Professional Padding.
At the ripe old age of 8 I could never understand why or how any animal vegetable or mineral could fail to become spellbound by an intoxicating atmosphere that pervaded the ozone rich air of a sleepy coastal town and danced a frosty tango with winter’s cold sigh once in every 365 blue moons.
That’s how special my child hood was, my parents set the bar so high that every moon was blue and every homecoming heavenly following the impossible task of aligning one’s mind to reciting hamlet, interpreting dickens, recalling the speed of light or the nearest star, thinking up 50 reasons for the Fuhrer’s rise, writing 500 words about acid rain, learning how not to use a belt sander, identifying a waltz from march, calculating mean averages, applying Pythagoras theorem, befriending PC fans, debating console fans, avoiding football fans, remembering it’s a teaspoon and not a tablespoon of cinnamon, planning a short cut for Friday’s cross country run and staying as far away from Mr. Benson as possible. For those who haven’t guessed, that was school….and yes, it was the hardest job I’ve ever had.
Returning home on a gloomy Monday evening to relish fifteen a three quarter hours of blissful respite before the rigours of tomorrow commenced, proved a cathartic distraction from despairing over how much of my sentence remained. Entering a cosy kitchen to a chorus of radiant smiles from a mother and father whose festive foolishness was as inevitable as a sunny Saharan summer, debt, taxis, or the iPhone 99 “S”, well now, that was worth fifteen and three quarter years as a paratrooper, never mind one woeful winter term.
To sum up, my parents were to me what St. Nicholas himself is to Donna and Blitzen or Steve Jobs was to iJustine.
The question is, who can don that ruby red attire, fill those glossy buckled boots or steer the sleigh of fruity spoils with the same endearing twinkle and virtuosic skill. Who can command the stage with the same confidence, fatherly smile and exude such charismatic charm.
Who could possibly have the foresight to include that one enchanting surprise, a final special gift, the present of your impossible dreams that even you forgot to hastily scrawl on that aromatic amoretto wrapper you set on its smoky journey to the North Pole and who possesses the instinct to reveal this pot of gold at the defining moment? When tattered wrapping has replaced tidy parcels. Excitement, like a rose’s petal’s has begun to wilt and children lament there may be nothing left for boxing day save for quarrelling in-laws and itchy home-made knitwear
Force Your Golden Charm Upon Me
In this impulsive new world where news remains relevant for the duration of a hummingbird’s calorific overhead and kudos from a major scoop crumbles faster than filo pastry, every tireless techno analyst can no longer afford to refrain from peeking lustfully into carrier bags and feverishly fondling tree presents before their adoptive corporate elders have had a chance to scribble seasonal gratitude on the labels, though signed with a price instead of a kiss.
It would almost pass as normal if, on your annual pilgrimage to the apple store, you encountered a virtual alter ego of yourself fresh from three rounds of the genius bar’s finest, who then would proceed to divulge not only which of your presents they’d already torn open and whether or not your wishes had come true but further sully the mood by spoiling every last surprise in Tim and Phil’s capacious sac and, as an armchair pundit would pick apart his home team’s performance, expound in selfish and presumptuous detail as to their merits and pitfalls.
Pessimistic Grey Matter – That’s right, force touch turned out to be 3D touch. It’s an interesting feature but to be honest, iOS is hardly optimized for normal standard basic plain vanilla touch or whatever you call it. Think hard. How many times have you mistakenly “pinkied” that pause button during a podcast when popping the phone in your pocket? How often have you furiously fingered a number pad, poked a link or dragged a slider, only to discover the screen responds two seconds after you tap it.
Poor connection? Slack server? A ropey app or a broken OS? Does it matter? Are you certain that 3D touch or peek and prod will resolve these irksome issues, or compound them?
Optimistic White Matter – If you had your way I’d be anchored to my desk drinking pints of Quink with ten fountain pen nibs embedded in my fingertips scratching monthly accounts onto sheets of yellowing parchment aided by nothing but the dimming light of a paraffin lamp.
Pessimistic Grey Matter – What a beautiful scene, assuming of course the nibs were Montblanc or Cartier
Optimistic White Matter – Not a Parker fan then
Pessimistic Grey Matter – You mean the iPhone of fountain pens? No, crude branding over true beauty
Optimistic White Matter – Nonsense, where other than under Apple’s watch is beauty inextricable from something truly useful.
Pessimistic Grey Matter – If by useful you mean flat, glossy and tinged with pink, then nowhere.
