dr_pwnage

In the dark, I have no lamp. It is blustery for June, and not warm like the promises that summer gives you the rest of the year. I know why I left this place, this bricked and chilled place. I left chasing that promise of summer.

I remembered a few months ago that I posted an entry about Chicago Hipsters and how they make me kind of happy. Sure, many of them are effete self-absorbed pseudo-intellectuals with a penchant for smugness and laissez-faire hygiene, but many others manage to actually pull off the "I'm so nonchalant and I don't give a fuck" to such a degree that I find them admirable, even to a level that I am envious. I thanked Chicago for having a thriving hipster community. Mostly it's pretty chill, even though some people just try too hard. Seriously, dude...if you are 30 pounds overweight, tight girls' jeans are NOT the look you are going for. Also you may want to shave, at least until you are old enough that your stubble doesn't look like you fingered your face with superglue in a few spots and then rolled around in the fleece throw blanket you got at Walgreens for $5.

Apple is a very important part of hipsterdom. A hipster won't spend more than $6 a week on food, preferring instead to enhance the balance of their food budget towards Pabst Blue Ribbon. For those who smoke, sure, cloves were great in high school, but now as an adult different choices must be made, and American Spirits are readily available. Doral cigarrettes are also moderately priced. They will, however, pay top dollar for Apple products.

I have always been a Windows guy, simply because I like to play games on my PC. Macs have no games. Don't bother sending me links; anything on the Mac that is a game is either something I don't want to play or I already have it. Macs used to be the forefront machine systems for music and video editing and desktop publishing, but now these things can be done on Windows machines just as powerfully. There is simply no reason for me to own a Mac.

Now, don't get me wrong. Mac Books appear to me to be super cool, and I wouldn't mind having one, but my Dell (haha) XPS 1330 laptop is pretty tight. It can play games because I got the non-integrated graphics card. It has great sound, built in wi-fi, an optical drive (again, I need one because I play games...likely my next laptop will not have one), plenty of USB and SD power, and plus it's red, which is the cat's ass. In any case, when it is time to get a new laptop, I will consider a Mac, and if the pricepoint for features is where I want it compared to a Windows machine, it will be a strong contender for my affection.

I would like to point out that although I laugh at people who are Mac fanboys, I purchased my Dedll laptop simply because it is red. It was overpriced, as well. It's a comedy blog, folks.

The Macbook Air is a wonderful laptop. It has decent battery life, is light, and looks very nice. It is, however, hipsterbait.

Ipods are another story altogether. I have had a bunch of different mp3 players over the years, and I have to say that my Archos player was the best, although nobody else I knew had one. It crapped out eventually. I had a Sony one, but it was tiny and only held about 16 songs. If I still have it, I might load it up from time to time, but all of the music has to have DRM on it. It's not necessarily that I am against DRM, I just don't think it's woth the hassle. I went through a few players before I ventually got an iPod. My first iPod broke after about a year, but I think that had more to do with me never using it. I didn't really find it to be that functional. When it broke, though, I replaced it with another iPod. I can defend this because iPods had changed for the better...the one I got had a huge 160 GB drive and could be used for computer disk storage. It also had video capability, but none of my videos were the right format, so the only thing that nice color screen got used for was album cover art. Kind of useless, because when I was listening to my iPod, I wasn't looing at it. I was probably looking at something like girls or birds or squirrels or whatever. I would have to say that my iPod experience has been pretty "meh" and that I missed out on what the fuck the big deal was. By this time, however, the Apple press machine was in full cockwaving mode because of the release of the first gen iPhone.

HOLY CRAP was that an event. I swear, everybody was talking about it, but nobody had one. At the time, they were like $600. A phone that is almost a computer in your pocket, with iPod functionality, and all kinds of other great stuff was indeed a step above the typical smartphone. I was a Razr user at the time simply because of the bluetooth (in my car...I was in sales and used over 5000 minutes a month) and the size ( I did buy into that craze...damn they were crappy phones) but moved on to a Palm (crap, never was able to get all of the things on it to work that should have worked) and Blackberrys (great for business if you have the separate keyboard keys, not so much if you get the Pearl). All of my clients (all of them) talked about wanting an iPhone. It was a phenomenon. It wasn't until after people bought the phones that they realized that they really wouldn't use an iPhone for anything more than they were using their current phones for, and they felt gypped. I knew one guy who had an iPhone...ONE...and he couldn't do anything but just use it as a phone. He felt really stupid for spending $600 and leaving his former phone company to get fewer minutes and worse quality reception.

