Poison Devil Mac

by Crom

I’ve wanted to get my grubby paws on an Apple for a long time now. Especially when they went to the OSX platform; it had actually started to venture into the dank and dusky forest of usability that didn’t require cartoonish icons. I especially love the physical presentation everything Apple churns out. It is also reasonable to believe that some form of deeply embedded psychotic trauma has made the concept of owning one of their delicious white plastic bubble machines appear, to my mind, to be the best way to gain Total Confidence and a sense of Contentment. As a child I had been one of the bastard children constantly under assault by the vicious appeal of the Apple IIe.

I was a logo whore; using that tiny turtle to create images and scenes, clapping and laughing like a clubbed seal when the picture finally came out. My father was the asst. principal of an elementary school, and so in the summers he would actually borrow one of the machines and bring it to his house for a solid month of awesome. I played some of my first video games on that giant bastard, feverishly stuffing 5 ¼ disks into the god cursed external drive and commanding it to let me play Crossfire. I was addicted to Taipan, the then text based piracy game that germinated the seed of Sid Meier. Perhaps this bucolic Father/Son engram explosion is the culprit responsible for my current day yearning to hug a G5 to my chest.

You can’t deny the esthetic of Apple products; you may want to in some delirious need to prove you aren’t in love with the idea, but you’d be lying to yourself. We all wish our computer was compact and lovely as the iMac. We wish the LCD’s were as large and pimp like as the HD Cinema displays. But, we don’t feel like committing a voluntary lobotomy on ourselves in order to deal with the OPERATION of these devices. When I heard you couldn’t open an iMac to replace something that had exploded on it, it was right after I had melted my HD and replaced. The idea that what I had just done to myself would have required a whole new system to be purchased, would have delivered such a savage blow to my fragile five dollar an hour psyche that I probably would have shit my pants and gone into a coma for several weeks. Because of course we love the esthetic of apple products. What kind of twisted monkey man wouldn’t look at the products they offer and say, out loud and with a southern drawl, “my My, quite lovely”. They pride themselves on creating products that serve an organic function around your office. They’re pretty, and they aren’t loud as shit.

And, now, with their decision to drop the swine, thieving, black hearted pimps known to the landed gentry as “IBM” to create their processors, there’s a hope that the 2nd string QB will finally be able to drive the ball past the 50 yard line. Because no matter how much the beauty of the Apple line makes you salivate, when you look at the hardware specs you instantly and horribly lose whatever hard on you had. Nothing will break a deal faster, for your average red blooded man, then the knowledge that this Isis you’ve been lusting after has nowhere near the raw, uncontrollable power of the motorhead PC brands. People don’t even know what 4 gigahertz will do for them, but they can quite clearly see it’s 2.8 more then an Apple, and that’s why that information is plastered all over the god damn place. Anytime he thinks that 1.4Ghz and 512 RAM is enough, he trundles past the open window of the neighborhood Futureshop and sees some shiny shit-box with a big orange sign that says “3.8Ghz, 1 Gig Ram, Giant Cock machine!” and before he can even think about the comparison, he’s handing his MasterCard to the freshly indoctrinated, pomade haired, slick shit sales monkey on the other side of the counter, and yes-sir-buy-a-service-plan-for-that? Naturally son, Can’t have this fine Machine break down me eh? God damnit boy, just let the stout lads at MasterCard shoulder the burden, fire it through the register.

Fuck Man. Get a grip. Maintain.

The bottom line of it all is that the machinery is going to get a major overhaul, and that alone is the rock to which I cling, in order to keep myself from purchasing ten of these wonderful machines, one for each room in the house, and two for the crapper. When the maniac mad scientists at Intel get their hands on this thing, they’re going to shove 8 times the transistors into it and turn the thing into a world domination machine. But, don’t be fooled, the bastard will be so loud once they’re done, you’ll have buy a separate accessory, better known as ear plugs, in order to sleep in the same house as the bugger. It’ll throw off sparks when it really gets going, and every time you decide to play music on it, your credit rating will get a little bit worse. I’m ok with it though, I’ve always lusted after that twisted Hollywood image of the 3d rendered super computer, 8 display machine that any computer hacker in any shitty Hollywood picture seems to have by default. No matter what anyone says, the only way to be a Warrior prince is to be inside this twisted online world that we all cravenly deny owns our lives, but secretly worship as the one true god, with all the answers, that tends the light at the end of the twisted and savagely dangerous tunnel.

Crom