Apple Computers: the power of creativity and intelligence

For everyone who knows me now this may come as a shock, but I was a bit of a nerd when I was in high school. Specifically, there was an eminently forgettable period of my high school career in which I became obsessed with computers. This was not manifest in the traditional ways—an insatiable craving for computer games or a mastery of the most forgotten-about corners of the C++ coding language. I was too lazy for all of that. Rather, for some reason, in the winter of ninth grade, I decided that I wanted my boring PC to look like a Mac, and I just became obsessed with fooling myself into thinking I had a Mac. This was long before the Steve Jobs renaissance, the iPod, or even OS X. In fact, I suspect that this was some sort of rebellious urge to control and create my personal space. As my parents had long since deprived me of that right vis-a-vis my bedroom (honestly, who needs 12 decorative pillows on his bed?), I guess that controlling my virtual space was the best available substitute for putting up posters in my room.

I downloaded some program that changed the appearance of all of my desktop windows, and I configured them so that they would look and act like a Mac’s. I somehow changed my startup and signoff screen to look like the Apple ones, and I even configured the sounds so that I could hear that odd little “dripping” sound that used to be on the old Macs. To a large extent, I succeeded, until the brilliant gray facade of the fake Macintosh began to crack, choking my sluggish Windows 98 machine with the sheer amount of crap I had loaded to hide the truth. The computer ended up completely shriveling to a slow death, until I had to format and reload everything. As I said, I was a bit of a nerd in high school.

That inexplicable urge I felt in high school to have an Apple seems to have spread virulently to pop culture in an entirely quantifiable way, to which Apple’s explosive fourth quarter profit reports attest. While no one doubts that its products’ chic image and near-flawless functionality have powered the company to its current position, the recent numbers are particularly arresting because they were not fueled by the iPod—rather, it was its Macintosh computer that was, as BusinessWeek calls it, “the belle of the earnings ball.”