Pull The Other One, John!

After reading what seems like the most incredibly obtuse and out of touch opinion piece I've ever seen, I went searching for dirt on our old friend John Dvorak. I'd decided I'd do a witty little piece highlighting the reams and reams of stupidity that must inevitably spew forth from his weekly column at Zdnet. My aim was to be to prove once and for all that anyone who could call the iBook "Girly", or claim that no self-respecting male would be seen dead with the "iMac to go", must be the most witless and ill-informed opinion columnist this side of the National Enquirer.

Much to my surprise, I found nothing. Nada. (insert every negative here)

Ok, there was the obligatory Mac-bashing scattered through his archives, but as I read through his body of work I realised that this guy is actually pretty damned perceptive at times, with valid commentary on the state of the Windows world. OK, you have to take for a given that Dvorak refuses to acknowledge the existence of other platforms, except when giving them his personal kiss of death Apart from that, he's certainly no worse than many intelligent columnists, and much better than teeming hordes of others.

So why would a seemingly intelligent, thoughtful and well informed columnist regularly make foolish sweeping comments regarding the state of the Mac, only to be proved wrong on a regular basis?

No one in their right mind could possibly think, after having seen the industry-wide success of the iMac, that the iBook will be any less a hit. It's not about specs, it's not about speed, it's about classy good looks, and winning charm. I seem to recall early last year that every man and his dog were predicting the fall of Apple because the iMac didn't have a floppy. When they were finally released the consumer market as a whole shrugged their shoulders, said "So what?" and moved up to Zip drives. Now we have the iBook, which is everything the iMac is, but portable and wireless. Sure, there's a bit of negative commentary floating about, but the general feeling around the 'ol drinking trough seems to be "Well, I wish it had this but, heh heh, I'll be getting one anyway!".

So why is John Dvork shouting out his denial of the iBook's inevitable success?

I think he's just trying to wind us up.

Honestly, what other reason does he have? I mean, he could I suppose be an old geek, fearful of embracing new technology. Unlikely. He could also be getting huge amounts of great new kit to "review" , and his commentary is appropriately skewed as a result. Much more likely methinks. But the more I look at it, I think he's just doing it for a bit of a laugh. I mean, as group, we're not exactly known as the "Sit quietly on the sidelines and take it" people, are we? Rabid Macintosh fanaticism is getting to be the only thing you can count on in computing these days, and we play the role to the hilt. And why not? It's fun!

It's even more fun now that we no longer have to justify our choice of machines! What a wonderful world this is. A year ago we were the joke of the computer industry, and now we're everybody's envy, even if they don't admit it. The Evangalist even disbanded because their stated aim, "To combat the tide of anti-mac sentiment" , was no longer valid &endash; apparently there just isn't enough anti-mac sentiment to justify the list.

So when we take a closer look, we're really all just playing the roles that we love best, like some internet-based Japanese Opera. John Dvorak loves nothing more than to bait us into rabid response, and we love to give him exactly what he wants.

So I say let's keep up the good work! Let John have his ebullient rants, allowing us to gleefully chorus back our good-natured outrage. Who knows, in 10 years it'll probably come out that good old JD was the one who stole the iBook prototype from the show last week, just so he could keep up his anti-mac facade!

__________

Kelsey Brookes works at the Computer Graphics College as a lecturer in sound and introductory computing for the net. He is also a trained opera singer, writes contempory music and performs as a singer and keyboard player in a cover band called Drill. Kelsey is 24, lives in Sydney, Australia and has moved far too many times to be considered even remotely grounded in the real world.

.

July 05, 2009