Geek Machismo
12 Jan, 2002
What these arguments remind me of is guys who hem and haw when it comes to neutering their male pets because they somehow find it threatening to their own masculinity.(Wow, another Apple-related post, and I don’t even own one yet. I’m not becoming a fanatic, I promise.)
Reaction to the new iMac has been predictably split between high praise and snide derision… but the reasons tech journalists use to pan the new design are (for the most part) really petty.
David Coursey is all bent out of shape because Apple gave Time magazine the scoop instead of him. He spends another paragraph wringing his hands over the compact form factor; his argument goes something like:
I don’t need my hardware wrapped up in a neat little package. I just put my big manly tower under my desk. Therefore, there’s no market for a computer designed like this.
Similar articles I’ve read elsewhere (sorry, none of them were memorable enough to track down; otherwise I’d provide links) take a similar tone, smugly criticizing the new form factor.
Nobody will take the new iMac seriously; what do you expect from a computer that looks like a desk lamp?! [Insert nerdly sarcastic snort here]
One article went so far as to quote somebody whose big concern was
“Think of your desk lamp and how many times you have knocked it over”
It doesn’t really look like a desklamp, you know; both lamps and the new iMac have articulated arms, yes, but that’s really about it. It’s very small for a full-featured desktop system, but we’re still talking a base that’s 10 1/2 inches in circumference and densely packed with electronic components; that’s a lot bigger than any desklamp I’ve seen. The “Think of how many times you’ve knocked your desk lamp over” analogy just doesn’t work. If you’ve got problems with repeatedly knocking stuff off your desk, maybe you should work on that before you buy any computer at all.
What these arguments remind me of is guys who hem and haw when it comes to neutering their male pets because they somehow find it threatening to their own masculinity;
“But my peers won’t think I’m 31337 if I don’t have a big huge box full of noisy fans under my desk! Therefore the new iMac sucks!”
I can appreciate and even agree with the criticisms about the lack of expandability, but that doesn’t make the iMac a bad machine. Feh.
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