Lunar Obverse

For dinner tonight, I felt like getting something new. There’s a spot near my grocery store, Philladelphia’s, that sells sandwiches and microbrew. I’d tried them in the past a few times, because whenever I walk past it, it smells great. However, every time I’ve actually eaten there, I’d come away mildly disappointed in the sandwiches – too expensive for the blah food.

They had recently added free wifi as an option and that gave me incentive to try them one more time.

Again, the food was blah and spendy. I’ll never learn to stop thinking with my senses.

While I was there, I pulled out my new sexy thing and poked around. Their access point requires a password that’s cleverly hidden so that only customers can see it, not folks sitting outside or walking past, and it looks like they change it from time to time. They’re using WEP encryption which is almost worse than not having encryption at all, considering how easily the encryption can be brute-forced and broken, but I’ll give them an “E” for effort.

After a bit another, older balder gentleman came in and opened up his Dell laptop. After poking around and showing increasing signs of frustration, he asked one of the employees for help. I didn’t hear the conversation but the employee looked helpless and subservient and the bald guy looked like… well, like a pointy-haired boss who didn’t understand what he was doing but was damned if he was going to back down.

After seeing the hapless employee, a twenty-something, tall and skinny and dark-haired, finally shrug, the bald PHB (not a contradiction in terms) said, annoyed, loud enough for the whole restaurant to hear, “Well, you should find out because I imagine you’re going to get this question a lot!”

Jerk.

The twenty-something guy (he wasn’t a waiter, and wasn’t a cook… cashier, basically) saw that I had a computer out, too, and stepped over. “You’re online right now, right?” he asked me hopefully.

“Yes,” I said, finally paying them some non-hidden attention.

“Where do you put in the password to get connected?” he asked, stepping around to see my screen.

Damn. Where was my “No, I will not fix your computer” t-shirt? At home in the laundry. I could empathize with the poor kid, but the PHB was being obnoxious about the cost-free wifi. I didn’t feel like rewarding the PHB for his rudeness. So, even though I knew very well how to connect a Windows PC to a wireless network, I feigned ignorance.

“Sorry,” I said, pointing at my beautiful bright wide-screened sexy laptop with it’s lick-able interface, “I’m using a Mac. It just… works.”

“Oh,” the kid said, knowingly but disappointed at the lack of assistance, “yeah… it just… finds the network, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said brightly. “Sorry!”

The kid shuffled back over to the PHB. “Well… let’s try this again…”

I feel a bit guilty but dammit, I’m not tech support for the world. There’s a reason I get paid a lot to work on Windows but choose to use a Mac for personal use.

They did, eventually, figure it out, which made me feel better for the kid but I didn’t like the smugness of old-and-baldy. Oh, well, not my gig.

Is it just me or has there been a rash of Windows-to-Mac switching going on lately?

On a personal level, one friend switched last fall, plunking down the cash for the last PPC iMac (he’s not bitter at all that his machine was obsoleted in just a couple of months – he’d hoped for at least a half-year before that happened but it was not to be). Another friend is considering purchasing a shiny new MacBook Pro to go along with his career change from government functionary to graphic artist extraordinaire.

Then comes word of a more momentous change: Gabe and Tycho, a.k.a. Mike and Jerry of Penny Arcade, hard-core PC and console gamers, have in the last week purchased their first-ever Mac OS systems, soothed in their decision by the presence of a familiar piece of hardware inside: Intel.

Jerry’s musings on the topic of switching are well worth reading.

Then, prominent political blogger Josh Marshall, of Talking Points Memo, after manfully not complaining bitterly about problems with a Gateway computer, and the company’s support (or lack thereof), initially resisted the siren call of the Mac loyalists but eventually succumbed and appears to be quite happy with his decision.

Even professional attention whore (I mean that in the nicest way, I swear; after all, look what I’m doing right now, only I’m not getting paid for it – pity me!) Heather Armstrong at Dooce found and linked to a post from someone who fought against the mental image she had of a Mac user… and only gave in when she realized that defying the stereotype would be satisfying. Y’know, as opposed to just realizing that the stereotype was incorrect…

And John Gruber at Daring Fireball, after reading about Josh Marshall’s initial resistance to conversion, had some interesting thoughts on the topic, pertaining to why folks might resist switching when, in all likelihood, they would benefit hugely. Somehow, because of the wide choice of commodity hardware, using Windows on top of that cheap hardware is seen as a more cosmopolitan platform? Crazy talk, to me.

Mr. Gruber is a confirmed Mac user, and by his own admission to me in email, never uses any other platform but isn’t evangelical about the platform – unlike someone like, say, me, who is forced to support Windows at work and retreats to the comfort of the Mac OS at home.

So what’s with all the switching lately? My first thought is that it’s because Macs now have Intel inside and that makes them somehow less exotic. But maybe this is a longer-building trend that is only now reaching the point where I start to notice. I had an ex-girlfriend who purchased an iMac two years ago after her home was broken into and her H-P PC was stolen. And my father switched quite happily almost 10 years ago when he became more involved in photography as a hobby. And, of course, my friend mentioned above switched prior to the PPC-to-Intel change-over (and he’s not bitter about the timing of that at all).

I’d like to think it was because of my powers of persuasion… I’d like to think that…