Mac. Better.

So I think it's time to throw my cards on the table, or rather my hardware. I use a Mac and I love it. In fact, so desperate was I to get my hands on one that I bought a base level eMac at a price which would have afforded me a well-specced PC, one that would have lasted a good, oh, three months before becoming obsolete. And five before spyware rendered it totally unusable.

I love Macs because I'm a real person, by which I mean that I choose a personal computer in the same way I choose any other luxury item. Firstly, of course, I think, 'will it look good on me/near me?' Then I wonder, 'will it work?' And only then do I think, 'and can I afford it?' So, when I want to buy a car, the answer to the first two questions points me to a Lamborghini, but the safety net third question takes me straight to the used car lot at Reg Vardy. In our post-modern, material driven, celebrity-ridden age, true happiness is removal of the third question entirely, but sadly that's not the case for most of us.

I know very little about computers really, but when I came to buy one, Apple seemed to offer me a positive response to each of my three commodity questions, outworked as follows:

1. Do I prefer the shiny white, compact, sweet looking, fully integrated single unit Mac or the huge grey slab of noisy plastic accompanied by a mass of cables, a tiny monitor, twenty software discs and eight uselessly inaccessible USB ports ?

2. Which will I be more likely to have to pull apart under the instruction of a call centre worker in India at a cost of £1 per second because my files have disappeared? Again.

3. My last PC cost £1,000 plus anti-virus software, a firewall and call charges to Asia. That good looking white thing is £200 cheaper even after I buy Microsoft Office. Why am I even thinking about this?

So minutes after walking into John Lewis I was walking out with a Mac under my arm. Even the box looked cool.

The hilarious thing about the Mac vs. PC debate is that people bothered enough to argue about it always battle over specs, operating systems, processing speeds, software stability and games. Who cares? All I asked of my new purchase was that it let me print a letter and find out quickly when another hot celebrity buys a tiny dog, yet it's now in danger of becoming my actual best friend. My wife thinks it is already. My eMac has been discontinued now, yet to this day it allows me to do those things quickly and efficiently, plus I can edit a film, download a song, upload a photo, transfer anything into my PSP and record songs. All straight out of the box, all easily, and all with only one button on my mouse. Phew.

It seems to me that Apple know what most people want from a personal computer, the same way as they know what people want from a portable music player; something that looks good, is easy to use and works properly. Sadly, not many regular people know much about Macs yet, but hopefully Apple's marketing department will catch up with its design team shortly. Their latest ad campaign is a start, I suppose:



Yes, they're quite haughty, and yes, after you've watched a couple they get a bit annoying. But, they've ENRAGED the PC crowd, and that can only be a good thing, if only to provide some tech-tastic comedy spleen venting on the forums. Here's a brutal parody by someone who loves his graphics cards:



...And I'm gonna go play Burnout with a real person I can see who can't lie to me about their gender. LOL, as they say.

The thing is, most people don't really NEED a computer, do they? But computers can perform such amazing wizardry these days that we choose to spend our lives making them impress us ever more. I don't need to transfer my CD collection into iTunes, don't need to make short films about my band, don't need to write this blog, but I like to because it's all made easy for me. I'm sure that 95% of people who own computers, including me, couldn't give a monkeys how their computer actually does stuff. Most couldn't care less about their clock speed and MB of RAM, but if the magic box will allow them to knock together a comedy home movie one day and a slideshow of their cruise to Magaluf the next, they're satisfied. If it'll do that while taking up minimal space, being quiet, not crashing and, most importantly, looking cool, that's just dandy. My Mac does all that really well. My PC didn't.

Macs are computers for style-conscious computer-illiterate buffoons. And designers. They're for people like me, who cringe at the thought of knowing what a Java Applet is, whose only knowledge of HTML code is < br > and who think a CODEC is what your dad takes pictures with. People with games consoles. Argh.

See, before I bought my little bundle of joy I operated two PCs, my own and my dad's. Both sucked, and sucked badly. You already know that I had to take mine apart and phone a call centre, which is to know enough. And my dad's. Oh dear. It spat its dummy out within ten minutes of being first switched on and never picked it up again. I used it a couple of weeks ago and, I'm not kidding, it took about fifteen minutes to turn it on and open internet explorer. Fifteen minutes. I think he only persists with it to annoy me.

But I fear that I'm getting too close to all out PC-bashing territory now, which would land me in hot water because I wouldn't have a prayer in a spec war with a hardcore PC-upgrading Mac playa hater. I'm blissfully ignorant. Intel Shmintel, I say. If you're happy with your PC, hey, I ain't mad atcha, you just keep perpetratin' those right-click drive-bys on the Mac crew and I'm not going to argue. The point I'm trying to make here is that most people just want the coolest stuff they can get these days, and the coolest stuff right now is the stuff Steve Jobs and his posse are making. If the good looking thing happens to have a bit about it under the surface too, great. Why do you think Carol Vorderman is so popular?

Here's my vision of the future. The iPod Generation, or whatever you care to label them (I prefer 'neo-walkmanites'), will be buying computers for themselves soon. Obviously that's discounting all the older people who bought iPods and hooked them up to their PCs like plugging a guitar into a hi-fi. Once the younger ones get spending on their very own MySpace Facilitators, PCs will become the new Macs - a misunderstood minority group, except without the cachet and the backing of dancing pop stars.

Apple, on the other hand, will be stemming a tide of viruses instead of making software that works properly and ruing the day they put form ahead of function. How are you supposed to shoot aliens on your typewriter when your mouse has only got one button?

Meanwhile, Half-life will move exclusively to PlayStation 4 and Nintendo's new console, the Pu, will aim squarely at the lucrative and untapped 65-90 age bracket with an innovative novelty control device shaped like a walking stick.

As Yoda allegedly said to Luke: Once Mac you go, never back you'll go.