Overthinking the Mac-Human relationship

　　An excerpt of Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination of Steve Jobs by Brett Robinson appears in a recent post on Wired. Robinson is a U.S. marketing professor. According to the publisher, the book will reconstruct "Steve Jobs’ imagination for digital innovation in transcendent terms."
　　Robinson's brief analysis in the Wired post looks at several Apple advertisements. He then riffs on what he considers to be their deep meta messages of narcissism with the computer user as well as the bonds between humans and their computing tools. He places particular emphasis on the famous Get a Mac campaign with Justin Long and John Hodgman, saying that Apple products may "possess personality traits or to reflect a particular way of thinking and processing information grants it a human likeness."
　　These ads rely on a metaphor that equates the human actors with the hardware and software of their respective computer systems. This biological analogy between computer parts and the human body reminds us that the metaphors that guide computer development come from our own human faculties, particularly cognition and memory.
　　But the reverse is also true. Our sense of self is now shaped by the technologies that are used to diagnose and repair the body. It’s easy to assume that the two actors in the “Get a Mac” campaign represent PC and Mac users, but the intent is clearly to grant the operating systems a human personality.
　　In the Mac narrative, differences in operating systems represent differences in cognition styles. Associating with a particular brand, then, is more than an affiliation to a name or corporate philosophy; it’s an affiliation to a way of thinking. The operating system is a metaphor for the mind.
　　Oy. What a bunch of hooey. Perhaps it's just as likely that Apple's marketing department at one time had a sense of humor (I'm unsure about that nowadays) and found that this funny "illness metaphor" could represent in less than 30 seconds the rather complicated subject of Windows upgrades and the hardware upgrade that almost always were necessary to run them back in the day?
　　However, I agree with Robinson on at least one point: the Get a Mac campaign never had users saying that they were a PC or a Mac. Hodgman and Long were actors representing the computing platforms and their differences. That was the point.
　　Rather, it was Microsoft that offered in 2008 an ad campaign that presented persons saying that they were PCs. The intent was to show that PC users were just folks, ordinary users, using the ordinary OS of the Wintel platform. I admit that I always found this campaign odd. After all, there are "cat people" and "dog people" but they don't say that they are cats and dogs, respectively.
　　These marketing campaigns certainly said something about Apple's solution approach to computing. But they also said much more about how the Windows and PC market has spent years working to become a cheap commodity, and easily interchangeable platform, one that users don't perceive any exceptional value. That isn't true with Apple customers.

My money's against it, however it could happen

　　It is no secret that Surface RT and Windows RT, together with Windows RT on other platforms, did not do too as Microsoft hoped. The most recent collateral harm in that failure was Nvidia's Tegra processors, which run inside the Surface RT.
　　Surface/Windows RT had no shortage of skeptics even when it launched, but it's attainable items could change over time. I am not saying that this *will* take place, but that there is a affordable situation for it. Here's how it functions.
　　Initially, some Microsoft organization strategy forensics: Microsoft desires developers to write apps for the new, Contemporary UI (a.k.a. Metro). Releasing Windows eight only for Intel architecture, they should have believed, would have produced it also uncomplicated for developers to bypass Metro due to the fact standard Windows applications would currently run on it (and on Windows 7 along with other versions). But if Surface RT had been a accomplishment, developers would need to be on it, and would select to create Metro apps so as to be on both platforms.
　　Effectively, that didn't function. In fact, color me shocked at the degree of reticence of developers to create Metro apps, because the sheer quantity of customers who can run them will undoubtedly be quite substantial, even though it's small adequate to become regarded a failure for Microsoft. Don't forget, any other organization in the world would love to have a disaster like Windows Vista, numerous millions of copies of which had been sold. Such is the worst you'll be able to anticipate from Windows eight.
　　This holiday season you'll be able to count on to see touch-enabled Windows systems heavily promoted and Microsoft will attempt other promotions to get people today obtaining apps in the store. Actually, the failure to acquire developers writing apps for the store is the single biggest issue they have. With great apps users will undoubtedly come, and with users excellent apps will come.
　　And in the event the apps do come, then the decision to buy an RT device could turn out to be substantially additional affordable. There needs to be a cost advantage in comparison to x86 because the RT will still be much less capable, or it'll need to demonstrate far far better battery life or something to give persons a purpose to get it, as opposed to an Intel-based method.
　　Based on the performance and energy consumption from the most up-to-date chips from NVidia and Intel, all of this is attainable. It really is also achievable that Intel will narrow the cost and overall performance consumption gaps, and RT will drop all its raison d'etre.

　　But if, come vacation time or later, the Windows app choice is respectable and RT systems are less expensive than Intel-based ones, it may possibly be completely affordable to buy one. If they get inexpensive sufficient, people might get casual about obtaining them.
　　My money's against it, however it could happen. There happen to be attempts in the past to put Windows on other architectures, however they have all failed because the Intel has often enhanced their chip functionality enough to produce the price of incompatibility too higher relative to the advantages.
　　You may make a case that Microsoft should really have pursued it this technique to begin with: x86 initially, other architectures once the app marketplace was solidly established. It appears like that could be the Plan B for Microsoft and NVidia, and possibly it was built-in from the beginning.