Keeping up with Kyle: Why does everyone have a MacBook?
If you ain’t got a MacBook you ain’t a real student…apparently.
Seriously, where did all these Macs come from?
Just look around the average lecture theatre and try to count the number of MacBooks. They’ve become something of a student status symbol. I mean are you even really at university unless you Instagram a picture of your MacBook Pro 15” surrounded by lecture notes captioned “student life #student #mac #revision #studying #hashtag”?
Though far from a recent phenomenon, the mind does boggle when you think about how popular MacBooks are with students. But is a student discount really enough to explain why, I mean they’re still damn expensive?
Sure you could have literally any other laptop, but this one’s shiny and doesn’t properly run the statistics software you need for that maths module you have to take. Perhaps their popularity is simply due to people trying to avoid viruses while illegally streaming the new Game of Thrones.
But for most students they end up just being a very expensive paperweight, one brought out in lectures so it looks like you have your life together and then left untouched for the entire 120 minutes. Or else propped inconveniently beside your library computer because God knows you need two computers to complete that very important PowerPoint.
But it’s really a subject where anybody with a strong opinion on it ends up sounding a prick. You get your PC-philes who wince when they see you use your MacBook and say “they’re so confusing, how can you even use that?” or scoff in derision and tell you how much better their Asus running Windows 7 is. “You know it really is the most stable and adaptable operating system on the…” Yawn.
But then you have your own fellow-Mac students who take owning a MacBook Air to mean they’re automatically better than everyone. Pipe the fuck down Claire, I don’t care that your new 12” MacBook matches your rose gold iPhone 6S Plus.
Thing is, we all know know Apple is fucking us, but I’m starting to think we like it. Tim Cook, explain to us how you do it. Why do we love you so? It is because Macs are so pretty? Is it because with every new generation they change the screws on the back so you can’t upgrade the fucking RAM when the damn thing inevitably slows to a halt? But we love them. We’d never think of going back to a PC.
Release us, Apple, from this hellish existence. We love you and hate you all at once. Still buying the iPhone 7 when it comes out though, no matter how many useful features Apple removes.