I guess that isn’t entirely true.  My mom and dad knew that one of my aunts was gay long before any of us kids knew; she was married to a man later described to me as “handsome” and “rich,” and then she left him.  Honestly, if my debate friends didn’t know homosexuality was a sin, they should have after learning that it caused women to leave their husbands who were handsome and rich.  But I didn’t know about her until much later than that incident.  The first gay person that I really knew was my uncle.  A similar story: he met a woman and proposed to her (on Oprah [clue one]), then after a few short years of matrimonial bliss, he left her for reasons my parents weren’t willing to mention.  Then he got a roommate, Scott.  And suddenly that was all nobody talked about.  I heard the word from my brother, from my mom I heard – in angry tones – talk of my uncle and his “roommate” living in “sin”.

How did I feel about all this?  Honestly?  Scared.  I’d been having gay dreams from when I was twelve, and the constant talk of how my uncle (later also my aunt) were going to Hell for their unrepentant “lifestyle” made me fear for my own soul.  Was I just that bad to keep having the dreams?  To keep looking at men?  My brother, through a hilarious incident involving a browser history that I won’t get into, was the first to find out.  It was our secret, and so was the therapist he would take me to on several occasions to try and get better.

Lyle was a really nice guy.  What you’ve probably heard about ex-gay ministries was so wholly unlike my experience.  All we did those sessions was talk; talk about how things were going, talk about how I was feeling that session, talk about my childhood, about my father who –  while he was certainly there in a physical sense – Lyle would assure me was not there emotionally, talk about my mother who – while she was certainly caring – Lyle would assure me was overbearing.  And I’m not going to say he was wrong.  Was my dad distant?  Yeah, like Alaska.  Was my mom overbearing?  Yeah, like wearing two parkas in Alaska.  But in spite of us figuring that all out and talking through it, I didn’t really feel any less gay from our talks.  Maybe he was doing it wrong.

I had my first kiss when I was nearly 18.  It was with a guy named Stephen.  He was a Mac.  It was wetter than I had expected, but it was a lot of fun.  Shortly after that I got a boyfriend, kept in complete secrecy from my parents, my friends, my teachers, and Myspace, which was easy because he lived two hours away.  Of course, after a long chain of hilarious events – starting with a not-so-hilarious suicide on the other side of town – I came out.  First to my friends, then to my drama teacher, then to my mom, then to my parents.  Never to Myspace, though, that site was already gay enough, am I right?

Thanks to journalism, I was also experiencing the Mac side of life.  So, the command button is much closer to the other buttons, which makes your hand cramp less by using shortcuts.  And the main browser is faster than the one on my PC at home.  And you can see all of your open projects with just one button.  And its control-alt-delete equivalent actually closes programs that have frozen.  Okay, using a Mac isn’t as bad or as problematic as I thought it was gonna be, in fact, it’s pretty fun.  But it still can’t play games!

Well, my parents had me see Lyle one last time, after my brother told them about him.  At this final visit, he asked me if changing was something I really wanted for myself.  I told him that honestly, no, it wasn’t.  I liked who I was, and for now it wasn’t really the core “problem” in my life.

When I graduated in May, my extended family got me a total of about $1,000.  I wasn’t allowed to come out to any family members at my graduation.  That summer, Apple made some important changes to their operating system that let you run Windows on a Mac.  In September, I bought the iMac that sits on my desk to this day (I installed Windows on it, but as time went on I used Windows less and less).  I also fell in love for the first time and had the epiphany, however late, that being gay was no more a sin than buying Apple.

There’s this joke my friends make: “The hardest part of buying a Mac is telling your dad that you’re gay.”  I think it’s pretty funny; I also think it’s backwards.  The best part of telling your dad that you’re gay is deciding to buy a Mac.

What I’m really getting at with all this, is if you need any help with your computer or with being gay… I charge $20 for either.

