Leopard’s Blue Screen PC Icon

The Mac fanboys have been chuckling about the icon Leopard uses to represent a “generic PC.” (I missed this in June; I first saw it on D?F a couple of days ago, but John Siracusa also found room to mention it in his comprehensive review (scroll down).) This is roughly what it looks like:

Icon from Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" of a "Generic PC" featuring a superannuated monitor displaying a blue screen of death

Now Anil Dash (whose web site has gargantuan pages; give it two or three minutes to load) wrote this whiny thing about how Apple is being smug and ugly, and people who live in glass houses, etc. Yeah, whatever. (He also bellyaches about how people tend to call different Mac OS versions by their nicknames: Jaguar, Tiger, Leopard, etc. That’s compared to solid professional non-smug non-ugly names like Vista Home Premium.)

The money quote in this great pathetic bleat is this:

Now, I’m all for a little sense of humor in the world of technology. But the image here deliberately uses an aged-looking monitor and a crashed computer as the illustration of your other computers.

Anybody who has to preface their remarks with “I have a sense of humor,” doesn’t. This whole piece reminds me of the scene in The Sure Thing where Daphne Zuniga says “I suppose you think that’s funny?” and John Cusack replies, “As a matter of fact, I think that is hysterical. I think it’s a scream, an absolute laugh riot!”

Of course it uses an aged-looking monitor and a crashed computer as an illustration of your other computers. Apple’s a hardware company. (Besides, is there, honestly, any more iconic way to represent a PC — to Mac users — than with a BSOD?) Duh, already!

But the really funny thing is that I spent several hours last week setting up my father-in-law’s new iMac. This icon looks exactly like his old PC, from the crappy old beige CRT to the blue screen of death. (Honestly, I had forgotten what they looked like.)

(The reason it took me several hours is that he wanted me to move his digital camera pictures and his Outlook Express mail to the Mac. The pictures were trivial, but I spent hours trying to save his address book and email. If his previous computer were a Mac, then I could trivially export both of them and read them in on the new machine. But it was a piece of crap like the one in the picture, and I had to jump through ridiculous hoops to move the data to the new machine. (Look how hard it is even after the Borg simplified it.) As for the email, all I can say is thank goodness for Thunderbird and its import-export filter.)

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