Shutdown

Posted on 3 Mar 2006 at 12:41

 

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The iBook blew up; the Dell PC is a bearable solution. So why does the Apple Store still beckon?

Last Wednesday, as 30 students sat down to my lecture on Contemporary Art and Society, my iBook G4 died a sudden and violent death. First, there was an ominous buzzing noise from deep inside the motherboard. Next, the screen dissolved into an eye-watering mass of cross-hatched lines in an array of fetching colours. As the buzzing reached a furious pitch, the screen went black and I resorted to the cover-all IT solution of switch-it-off-and-back-on-again. A student in the front row asked if this was part of the lecture as I waited perspiringly for the happy iBook chimes. But the chimes were not to be; the iBook is dead. Its metadata processes are history. It is an ex-iBook.

After several days of pen-and-paper insurance wrangling and late-night cradling of the lifeless plastic corpse, I accepted that I was going to be working on the family PC for the foreseeable future. A comparatively vast monolith of black and silver plastic anchored to a large desk in my husband's office, the Dell Dimension 1100 had previously only registered on the edges of my consciousness as a kind of interestingly shaped jukebox and dust gatherer. After the initial shock of being obliged not only to get out of bed, but also to assume a vertical typing position had worn off, I became quite excited about entering the world of Windows.

A few things have become immediately apparent. The first is that the PC is an inveterate conversationalist. Every mouse click seems to bring a contented ping; every user switch, a kindly string arpeggio. If I sit and stare at the screen too long, I am shaken from my reverie with an alarmed chirrup; it wants my attention, apparently, but I'll be jiggered if I know why. It's a bit like an attention-deficient kitten, nudging your hand and wanting to play. It's all quite cute and entertaining, really, and without the hassle of a litter tray.

Looks-wise, Windows has come a long way since my last experience in the late 1990s; buttons are smoother and enhanced with a shiny tonal effect, text is less blocky and vaguely anti-aliased and, thanks to the expunging of Microsoft Office in favour of Open Office, the little paperclip man doesn't appear and offer to help me write a letter every 15 seconds. The seasoned Mac OS X aficionado, however, can't help but feel a mite sorry for the PC interface. The flashiness is half hearted and cosmetic, like the technological equivalent of a middle-aged combover. And while I no longer have to send the paperclip man packing every time it looks like I'm managing a list, I now have to bow to the sinister text box of the Dell Support Overlords, which slices into the frame with light sabre sound FX and insists on 'checking computer environment'.

There are other PC/Mac differences that are, I confess, utterly inconsequential but that get my dander up due to sheer laziness and inability to change ingrained physical habits. Uprooting the " key from its natural home down next to the ' key, and switching it with the @ symbol, for example, has left me staring confusedly at the keyboard for minutes on end as the PC farts smugly at my erroneously entered email address. My iron mouse-grip has a tendency to inadvertently click the sneaky little side buttons, sometimes opening five or six windows at a time before my reflexes kick in and drop the thing like the proverbial hot brick.

Despite all these complaints, my experience on the Dell has not been a dreadful one. It works just fine. It hasn't crashed yet, it generally does what I want it to and it has all the programs I need in day-to-day life. It is a good office tool. So why am I returning to the Apple Store in London's Regent Street to select a new MacBook Pro next Saturday? Why do I remain so fanatically faithful to a machine that, let's face it, let me down at a vital moment, when I have a perfectly functional machine in my house already? Am I a style-obsessed London media whore? Perhaps... but there is more to it.