Optimistic White Matter – Get a grip, you want this phone, you need this phone. You’re dismissing the extent to which this honed and polished revision of 3D touch differs from the inaugural implementation on the Apple Watch. There we had fledgling hardware driven by juvenile software. Here we have the latest in a lineage of thoroughbred, astutely designed, intelligently evolved and surgically streamlined by insightful artisans and now, propelled by an OS liberated from latency and revolutionised by the most receptive and naturalistic technology ever harboured within a hand held device.
Pessimistic Grey Matter – Really? Here’s a hand held baseball bat you can use to reacquaint heads with common sense, I’d say that’s far more naturalistic.
Optimistic White Matter – And you’d be wrong, this is a smartphone so sensitively aligned with its owner’s temperament that the service it provides is virtually instinctive. A smooth and supple interface, intuitively integrated context menus all responsive to pressure as well as motion, allowing a user to effortlessly glide from weather to websites to mail to maps to moments to memories and savour all their critical functions with pinpoint precision. Forward and back becomes in and out, reducing hours of cumbersome swipes and ponderous pokes to seconds of subtle squeezes, sneaky slides, speedy shifts and silky shimmies.
Pessimistic Grey Matter – Is it me or has it taken apple 20 years to realise that a two button mouse wasn’t such a bad idea? You’re just a overgrown kid with the dangerous privilege of enough cash to fritter on five minute wonders. Face it, by the time programmers have deciphered the best way to deploy all these ground breaking gimmicks and users have committed them to muscle memory, they will only prove of use for as long as the your grand enabler’s fickle conscience can resist contemplating 4d touch.
Optimistic White Matter – On the contrary, my considered investment will pave the way for legions of aspiring and imaginative developers to unleash their spectacular skills and mobilise a generation of visionary inventions, thus transforming the contemporary handset from a Swiss army knife into a single, malleable blade that morphs into the ideal tool on command from a subconscious neural twitch. A skeleton key that unlocks every door in an enlightening maze of organic communication and allows distant souls to instantly connect and interact with spirit and emotion.
Pessimistic Grey Matter – Or alternatively, an extremely effective way to render opposable thumbs redundant, placing us below beavers and level with woodlice in god’s great chain. As for the new A9 processor, no doubt it delivers an exceptional 80% boost out of the box and makes the GUI as snappy as an alligator tied to super strength bungee, but everybody knows the heady honeymoon will cease as soon as Apple enforces a bloated OS replete with stealthy obsolescence slowing it down in flawless unison with their shrewd philosophy of clinical profiteering. Have a little empathy. They have to do something to persuade certified converts that $32 guarantees them something better next month.
Optimistic White Matter – If I step it up I’ll make the store by 3am, I only hope this new credit card doesn’t bounce, if it does I’d sooner abandon my rosy fantasy that risk the embarrassment of showing a bank teller the world’s worst seflie…my passport photo.
Other party pieces I was ill-disposed to subtly weave into the narrative.
A 12 mega pixel camera with optical image stabilization (exclusive to the plus model), automatic HDR to make DSLRers salivate and the novel knack for seeing precisely 1.5 seconds into the past and the future and documenting 90 hyper resolution premonitions and flashbacks on the off chance the user wishes to carve a career as a spiritual medium or a physic stockbroker.
A resoundingly re-enforced chassis wrought from genetically purified industrial grade aluminium branded with the number 7000 to assure customers that while Apple would never admit the iPhone 6 Plus with incapable of surviving routine wear and bend, they are a company that thrives on gestures of goodwill.
A 5 megapixel face time camera with telepathic ambient light calibration, and the intriguing facility to employ the phone’s retinal powers as a super intelligent finely incremented flash to capture selfies so sublime that Snow White’s wicked stepmother would have snapped one, hurled her scarlet apple at the castle wall in a fit of furious envy and screamed,
“Curses!” Not only is Snow White farer than I, now there’s this other saucy minx I must hunt and poison. Pray Mirror Mirror on the wall, please tell me who she is. And the Mirror Mirror on the wall would have uttered a melancholy sigh and replied
“Fair lady that is you, as I have stated no fewer than five times this fine morning. That infernal contraption you bear has the power to skew reality, make its owner appear so beautiful they can no longer recognise themselves. I fear I may soon be out of a job.”
Meanwhile, Snow White would have taken one and said,
“Goodness!” Either the side effects of that succulent Cox have yet to wear off or my “fairest of them all” days are numbering to a close, she’s a stunner.
Finally, the handsome prince would have taken one and exclaimed,
“Ugh! My Nose! What’s happened to my nose, it never looked like that on the Note 4 and my hair, those roots can’t be that dark, I used the best dye in the Kingdom. This thing’s going straight back to the market. I’ll knew that merchant looked suspicious, seven feet tall with no face and a curiously spherical head. I’m holding off till the Galaxy 7”.
