Blogocentric Formulations

Macs & The Brass Teapot

PROMPT: Mac or PC? (One word answers aren't interesting to read, so please expand on your opinion


I'm definitely a Mac person, although I have to admit that I'm not one of those cult-like Apple followers who believe it's Mac or nothing. I just bought a new laptop toward the end of last year (a Macbook Pro), but before that I had an ASUS laptop running Windows 7 for nearly four years, and I still work on an HP machine running Windows 7 at work. I actually know a little bit more about PCs since I grew up using (and building) them... but in terms of preference for the overall experience, I'm firmly in the Mac camp.

There are really only three reasons why I prefer Mac over PC. First, I think Macs look nicer and feel better. They're some of the most lightweight and sturdy machines on the market, especially when you compare them to PCs with similar high-end components. Second, my experience with Macs has been that they last longer. Almost every PC I've ever had experiences an event horizon at which point it begins to decline and there's really no hope of recovery. It becomes slower to start up, takes longer to load programs, etc. The only times I've ever used a Mac (my wife's had one for years and I used to have one at a former job) those things lasted for three years or more in remarkably similar condition to when they were purchased; no waiting five minutes for it to boot up, or needing to force quit every application except your browser to get it to load pages in a reasonable amount of time. Third and most importantly, though, the graphic interface is much cleaner and sharper to my eyes (especially with my new Retina display ), and I vastly prefer the way text and images look on a Mac display. Again, it's not to the point where I can't deal with looking at something on a Windows machine, but when you spend as much time in front of a computer screen as I do each day, you start to notice when the serifs on a font are a little blocky, or when an image's colors aren't quite as crisp as they could be.

I know Macs aren't for everyone, and they are incredibly expensive. The one downside to owning a Mac is that I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to protect my machine, including double-insulating it when I put it in my bag, and generally being more ginger about how I interact with it. While I suppose that's a good thing overall, it is kind of a pain to be constantly worried about a super-expensive piece of technology when I could just lug around my $400 ASUS laptop without as much concern for its safety and well being. This is probably why I'll never own a fancy sports car... I'm just too worried about something happening to it.

All that said, though, what Mac or PC really comes down to is personal preference. For your computer needs and personal predilections, which offers the most comfortable and intuitive experience? For me, that happens to be Mac, even though I do constantly screw up the keyboard shortcut commands because they're just different enough to be bothersome. Since I use both PC and Mac on a daily basis, I'm continually hitting Alt + C to copy something in Windows (because that's where the Cmd key is on a Mac keyboard), or pressing Fn + B at home to bold something on my Mac because that's where the Ctrl key is on my PC keyboard at work.

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PROMPT: Tell us about an unexpected gem; something you've seen and love that you doubt many other people know about.

THE BRASS TEAPOT
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1935902/

This is a really quirky and interesting film I found in the latter half of last year; the basic idea is that a young couple steals an antique teapot from an old woman and then realizes that the teapot generates money every time they feel pain. The more pain, the more money they get. So when you stub your toe, you get ten or twenty bucks. When someone punches you full in the face, a couple hundred. Get beat up badly in a bar fight? Several thousand. The movie follows the two characters who realize this fact and set about trying to earn enough money to retire by hurting themselves and each other, all while being pursued by previous owners of the teapot, as well as someone who's traced the history of the teapot and wants to destroy it because - eventually - all of the previous owners have gotten too greedy and ended up killing themselves in search of a greater and greater payday.

What makes this movie particularly dark (and funny) is the ways these people hurt themselves in order to get money, starting from simple things like plucking eyebrows and bikini waxes to actually hitting each other with vehicles and throwing themselves out of windows... it's a fascinating look into the psychology of greed and how far some people are willing to go for the promise of something greater, especially during the twist in the middle where they discover an even more profitable way to hurt one another. There's even a decent moral at the end of the story as one of them finally realizes that they're going too far and they just want to live a decent life, not a wildly extravagant life that comes at an enormous cost to their physical well being.

If you're into quirky independent movies that are a little dark but end up having a good message, I highly recommend this one.