Point, counterpoint (I will continue until it is dead, part two)

That's really not an accurate comparison by tossing out numbers like that. Part of the iPad's power is the operating system, which is refined so that the most processing power can be made out of it. The 1.5 GHz computer you had likely ran Windows XP, which spent more computing power to run the OS than the programs. It also had all of the hardware you outlined above, which requires processing power to physically run, including thermometers, fans, and the spinning motors in the DVD drive. Battery life for laptops around then were between 3 and 4 hours--iPad is over 10. I'm also guessing your laptop wasn't $500, since the net book craze wasn't around then.

I've had an iPad since after the day is came out, and I adore it. It's far easier to bring places in public and write. Games are a ton of fun on it, and it has a gorgeous screen for watching video. It's only 1024x768, but that still includes 720p which is an HD aspect. (People seem to have no problem with their 46" flat screen TVs only reaching 1080p, which is a resolution far smaller computer monitors surpassed many, many years ago.) The screen is only 9.7", so to have a deeper resolution wouldn't really be conducive on the eyes, since text and details in general would be too small.

The iPad is a premium product, not meant to replace a more fully loaded computer, and certainly not worth all of the anger so many people seem to have with its existence. ;)

Reducing the number of applications you can have open and onscreen at a time to "one" is not a refinement. Windows 3.1 could do that quite well. The improved battery life is entirely reliant on the fact that there are no moving parts to the iPad, and there are no (sorry, iCultists. I'm sure you know I mean to say "few") background processes allowed. Yes, my laptop had a shorter battery life because it was able to have concurrent processes, but guess what? being able to watch my physical copy of Wayne's World and IM my friends at the same time was something I *liked* being able to do.

Writing in public on the iPad is also categorically harder than on a laptop, because the keyboard is on the same plane as the screen, meaning that in order to have a workable typing angle you need to have the device at some intermediary angle so that you can see the screen and make sure that your wrists aren't bent at a ridiculous, straining angle. Or, maybe you still fancy the two-plane system and decide to buy the keyboard dock. Congratulations, you just paid extra for an implement that has come with every other personal computer ever. Incidentally, I hear they're coming out with a car that has an optional steering wheel; in order to drive without it, you gesture violently in the direction you want to go and pray to Xerxes that it all comes out alright.

Saying that the iPad has a 720p screen is also a huge steaming pile of half-truth. Yes, it has more than 720 lines of vertical resolution and, yes, all of those lines refresh simultaneously, but any signal transmitted at 720p is always, always, always going to be in widescreen, vis a vis, NOT proportioned to fit your 1024x768 iPad screen. The brilliance of a 1080p TV screen isn't the number of pixels the human eye is picking up, it's in the number of pixels the hardware from which your TV is receiving its signal is sending. Consider the amount of data in a 640x480 broadcast of any half-hour or hour-long show. If you need help doing that, iTunes has plenty of them in standard definition for you to peruse, and you'll see that it's actually a considerable amount of data. Even when the stream is sent as interlaced, and only half of the data is necessary, it's still a lot. Now find something on iTunes that's in 1080p and OH CHRIST HOW ARE WE STREAMING HUNDREDS OF CHANNELS OF THIS NATIONWIDE AROUND THE CLOCK should be your default response, because if all that data were carbon dioxide, Al Gore would never stop crying. Finally, saying it would be a bad idea to have a higher resolution on that small a screen is crap; my Droid actually has a slightly smaller screen than my iPod Touch, but it has over double the resolution, and wouldn't you know it? Things look bloody fantastic when they're that sharp.

You're absolutely right when you say that the iPad is a premium product, and you're absolutely right again when you say it's not meant to replace a more fully-loaded computer. I wouldn't even use it to replace a less loaded computer, but truth be told, I'm not mad at the iPad, not really. To be mad at an inert object - be it a brick, a wall of bricks, an iPad, or a wall of iPads - belies the intelligence on the angry person's part. I'm mad at the overbearingly huge swath of the world population that's convinced that the iPad is better, more practical, or more even prettier than any computer that bears the pre/suffix "mac". The iPad's OS is an offshoot of an offshoot of OSX, and as such, is capable of doing absolutely no more than any computer equipped with OSX Leopard or Snow Leopard would be capable of doing. Absolutely any app made for either the iPhone or the iPad could run on a Mac as is, and there would be no complications. If the thousands of developers who have made half-baked iPhone apps would step up and create half as many apps for the Mac proper, there might not be the stigma that Macs are less capable than Windows computers. Hell, the programmers wouldn't even have to go through the ridiculous approval process if they went that route.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to graft a capacitive touch screen to my iMac, take it to a bar with me, get drunk and leave it there, and then sue the idiot who picks it up for millions.

