Shutdown

Posted on 24 Jun 2002 at 15:16

 

Gallery

I don't normally read The Works, the section of MacUser dedicated to helping readers through the little hurdles and mysteries of Mac ownership.

I don't normally read The Works, the section of MacUser dedicated to helping readers through the little hurdles and mysteries of Mac ownership.
There are two reasons. First, I seldom understand the questions, let alone the answers, and this induces a deep sense of inferiority. Second, most of the queries appear to concern extraordinarily up-to-date kit - so much so that I have long suspected that many of them are in fact absolute fakes, drafted in at the last minute by the MacUser team. One guy thinks up a good answer to a question nobody's yet asked, another supplies the question to fit the answer, and a third contributor invents a plausible-sounding name and address.
The whole exercise is designed to make the mag look cool and knowledgeable, and also to promote the idea that most of you readers already possess the hottest kit and are running tremendously groovy applications on an everyday basis.
I have no means of confirming this suspicion, as the MacUser staffers tend to clam up like Mafia hitmen taking the Fifth in front of Congressional committees if one so much as hints at dodgy stuff going down in the back doubles of this apparently clean-living editorial organism. Nor do I suggest that all the queries are ersatz - one in particular, a couple of issues back, struck me as having the ring of truth. A chap with a Quadra 850 AV wanted to know how to stream video to its hard disk. (He was told, in a roundabout sort of way, to forget the whole idea and buy a new computer.)
This rather touching evidence that at least some MacUser readers own extremely ancient kit yet still desperately want to be part of the video-streaming in-crowd struck me to the core, as I too own a rather elderly Mac - a 233MHz beige G3. I'm stuck on Mac OS 9.1 since installing Mac OS X would be asking too much of the old girl, my display is CRT, my ports are SCSI, serial and ADB, and my sense of being left behind by the stream of Time is overwhelming. Why don't I buy a new computer? Don't ask silly questions.
But I'm not the only inhabitant of Heartbreak Hotel. My colleague Charles Shaar Murray also owns a beige G3, which puts him in the room next door. Every morning he and I strap on our Zimmer frames and hobble down to the sun lounge to play shuffleboard with the editor (iBook mark two), the news editor (ditto), the features editor (iMac mark one), the technical editor (blue-and-white G3) and the publisher (iMac mark one).
The only MacUser staffer so far to make the gigantic leap to G4 status is the reviews editor [Obviously overpaid - Ed]. No one has anything running at 1GHz; no one owns a flat-panel display; no one has more than one processor; and no one has a new iMac or anything made of titanium.
This puts rather a different gloss on all those reviews, doesn't it? 'The 867 model performed poorly on speed,' and so forth. A bit like the owner of an Austin Allegro complaining that a Ferrari 355 'could do with more oomph'. Or nit-picking criticisms of the latest digital camera when the reviewer actually owns a Brownie 127 that was good enough for his dad. It's altogether sickening - and yet, my friends, it's wholly necessary.
Why? Because at all costs the illusion must be preserved that the typical MacUser reader possesses not the very latest kit, since that would make all the ads in the mag rather pointless, but something a year to 18 months old. This slot might be defined as 'the ability to stream video but not very well'. He runs OS X, owns a digital camera and a photorealistic colour printer, prefers FireWire to USB and is thinking seriously about a large flat-panel display. This positioning of the Theoretical Reader allows MacUser staff to wax lordly about kit that they haven't a hope of owning this side of the next millennium [Obviously underpaid - Ed] and it keeps the advertisers more than happy.