Left/right

Doodling around the Web like I do, I stumble across a lot of opinions about just about everything. Mostly, I lurk around Salon.com's message boards, seeing what the latest insta-gossip is, collecting links for posting here and watching the equivalent of drunken slobs sitting at the bar viewing a ball game and commenting how they could do better as a coach. Watching Salon’s keyboard political pundits dissect Team Bush and offer unsolicited strategies for the Democrats is, at best, grassroots democracy and, at worst, high horse grandstanding about being the better angels of American political discourse while tossing bile at the GOP by the gallon.

One of my usual haunts the “Commercials that annoy the piss out of you” section in the “Television” folder. A lot of hate going on in there, with practically every 30-second solicitation under fire. Read the transcripts from the peanut gallery and you get an impression what works on people and what doesn’t. Strangely though, for a group of people who get honked off a lot by commercials, they watch a whole lot of TV. Maybe it’s a kind of Oprah Book Club for bad ads…everyone has to watch TV to join in.

One of the current ads under fire is the ones by computer maker Apple, who has been running its “Switch” campaign featuring real people talking in a minimalist setting about how Macs are so much easier to use than PCs, and how as former PCs users, they have embraced the Mac with a fervor seen only at revival meetings.

Granted, the "Switch" campaign by Apple is a mixed blessing. Some commercials are incredibly geeky (in a bad way, as in the scrawny kid grumbling about listening to music, and how easy it is to carry around a laptop instead of dozens of CDs); some are straightforward, yet charming (as in the one where the young girl explains how she "saved" Christmas by plugging the family’s digital camera into her Mac).

But one complaint about the new "Switch" ads got me thinking. Here it is in full.


New Apple commercial where Yo-Yo Ma tells us how technically challenged he is. He starts by saying how he can't follow instructions.

Yo! Yo! Ma! Isn't sheet music nothing but instructions about how the music should sound?

For the record, here's the Yo-Yo Ma commercial in question.

Notice in the commercial his complaint isn't about following instructions, but the implied concern of not being able to easily fiddle around with PCs. His argument is Macs allow you to tinker around artistically without worrying about device drivers or any of the under-the-hood crap PCs saddle you with.

No, the Zen of the ad is about being able to create with a user-friendly machine.

Yo-Yo Ma is obviously a right-brained kind of guy, if you go into that stuff. According to the lore, right brainers are arty types who approach things from a subjective point of view. Left brainers are more rational, logical creatures. Righties don’t see the sheet music as instructions, like a recipe, but more like a map, inferring how to get to a final destination. Along the way, an artist like Yo-Yo Ma may take a detour, stop to see the sights or veer off in another direction. Just reading sheet music won’t give you insight into the underlying passions in the music just as a UNIX programming manual isn’t the same as Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” After all, both are nonfiction. Both explain a sequence of events that lead to an outcome and one could argue the police in Capote’s masterwork were merely troubleshooting the murders at the Clutter residence. However, you aren’t likely to see UNIX programming manuals at the top of The New York Times’ best-seller lists. Why? They’re lifeless and dull while “In Cold Blood” can still give you the heebie-jeebies.

I suppose my gripe with the complaint is this: From my personal and observational experiences, arty people can’t stand reading through manuals. They don’t like to follow instructions. They want to sit behind a machine, fire the puppy up, and get on connecting with their muse. I don’t care about sound cards or device drivers. I just want to boot up my machine, play my music, send e-mail and write. I don’t need frills. I don’t need the bloated and intrusive Metropolisesque tiramisu of Windows’ features and interconnectivity to tell me the 8,000 different ways to connect to the Internet or listen to my Radiohead CD or even write a letter.

It’s also a shame to suggest that those who are gifted in one venue are lesser men or women if they can’t handle a computer. Just because you can play a cello like a master doesn’t automatically grant you expertise on how to defrag an errant hard drive. Just because you are a master chef doesn’t mean you automatically know how to rebuild an engine. One could even argue that because one is a master chef means one devoted his or her energy to sauces and soups and not spark plugs. The Yo-Yo Ma ad illustrates that geniuses are in fact fallible. And if an accomplished musical craftsman as Yo-Yo Ma might have trouble deciphering the hieroglyphics of the Windows arcana, what hope we can we mere mortals have?

Perhaps the real message is lost even still. Computers should be easy to use. This is the future after all, and if we can’t have flying cars, shouldn’t our computers be as easy as using a toaster? The artist friends I have nearly all use Macs because they can just sit down and fire up their art toy boxes, eager to play with the tools inside. I have yet to see a graphic artist on a PC, and I yet to have a pleasant writing experience on a Windows machine.

If you haven’t guessed by now, I’m a Mac fan. I’ve used Apple computers since early high school and the next machine I’m drooling after is a Mac laptop. This current iMac that I’m using will be retired one day into use as an interactive, programmable stereo in the master bedroom. My wife has an original Mac Classic stowed away in a closet. We can’t bear to part with it for our own reasons. For her, it was a beloved computer that worked like a champ, and it’s just cruel to toss aside a noble workhorse like that. For me, it’s a rugged, geeky-cool machine that symbolizes the launch of a new era of personal, user-friendly computing, and I can’t bear to turn my back on this piece of history. Respect your elders, damnit. I also have an ancient Powerbook by Apple, a drab, gray, blocky clamshell by way of Lego. It can’t do much of anything besides handle text, but it heats your lap up nicely on cold days.

I agree Apple’s latest “Switch” campaign isn’t the best, but it covers a couple important points. First, computers shouldn’t be that damned difficult to operate. And second, life is way too short for joyless instruction manuals or tearing apart computers to make them play music by, say, Yo-Yo Ma.