On Friday, I offered a little fable full of love and appreciation for the pet that has won my heart: my MacBook Pro. It was an homage to The Nightingale, a story by Hans Christian Anderson, which is a story about an Emperor who falls in love with a mechanical toy bird and spurns the flesh and blood warbler with whom he had enjoyed a long and happy relationship. I thought it was a sweet little fable, pathetic in its own way. I mean, what kind of fool falls in love with his Laptop? Shouldn’t I really get a schnauzer and lighten up on the emotions I’m investing in an inanimate object?
Be that as it may, my story contained some mild complaints about the new plaything in my life — my MacBook Air. I didn’t say anything really nasty about the thing. That would have been impossible. It’s a great little tool and I like it a lot. What I don’t like is:
I didn’t even get into the last bullet in my tiny parable, because I wasn’t sure if that was just me. Over the weekend, nerd that I am, I read a bunch of magazines and web postings on this subject, all of which revealed a host of angry people railing about this very issue and taking Apple (AAPL) to task for launching a new OS without proper testing.
At any rate, what was interesting to me about all this was how ferocious and immediate were the contemptuous, partisan, ill-tempered replys to my tender tale of affection and loyalty. Not all of you, no. Many actually wrote in to say that they wept when the narrator of the tale returned to his first love, the bigger, clunkier but more substantial Laptop.
But the rest of you, wow. You would think that I had stepped on a crack on purpose and broken their mothers back most heartlessly. Why didn’t I get the new migration route!? What am I, a moron? Hey! Didn’t I know that you could plug all kinds of peripherals into the supplied USB port? What kind of schweck was I to criticize this apex of contemporary achievement?! Dolt! Idiot!
This nation is right now embroiled in any number of screwups wrought by people who stayed the course when they should not have, who failed to listen to criticism when it was offered, who placed blind enthusiasm over judgment.
Hey, people? Nobody is more immersed in the Mac universe than I. In fact, those who are close to me are frankly concerned about my tendency to solve problems by purchasing hardware from Cupertino. But that doesn’t mean I believe that those guys can do no wrong. The fact is, Leopard’s printer drivers blow. And so does the Air’s actual battery life.
There, I said it. You want to make something of it?