Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Apple and the others

Apple's latest publicity in the personal computing domain, directed aggressively against Microsoft's Vista system, is a little like firing upon an ambulance... but few of us Mac enthusiasts feel sorry for Bill Gates and his failing universe.

In the iPhone domain, Apple's ads have been delightfully naive, invoking nice reassuring individuals such as an airline pilot equipped with his ever-present friendly iPhone.

This kind of publicity can be easily spoofed. I love this specimen about a friendly guy whose favorite pastime is punching cops and then running like hell. In a memorable line that deserves to go down in cellphone ad history, he explains: "Finding an escape route after a random act of violence can be tricky." Thankfully, he owns an iPhone!

In a neighboring domain, Google has just announced its much-awaited Android system, with $10 million of prize money offered to ingenious software developers. I'm going to try to jump onto this bandwagon, in ways that I'm already indicating to interested friends.

2 comments:

  1. I read your article two days ago, but had no time to look at the advert. I had a look at it right now. It is great!!!
    At least Mac people have a sense of humour.

    As I think that Vista is basically shit and as I'm not a Mac enthusiast, I'm about to move to Linux... But who knows? One day I might get back to Mac - my first computer was a Mac SE...

    ReplyDelete
  2. I've lived alongside a Macintosh for so long now, and computing of various kinds has always played such a central and constant role in my everyday life [particularly since moving to my mountain home at Gamone], that it would be almost unthinkable for me to use a rival machine. But I forced myself to think the unthinkable a few days ago in the context of the Google Android project [mentioned at the end of my Apple and the others article], for which I've been comparing two possible development platforms: an Intel-based Macintosh or a Linux machine. Now, in the case of Linux, there's an unofficial criterion referred to as the Granny Test. The idea is that an ordinary individual should only feel totally comfortable about making the big move to Linux when it's so easy that even his/her grandmother could do so without running into insoluble problems. Well, click here to see an in-depth Granny Test of Ubuntu Linux versus Windows Vista. Apparently, from a difficulty viewpoint, it's a fifty-fifty affair. For me, that's a good-enough reason to set aside Linux for the time being and tackle my Google Android project within a Macintosh environment... although I'll probably need to purchase a more powerful machine than my present tiny MacBook. Within the public context of this blog, it goes without saying that I don't intend to reveal the exact content of my Google Android project [for which I've been seeking technical collaborators].

    ReplyDelete