Fly the Pad to Fight the Phablets
In our household, Yuletide magic found vent through firelight and silent night. Or Less cryptically, a mysterious musical heirloom that chose to chime its charming melody not a moment before it sensed fairies dancing atop its flame.
No sooner had the season of goodwill taken wing, then my parents became savants of guile and secrecy, as far ahead of my prying eyes, itching fingers and burning inquisitions as an elite level cyber cracker was of a graveyard shift security guard sitting at a dumb terminal scoffing doughnuts, glugging decaf and sweating over how much of his salary he could sacrifice for his daughter’s iPad Pro.
Greg the Appolyte – Of course Sophie should have one, she REALLY needs it. Must be hell cruising through collage passing off flaky colour washes as high art and last summer’s holiday snaps as advanced photography. She doesn’t even know how to use an off camera flash but Cathy thinks she’s Man Ray. Fat chance I’d ever get one. Not even Trevor’s old iPad 2 came my way because she’s so finicky about electronic clutter.
She really thinks that clapped out Acer is all I need. I’ve done five clean installs on that thing and it still drags more than randy Rottweiler. It might be fine for the accounts when using a four year old version of Quicken, but what about my creativity? Suppressed, stifled, sealed away for 15 years. I had a brilliant eye, used to illustrate our form’s weekly magazine. If only that comic strip had come to something. What a fantastic premise.
Two twin brothers, one who could only ever be seen by cameras, the other only by a human’s eye. What constitutes identity or existence? Just how desirable is fame, even over wealth, peace, happiness or a secure future. Is a virtual relationship all you need? Why ever meet if when you do, the one place you don’t look is straight ahead and the one person you don’t talk to is sat in front of you. I was way ahead with that one, now here I am staring at empty rooms for a living. Coffee taste’s great though.
I know, I will buy one. Get what I can for the Acer on Ebay, tell Cathy it was the only way and that I’ll be doing the accounts by hand for a while, smuggle some brownie points there. Boss’s goodwill bonus should comfortably cover the rest, including the keyboard and that pivotal pencil. I’ll wrap it myself, do the niceties, make it irresistible then sneak off with it every night, no one will know. Who said 9 Guess there are advantages to being nocturnal and thank God Cathy talked Soph out of being a boarder. I’d only be borrowing it for these lonely shifts. I know I could put that sublime stylus to sensational use. Stroke it sensuously across that silky screen, a 12.9 inch infinity pool of fathomless opportunity. Always wanted a tablet ever since I saw those Wacoms in action.
Trev’s Cintiq is a pearl but way too pricey. An Intous is out because my Acer would never let it shine, plus I can’t hack my display and input being separate entities, it’s like having to paint on the palette while an invisible brush passes over the canvas. Direct contact between talent and instrument is essential and now I’ve the chance to own something which revolutionises that concept.
Terminal E. Microsoft – Hello Greg.
Greg the Appolyte – A larger display, a less cramped interface, perceptively appointed apps with additional tool-bars and dialogues. A generous and flexible workspace for the hitherto repressed genius. Surface grade sorcery for two thirds the price but a superior screen with almost 3 million extra pixels and its digitiser rehoused in the point of a lead-free pilot.
Terminal E. Microsoft – Greg? Can you hear me?
Greg the Appolyte – Zero lag, organic sensitivity, authentic feedback mimicking the resistance of paper and spontaneous recognition of every technique across a seamless spectrum of artistic disciplines. I could even use both at once, learn to draw and paint all over again, leave a mystery masterpiece for Sophie every morning.
Terminal E. Microsoft – “Might I break your whimsical train of thought for a byte or two.”
Greg the Appolyte – “Uh, who said that?”
Terminal E. Microsoft – Me Greg. The dumb terminal you’re sitting in front of. The one you’ve been staring blankly at for the last five years, the one connected to a host running a decidedly leaky installation of Windows Server 2008. My display may shine a more dimly than on the date of my induction and in case you hadn’t noticed, a hacker is presently poking holes in my firewall. But I have enough good sectors left to know that IPad pro you’re drooling over won’t penetrate the surface of a surface or plumb the depths of OF YOUR CREATIVITY.
Greg the Appolyte – A dumb terminal gives a dumber opinion before being disarmed and destroyed due to its own dumb security, think I’ll take my chances.
Terminal E. Microsoft – Mockery shall never muddy the truth Greg. This isn’t a professional tool, nor one for the accomplished amateur. Its a trend riddled fashion statement for dabblers with a toddler’s attention span who’s ambitions run no further than touching up selfies, self indulgent blogging, fawning over shaky 4k footage shot on their own iPhones, Looping bland stock samples available everywhere from Amazon to Dj-ing for dummies dot com and bouts of dorky doodling in between busting to Dr Dre in a pair of beats by Dr Dre, and all achieved by juggling dozens of half-baked apps within a volatile virtual tool-kit as unique as the next iProdder’s, and which brakes the moment its maker changes the case .