Don't get me wrong...that iPhone was an incredible device, it's jut that a very small portion of the population will use the functionality on the phone to the extent that they can justify the hefty pricetag.

The 3G is a much better deal. I got one of these, and for once in my miserable life, was rewarded for not being an early adopter. At $200 for the 8 GB model, with great reception, 3G speed, and great wifi, as well as a shitload of included apps that are useful and the ability to get more apps for just about anything you would use in your daily life hassle-free through the iTunes store, it's a steal. Finally it was enough to make me get rid of my blackberry and iPod. This little phone does everything you could possibly ask except for a few things:

1. Can't shoot video. I have no idea why.
2. The camera really isn't that good. Not a big deal, but it would seem to me that this tiny aspect could have been improved.
3. No tethering. You can't use the phone to dial a cellular wireless connection for your laptop. This is especially stupid, because it would have been soooo easy to implement; the phone uses that cellular connection as part of your service agreement.
4. No MMS. Seriously, no sending picture text messages. Yes, you can email them, but if the other people you are sending to don't have email on their phone, they can't get your message right away. If somebody sends you an MMS, you have to log in to some ridiculous AT&T site with a hard to memorize message id and password (they are randomly generated for each message). Simply atrocious.

The main point is, though, that this iPhone 3G is really a great phone. I concede this. The other day, however, I made the mistake of going to the Apple store on Michigan Av here in wintery Chicago.

I had just gotten out of my psychiatrist's office with a freshly inked prescription for my crazy pills and remembered that I could use a little bit of an upgrade in the headphone department for my phone. I am talking headphones for music; something simple. I didn't like the Apple earbuds (the iconic white ones) because they don't feel right in my ear. I like either earbuds or cans. I was looking that day for earbuds.

It was a Friday after working hours, so I wasn't expecting an empty store, but holy hell it was so packed you would think that they were expecting Steve Jobs to come into the store personally and shit out golden dollars for everyone. Nobody in the place was over the age of 30. The people who worked there, all of them, were hipsters, and not the good kind. All of them looked like they were trying soooo hard to be trendy that I couldn't decide between laughter and anger. I remained neutral.

There were tight pants on the boys, to be sure, with converse sneakers. There were winter hats worn at a jaunty angle to hide their emo hair which was especially unkempt due to the Pabst Blue Ribboning of the night before. Smugness was palpable in the air. Smugness with the knowledge that if someone were to come in the store, they were there to buy into a phenomenon. A phenomenon of moneysucking and greed sold to people as a religion. Seriously, it's like scientology. You give them money, but you have no idea why what you just bought was good until you buy more stuff to find out what the stuff you bought before is actually good for.

Seriously, folks...a Macintosh computer is just not comparable to a Windows machine. The people I know who use Macs have no idea what the fuck they are doing. They are smug, to be sure. Smug because they have a white computer case. Smug because somehow having a Mac makes you a better person...more trendy and hip, more socially aware, and it probably means you have better taste in coffee.

Mac books are pretty sweet, and do a great job for the average internet user (checking email, facebook, myspace, twitter, yelp, yahoo, etc. obsessively in case anybody wanted to whore out any attention to said internet user), but that's about all these things are used for. Maybe a little online shopping for new wool winter hats to wear whilst drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon on your fixed gear bicycle and wearing a hoodie with your Mac slung over your back in a messenger bag, but that's about as complicated as it gets.

Guess what...netbooks can do all of that for a 6th to a 10th of the cost, are lighter, and have just as much quality.

Doesn't matter to apple smugs. They know their niche. They market SPECIFICALLY to hipsters and hipster wannabes. Looking at the people working in the store actually made me wish I was somewhere else. It made me wish that I was in a place that smugness wasn't part of the required uniform. All I wanted was some earphones, goddamnit.

Well, sure, they had plenty of earphones there. They were just all murderously expensive. I think the least expensive set of earphones was $45. Now, I don't mind paying for quality, but this was just retarded. The high end earbuds were well over $200.

Hey dudes...this is an mp3 player we are talking about here. The default setting on itunes for ripping is 128kb, and I think that this is the same quality you get when you buy from the itunes store (I didn't look it up before I wrote this). This means that there is no need for you to ever have to spend more than $20 on any pair of earbuds.

The difference between getting mugged in an alley in Chicago and going to the Apple store, is that the alley mugging will be considerably less expensive, and your assailant will not be anywhere near as smug.