Friday, October 14, 2005

iProduct

I'm sure everyone else has already seen it, but it's new to me (thanks Jack Shafer): It's the Apple iProduct:
Apple iProduct. You'll buy it. And you'll like it. . . .

Will it be merely an incremental improvement? Will we simply increase the storage capacity of an existing product and increase the price? Or will we remove features and capacity and reduce the price? It doesn't matter. We'll still trumpet it as a brand new product, and you'll buy it. You know you'll want it. And you know you'll pay big for it. Steve Jobs could take a dump, put it in an off-white plastic case, add two grey buttons and a small LCD display, and you'd pay $600 for it. Just fucking admit it.

What is it?

We're not saying yet. But we know that won't stop you.

The tag line is even funnier:
Apple iProduct
Your life. In a small, shiny, plastic case.

I grew up on PCs, but I switched to Macs after college and I've never looked back. I love them. But Sweet Jesus, I can't stand the culture of Mac worship. There are no retail employees on earth as insipid as those black-clad hipster dweebs at the Apple Store. I actually buy my Apple stuff online and pay the shipping even though I live 10 miles from an Apple store--just because I don't want to give them the satisfaction.

Anyway, the author of this brilliant parody seems to be my kind of guy. His disclaimer reads: "Please take note: don't make the mistake of thinking I'm dissing Apple products. Apple makes good stuff. I'm not making fun of Apple products, I'm making fun of you."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You pay shipping? I just bought a new Apple computer and paid zip for shipping. The machine came by FedEx from China in less than 72 hours. If you're gonna pay the extra couple hundred bucks for Apple hardware, you've gotta demand free shipping.

The nice thing about the Apple Store is that you can play with anything Apple makes for about as long as you need to get a sense of how it's gonna work for you (or not) and unless you go asking around none of the salespeople will ever bother you. Well, that and the inanely named "Genius Bar" (sounds like something the Republican Party would come up with as a donor category) actually provides decent in-person tech support for free.

Anonymous said...

Ahh, Macs. I was an Apple devotee for years...but it seems to have worn off. Windows still sucks, yes...but it sucks marginally less these days, and from using it at work it's now more familiar to me than the latest Mac OS.

System 7 through Mac OS 9 still feels like a comfortable old shoe when I fire up one of my old machines...but the latest iterations of OS X seem so foreign to me, it's almost a relief to switch back to Windows XP.

Surely I'm not the only one?

Anonymous said...

Maybe it's a Midwest thing, but the suburban Minneapolis Apple store employees are anything but ubersnoot dorks. They'll even polish your iPod if you ask, and do so with cheer. (Oh, great: a new synonym for onanism.) The Genius Bar guys are often harried, since they're helping people reinstall system 9 on a Performa from 1992, but it's still free.