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

We 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.

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.

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?