I will continue until it is dead.

I got a laptop six years ago, with a 1.5GHz processor, a 32 GB hard drive, 512 MB of RAM, a 64 MB video card, an 802.11g wireless card, a DVD-ROM drive, an ethernet port, a video out port, two USB ports, and a FireWire 400 port. That was six years ago.

The iPad has a 1GHz processor, an unknown quantity of RAM (but I'm willing to bet it's not more than 512 MB), integrated video, an 802.11n wireless card, no DVD-ROM, no ethernet, no video out, no USB, no FireWire, and it can come with 32 GB, but it'll cost extra. The iPad also has a 1024x768 screen, just like my six year old laptop.

The iPad, however, does not have a replaceable hard drive. It does not have an expandable RAM slot. It does not have the ability to run two, or three, or five applications side-by-side. You can get a keyboard for it, but that will cost extra. You can not change its operating system, unless Apple does it for you. You can not change its battery, unless Apple does it for you. You can not install any applications on it that Apple hasn't told you that you can install on it. The iPad is six years newer than my laptop, and in all that time, the greatest advancement in computational hardware that anybody can claim the iPad has over a mid-range laptop from 2004… is a faster wireless card.

Excuse me if I don't start to foam at the mouth at this $500 insult to Moore's Law.

A short story what I did for class Wednesday

The Dark

Neither of them could see a thing.  There was hardly any room to move, and zero light.  In spite of that, both could tell that they were tethered to the walls, possibly to each other?  It didn’t matter.  They were stuck there with no hope of escape.

It seemed whoever had done this to them was a sadist, at the least.  Apart from being tied down, their bodies had so little freedom of motion that they typically remained with their hands fixed on their knees.  Sometimes, the stillness sat on their muscles to the point of agony, and one of them would thrash his legs for a few seconds if only to try and appease his nerves.  They were fed at irregular intervals; sometimes the meals came almost immediately after the other, sometimes they had to wait half a day before they got anything.

Mostly, though, what consumed them were the intense, vivid effects of their sensory deprivation: illusions, shadows, visions... sometimes they felt even like other peoples’ memories were treating their minds like a premium vacation getaway.

Both of them had long since given up hope of escape.  Even if they could get out, either one of them knew he had no idea where he’d go, what he’d do, or if there was even a life still waiting for him on the other side.  Besides, they were both naked, wet, and all but completely feeble from their stasis.

It seemed like whoever put them in this place wanted them to hate each other.  Every subtle movement one of them made, the other one felt.  One couldn’t even turn his head without rubbing against the other.  Their worst hells were an inch away from them every second of the day.

“I hate you,” one of them said.

“I hate you more,” the other shot back.

That was the most either said for a while, and then one asked, because the sound was better than the silence, “How long have you been here?”

“I don’t know,” the other replied.  “I don’t think more than a few months, counting the meals.”  He was completely guessing; even if the people keeping them there were benevolent  enough to feed them three times a day, every day, he’d lost count long ago of the number of times he’d gotten food.

“It feels like I’ve been here forever... what’s your name?”  The first asked.

“Why the hell do you care?”

“I was just wondering if you had one, alright?  At least something to attach humanity to either of us.”

The one hadn’t thought of that.  He honestly didn’t know what his name might have been, but figured he should give his cellmate an answer.  “Gene.”

“Gene, huh?  Call me Ted.”

“Great.  So glad I finally know how to address the most annoying thing ever.  Are we best friends yet?”

“Alright, fine.  If you don’t want to talk, we can just go back to the hallucinations,” Ted said.  Gene was completely silent for a couple of seconds, then groaned in exasperation.  “Fine, what do you want to know?”

