Hello, my dear geek friends across the Atlantic.
Apparently over 2000 of you wanted to read Why
Low End Mac Users Are Nuts. Great! Unfortunately, some didn't get
that I didn't say that low-end Mac users are nuts - it was that
magazine guy. Remember? Good, so stop flaming.
Anyway, back to cradle of transatlantic culture, Great Britain: Last
week, the tech sections of the broadsheets (meaning newspapers without
naked women on page three) were full of reviews and features of that
watery thing, aeh, NetBSD with Aqua thingie, OS X (or Oh aess taen
point zero, as my British friends would call it).
One of the reporters of the Guardian, a chap called Cameron Paterson,
dodging smelly men in anoraks and strangely formed laptops, sneaked
into the presentation of Apple UK's Stuart Harris at one of London's
few Apple retailers and - shock, horror - met an Italian Graphic
Designer called Fabio with an Apple tattooed on his arm, who told the
reporter trustworthily that he "thinks, sleeps and works with Macs"
(see, and I always thought that Italians have better things to do) and
that he would soon have a X tattooed on his back. Oh, well.
Meanwhile things were getting so steamy inside the shop that one of
the staff members demanded to open the windows, which prompted the
response, "that's the last word I want to hear tonight," from one of
the punters.
In the real world, meanwhile, the new OS had modestly well received
reviews by the papers, although criticising the lack of hardware
support (and bloody well true: I have an eight month old USB Samsung
Laser Printer which seems to be as useless as a doorstopper when it
comes to printing under OS X). And, as usual, the rest of the
public didn't notice, as Apple 
is still
promoting the -ahem- cleverly designed new iMacs in its TV
commercials (mostly on obscure satellite channels after 11 p.m.) with
the revolutionary formula: "Rip. Mix. Burn."
In the advent of BSE and Foot and Mouth Disease and burning
carcasses everywhere, maybe this is not such a good slogan.
Back to the media, the Mac-Mag with the most sophisticated
readership and a revolutionary layout, MacUser (whose columnists, BTW, still
happily endorse low-end Mac use, as they still remember how they
started the mag 
with two 128k Macs) featured a very
good looking, stark naked young Afro-Caribbean gentleman on the cover
of their last issue, whose modesty was just covered by a gleaming
Titanium PowerBook -
creating the sort of outrage you get when you put naked people on front
covers (and not on page 3, like the "Sun"), only this time the
complaints came from the male side of the public (probably the ones
that buy the "Sun" or the "Daily Star" (brrr..) in the morning) who
thought the images were sexist. Surprised?
I wonder what Fabio, the Apple-wearing Italian, would have said to
that. (BTW: fortunately the guardian reporter told him that if he would
go ahead with his new tattoo, he would become an official endorser of
Microsoft's XboX.) 
