Back in the 80s and 90s Apple produced quite a few commercials attacking their windows using brethren. I guess not much has changed. Though the past commercials didn’t have iconic personifications of the parties involved, they were equally memorable. One commercial always stuck out in my mind. It involved a dad who brought home, for his son, a CD-Rom about dinosaurs. CD-Roms were hot shit back then because no one knew what to do with 600 megabytes of storage, but I digress. Dad tries futilely to get the CD-Rom to run. Eventually the son walks out on him, proclaiming his friends are better people for having a Mac. The moral? Only bad parents run windows.

This commercial is fresh on my mind because I found myself, last weekend, living it. Substitute “Windows 3.1″ for “XP” and “CD-Rom” for “Netflix”. Regardless of the specifics, I am a bad parent because my Mac is 10 years old and in the basement. Just like the commercial, my son is huge into dinosaurs right now. We’re slowly working our way through the first 700 volumes of the Land Before Time series. I thought it was time he saw some realistic looking dinosaurs. He’s still a little young for Jurassic Park, but there is an excellent BBC series with CG dinosaurs. I went to add it to his Netflix queue when I saw it was available for download.

I used Netflix’s movie download service when it first came out. So I thought nothing of telling my son that he could watch it right now. Big Mistake… I can hear a few parents chuckling right now because you know what’s coming. The thing I don’t understand is why Netflix can’t just jump on the Flash bandwagon when it comes to streaming video. For reasons I can only assume are related to DRM BS, I had to install the latest Windows Media player. Fifteen minutes I waited for this beast to download and install. Then I had to reboot. Why the hell do I have to reboot just for installing a media player? Anyway, this is the point where my son walked out on me like the dad in the commercial. I began to hate commercial software vendors for requiring me to use Windows, and Apple for pointing out that I am a bad parent.

Of course, after the reboot I still wasn’t done. Now the Netflix player had to be updated as well; another five minutes. Being the tech god that I am, the thing did eventually work. The point is, that old apple commercial still holds true. This post is already getting too long so I’ll spare you my rant on why this would not happen in any other operating system. I just wanted to share this little anecdote with the world. It’s the little things that impress me, which is why Microsoft never fails at letting me down.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 12:50 am and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.