Ted rolled the thoughts in his brain around until a question fell out, “Do you remember anything before this?”

“I don’t know,” Gene replied.  “I guess, maybe.  But it’s hard to say.”

“I remember things, but I don’t know if they really happened.  There’s a lot of guns, bombs, people dying.  Murders, monsters bigger than trees, and a lot of red – I don’t want to see any more of that,” Ted confessed.

“I haven’t had anything like that,” Gene said.  “I can understand why you’d want to talk... did you do any of that?”

“I don’t know.  I really hope not.”  Ted had wondered before if the blood spilled in any of the things he’d seen was on his hands.  Maybe it was why he was here now.

“I see people, but there’s usually not red.  People watching men run a ball up and down a field, a woman vomiting once or twice, men hugging, men kissing, men —” Gene trailed off, then slowly said, “There’s never men kissing women.”

Ted considered that.  “I wonder what that means.”

Gene was going to say something more, but with as much warning as a car gives before it tears out of a back alley, Ted was ejected from the room by some force neither of them had known was even there.  The tactile sensation of the experience only worked to heighten the point that he was now alone.

"Ted?" Gene paused, “Ted?”  Ted wasn’t getting back to him.  Gene waited, but nothing more happened.

For about a minute, the feeling manifested itself as solitude.  But then the empty space began to itch at him.  The air felt arid.  The thoughts in his head churned thick and slow like curdling milk.  Where did Ted go?  Who took him away?  Is he dead now?  Is he worse than dead?  But most importantly, what was going to happen to Gene now?

Something like a hand wrapped around Gene’s feet, and slowly Gene felt it creep up his body like strangling vines.  And then Gene felt himself being pressed down to meet the pit.

“What’s happening?  Ted?  What’s going on?”  Gene’s pulse elevated as the chasm slowly opened to swallow him.  There was nowhere he could turn to get out, the walls began pressing in on him, as if claustrophobia were a malevolent spirit seeking revenge on him.

He sank further and further, and the walls continued to collapse around him.  Thoughts barreled through his head faster than he could sort them out.  His heart beat in tempo with the thoughts and the frenzy within him made him want to fight, but the only thing still outside of the maw was his head.  He wanted to scream but he couldn’t.

And after what felt like an eternity of this panicked state his entire body was constricted by the walls of the tunnel.  The pressure on and in his body was unbearable.  There was nothing he could do, and the images he’d seen all before were bullets firing through his brain.  The people, the places, the events; surely they were his sins, surely this was his judgment.  He was being consumed by the transgressions he’d brought upon the others in his life.  Hell had literally begun to swallow him.

His feet were engulfed by a devastating cold.  In the matter of an instant, it felt like they were being assaulted with frostbite, and the cold, like the pit, crept up Gene’s body, one extreme to another.

All thought had began expelling itself from Gene’s mind.  The only things he could concentrate on were the sensations, torturing him.  One by one, each of the memories he’d been given passed back through his mind and then flew away from his conscious mind on angel’s wings.  Then his memory of the place itself, the walls, and the one he’d shared the horror with; each one suddenly eradicated by the trauma of the motion.

Surrounded by a cold he’d never known before, Gene could do only one thing: cry.  A hand he couldn’t see cut him free of his tether; the world was a shroud of white light, a colossus stood over Gene as he continued his wails.

A pair of giant hands wrapped a blanket around Gene, and then rocked him for a moment until the fear, pain, and cold were as faraway as the dark room.

Somewhere, a voice said, as Gene quieted, “Congratulations, ma’am,” and Gene slept.

New blog design

I know I haven't updated this blog in a good long while with anything meaningful, but nothing in this world has too much meaning, so EFF YOU.

I'm sorry, that was uncalled for.  Anyway, this is just to point out what you've already noticed: this blog has taken on a new design.  It has some eccentricities, for example, my tags totally had to go because of how far down my posts extended from it.  Anyway, I think it's pretty stylin', but I might be wrong.  Anybody have more elaborate thoughts?