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“I Hate Macs” Headline: Satire, Irony, Or Bait?

Ben - JeffreyWe love RSS headlines at Mac360. It’s just so easy to capture and read hundreds of articles daily.

Sometimes we get caught by a catchy headline that’s hard to pass up. Like, ”I Hate Macs.” As a Mac user, how do you pass up a headline like that?

Seriously. We poor Mac users are gluttons for literary punishment these days. It seems everything in the media is either “Love Apple” or “Hate Apple.”

There’s not much in between, is there? So it is with the clever Charlie Brooker.

Charlies latest headline in The Guardian is about as much of a hook to the brain and you’ll find these days.

I Hate Macs” says it all, right? Yes, and no.

Yes, it says enough to make you click, read, and become incensed all within a few moments. And, no, there’s just not enough meat in that headline to tell Charlie’s real story.

It all started with Apple’s successful television commercial campaign, “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac.” Successful? Sufficiently so that Mac market share is booming, sales of Macs to former Windows PC users is booming.

These TV commercials have legs, sufficiently so for Apple to produce localized TV commercials for Japan, the UK, and elsewhere.

In the UK, “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” stars David Mitchell and Robert Web. Charlie Brooker writes about the campaign, calls it an “attack,” and then launches his own attack on readers. They get pulled in, hook, line, and sinker.

“I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.”

How do you pass up a headline like that? I tried, but failed. I just had to click. Save. Yourself. Now. Don’t. Click. Here.

OK, it’s too late. You were warned. Charlie launches into an examination of the TV campaign while bashing Macs and Mac users in a delightfully intricate way.

Are you a Mac user? Are you a PC user? If you said “yes” to either one, you have some mental illness in your family. Charlie says so.

“Ultimately the campaign’s biggest flaw is that it perpetuates the notion that consumers somehow “define themselves” with the technology they choose. If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that “says something” about your personality, don’t bother. You don’t have a personality. A mental illness, maybe - but not a personality. Of course, that hasn’t stopped me slagging off Mac owners, with a series of sweeping generalisations, for the past 900 words, but that is what the ads do to PCs. Besides, that’s what we PC owners are like - unreliable, idiosyncratic and gleefully unfair. And if you’ll excuse me now, I feel an unexpected crash coming.”

Far more enjoyable than Charlies headline hook, or the lines that pulled in readers to the rest of the rubbish, were the comments from readers. Trust me. You’ll enjoy those even more than the original premise which is fully undisguised by the headline.

These days it’s easy to get hooked into a dialog online. The web allows for readers to place comments, join forums for discussions on any topic you can think of, and generally waste lots of time on inane online topics.

But it’s fun, right? Judging from that Headline, the Article, and the Comments, which is it? Satire, Irony, or Bait?

Check out the daily list of our 9 Word mini-Reviews at NoodleMac, and Kate's daily in-depth Mac software reviews at PixoBebo.

Click Here to view this article and reader commentary in the Mac360 Forums.

   • Article by Jeffrey Mincey • Published on Monday, February 5, 2007
   • Category: Daily TopicsEmail This • Digg This • Shop Now
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