Is your debit card safe?

Recent headlines, particularly this one from the Washington Post’s washingtonpost.com column Fast Forward entitled “Have Your Mac and Windows XP, Too” about the Mac adopting a program routine that allows users to run their computer on the same Windows XP the rest of the world uses, prompted this exchange with a number of prominent computer journalists:

“We are The Borg - resistance is futile."

So it is that the Mac becomes just another WinTel machine.

All the fuss about the Mac has been for years just giddy chattering by elitist writers. They think that knowing what so few know - or more accurately what so many have no care whatsoever to know - about the Mac makes them "special" in the true Gnostic sense.

Rubbish.

The truth is that the Mac survives on cachet. It is style over substance, supported by fanatical users who deny anything negative about owning a machine rejected by 97 percent of the marketplace.

To them, that 97 percent rejection merely reinforces their self-anointed place as the "true holders of special knowledge" that the rest of the unwashed mass fails to grasp with their innate intelligence - being so much lower than that of the Mac fanatics' . . . so the Mac fanatics tell themselves anyway.

But reality being what it is, the collapse of the Mac myth is accelerating with irrepressible speed. First, it was the Intel chip, now the switch to Windows.

The dirty little secret is that the Mac has always been on a path separate from the rest of the computer universe; it is a path replete with quirky ideas promoted by quirky people desperate to reinforce their quirky image as quirky computer geeks. Mac fanatics lust to be known as isolated pseudo-intellectuals expressed through their quirky concept of contrarian rebellion.

It is proven true again as Mac adopts Intel at the same time the universe is now adopting the AMD chip as its processor of choice. Its uselessness would have made the Mac just another Commodore 64 but for the by-lined writers in major publications who exercise the power to promote their quirky personal tastes to an audience of readers miniscule enough to spike any other story.

They write, but nobody reads. It is self-delusion feeding the egos of journalists otherwise sensible about honestly assessing the import of a story by the depth of its readership reach. It has no reach because the Mac has so few users; ergo it is ego, not essentialism, which drives the waste of ink and paper.

Mac fanatics will still argue they are a different species because it is essential to their self-concept of being themselves a separate species than the rest of humanity, but reality trumps their delusion: The Mac is just another WinTel machine. And as such, there is no reason to own a Mac other than to delude oneself into thinking he or she is part of something intrinsically different, intrinsically superior to everyone else.

No, there is no reason to own a Mac. Nothing exists but self-delusion.

They assimilated into The Borg - resistance proved futile.

-30-

This appears in Mr. Lamb’s blog, Staying CyberSmart! (TM) with "The CyberMeister" (R) at http://cybersmart.blogspot.com/

See all of Mr. Lamb’s blogs at http://www.blogger.com/profile/14444338