KEY POINTS:
No, not really - I've just been reading The Onion, the famous satire site. This particular entry declares, 100 per cent jokingly, of course, that "The Microsoft ads, which began airing earlier this week, are being blamed for generating critical system errors in more than 70 million televisions.
In addition, thousands of frustrated Americans said that the ads have caused their TVs to become unresponsive, their screens to turn blue, and a small box with the message 'terminal application error' to suddenly appear."
I guess you could say "where there's smoke, there's fire" but you could equally take a tilt at Macs. I guess, like malware and viruses, Macs will also become more of a target of satirists if Apple growth continues.
Good satire is funny because it's clever. There are plenty of stupid hate sites out there, directed at all sorts of targets including Apple and Apple users. But they're just that - stupid. As usual, people can hate most vociferously what they know least about.
The Onion offering is pretty funny though - have a look. I guess the humour for me is tinged with the realisation that the satirical barrel could so easily be redirected - at Apple.
Ask Mac users about "the spinning beachball of death." It wouldn't be hard to have a go at Apple - how about rumours of new Apple device so achingly beautiful, so exquisitely made and designed, it doesn't matter to Apple fans like myself that it nothing?
I wonder how much it will cost...
The Onion has tilted at Apple before, of course. Last year a post on the iPhone said that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had "confirmed that his engineers were already working around-the-clock on the touchscreen smartphone's far-superior replacement."
Please take note, this is absolutely bogus, just like the Onion's one about Microsoft ads crashing TVs.
The fake iPhone report includes a pretend quote from Steve Jobs: "We looked at [the iPhone's] innovative user interface, the paradigm-shifting voicemail, the best-in-class mobile browser, and we realised we could make all that seem ridiculously outdated by the time the product becomes available to customers in June ... When the second-generation iPhone comes out this fall, we want iPhone users to feel not just jealous, but downright foolish for owning such laughably primitive technology."
Ouch - it's a bit like Obama saying he would stop Apple putting out a new iPod "just after you bought one" to Letterman as one of 10 equally ridiculous, joke election promises a while ago on the TV program Saturday Night Live.
There are plenty more - just entering these three words in a search engine (apple satire 2008) fetched me 1,680,000 entries. Some of them are earnest and serious, however, and mention the Apple stance against the contentious Proposition 8 going through in California, mentioned previously on Mac Planet. Some are penned by angry and righteous Christians.
But I was looking for humour. How about the MacBook Water? This surfaced (ha ha) in January of this year before the Macworld conference, when leaked pictures showed an Apple banner reading 'There's Something In The Air.' The MacBook Water was to be specifically designed for scuba divers and other water-sports enthusiasts. Right, yeah.
One that might find a more sympathetic audience was The Oredigger, which ran this entirely bogus item: "In an unprecedented lawsuit brought before the Supreme Court last week, the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG) sought $80 billion in damages from Apple, claiming that Apple "is turning the English language into an iLanguage, and in doing so is responsible for the hospitalisation of numerous English professors, teachers, and other 'grammarians' suffering complications from malgrammariphobia."
There are many satirical Apple items at iPhoneSaviour.com. One comes close to home with references to Australian Mac lovers being known as 'boofheads' - it talks about the huge Apple 'Drop In Soon' banner over the site of the soon-to-be opened (back then) store and concluded 'More to follow on this dinki-di mystery for Aussies'.
I liked the one about Apple Store employees sneaking the new model of iPhones into stores concealed in fat suits, referring to them as 'iPhone mules' ... for example: "One tipster claimed that lines forming outside the Manhattan Apple store were being used by several iPhone mules posing as loyal, gravitationally challenged cult of iPhone customers in order to deliver their loads."
Good to laugh, hey?
