Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Spoiled rich (or hardworking) kids

Students are sharing details of their Mac hardware/software setups on TUAW. They range from the humble 12" iBook to the Dual G5 PowerMac + Powerbook combos. Pardon my characterization of students using macs as the ones I know are mostly of the latter type, but I'm just jealous (deadly sin).

My mac 'rig' is a graphite iMac G3 400 MHz with slot-loading DVD player and 384 MB of I-don't-know-what-kind RAM with a puck mouse and no-name USB keyboard. It took me approximately 40 minutes to build Adium using Darwinports (Fink didn't have it) and it didn't even work for some reason. I'm pretty proud of it, nevertheless.

UPDATE 1:40 AM EST: After looking up the definition of envy and trying to convince myself that I didn't harbor resentment towards mac users (!), I feel bad about my generalization and do apologize. It's like criticising people who drive BMWs or otherwise nice cars. I think what I do feel resentment for is people who have everything but take it for granted. Like me in many ways, if I wasn't me.

DISCLAIMER: Even though I will not further edit the title of this post, I acknowledge that in many cases, possessing luxury items does not mean you are spoiled. Furthermore, I do not believe that Mac users are either hardworking or spoiled and rich. One can conclude, however, that I consider myself to be either not spoiled, not rich, or not hardworking.

2 comments:

Eric R. said...

Why don't you feel that way towards PC users. There are a lot of "Gamers" who have "nicer rigs".

(Writing this on a iBook G4 1 GHz which I bought with money I save for a year and a half)

Will said...

Sorry... Ok, first of all, as you can see from my updates and disclaimer, I know I generalized pretty unfairly. The original post title was "Spoiled (or precocious and hardworking) kids". I also had a third adjective, precocious (which I thought meant smart, but checking the definition made me drop it).

To answer your question, though, the reason I didn't say something about PC users is that they're such a diverse group. I did participate on a modder/hardware enthusiast community for a bit and could have come up with the conclusion that a lot of them are spoiled, but there were a good share of them building and modding on the cheap.

Although flawed as all generalizations are, the exception I built into the title (hardworking) applies to you.