Terminal E. Microsoft – Which worthy magician’s box of tricks is identical to his rival’s? How do you intend to render rich and varied content when one’s scope to be original is predicated on typical usage, cost effectiveness and thus, progressively restrictive parameters. No USB port or SD card, the same proprietary extortions as every Pink lady plucked from the new world Orchard. How much UHD content do you expect to squeeze onto these whilst ensuring quality remains acceptable?
You’re looking at 1 to 2 gigs per minute, so 32 gigs of storage boarders on absurd and once you’ve factored in the OS, installed apps, music, videos and 10 thousand photos of beaches, babies and man made miracles defiled by grotesque grins, even 128 gigs seems decidedly meagre.
Three simultaneous 4K streams correct? No mention of compression or codecs and what about this A9X processor? Could we not have at least been privy to frequency or how many cores? Any details on the process node? What’s so extraordinary about these transistors? Apple asserts a 60 percent boost for the CPU and an 80% brisker GPU relative to its second “Air”, “up to” in both cases mark you. I can’t be bothered to quantify how that might translate into tangible performance but it scarcely sounds sufficient for frame accurate editing of hi-res, heavily compressed video, a task which would tax most desktop class workstations.
Greg the Appolyte – Which is why they’ve devised it to deliver “desktop grade performance”.
Terminal E. Microsoft – I see. Relative to what? An i7, an i5, an i3, the top of the desk it’s sitting on?
Greg the Appolyte – No, to portable PCs. Phil Shiller stated it could out muscle 80% of every one that had shipped in the last year
Terminal E. Microsoft – Well blow my smoking regulators. And what exactly constitutes portability in Phil Shillers Mac Book? Wait, let me guess, anything that’s 1.57 kilograms or under and no larger than 12 x 9 inches? Am I right? What a coincidence. If there is one byte of validity to these bullish boastings, why shroud the a9x in such secrecy and why restrain it with a mobile class OS?
Greg the Appolyte – Because it’s a tactile device. Conceived, crafted and optimised for touch control. Merging it with desktop DNA would be counter-productive. Microsoft had to use Windows because it has no genuine iOS counterpart and please let’s not even mention Windows Mobile. They had to reverse engineer many aspects of the OS in order to implement touch functionality which is an awkward and onerous compromise, especially when you’re trying to placate armies of laptop, desktop and tablet users, all of whom have individual needs and legitimate complaints. Just because iPad pro isn’t running OS X doesn’t mean it couldn’t, only that iOS 9 was a far more suitable option
Terminal E. Microsoft – Really, with a limit of only two tasks side by side.
Greg the Appolyte – But think how those tasks will be handled by the latest processor in a line legendary for its architectural efficiency and razor sharp responsiveness to workloads, attuned to the protocols of a single OS which in turn, generates almost negligible overhead and is nourished by comprehensive library of apps stylized, coded and maintained with forensic finesse, many of them natively engineered for the hardware. Expansive UI’s diligently adapted to populate the display’s unique proportions, custom menus with platform specific options, all swiftly accessible and navigable by touch.
Terminal E. Microsoft – Along with a brace of apps your to which your business and skills have become accustomed that are casually cut loose in the wilderness never to receive another update or rendered dysfunctional by a “brand new and improved OS”.
Have you even hunted for evidence or are your investments always secured though pie in the sky speculation. Let’s try to decipher this enigmatic a9x. Good old Dr.Phil insists it’s UPTO 80% quicker than the A8x overall and 90% more effective in tasks which tax its GPU. He also bragged it could surpass of all portable PCs less than 12 months old 80% across the board and 90% when running graphic intensive graphic intensive workloads. Coincidence?
Greg the Appolyte – Not at all, his team did the research and found those numbers were accurate. That’s one of the great arts in presenting keynotes, be constructive with your stats. Find the figures that leap out or can be linked to others to given them credence and context and make them easier for your audience to memorize.
Yet he offers no context whatsoever. For all we know he might be purely referring to frequency like this Apple biased source,
…but that really would be pathetic. Perhaps you’d care to glance at the Geekbench figures. Rounded to the lowest 100, the 1.5ghz a8x polls a score of 1800 for a single thread benchmark and 4500 with all three of its cores maxed out. The mid-tier 1.9ghz i5 4300u in our sensational Surface Pro 3 achieves 2900 points in single core tests and 5700 points for dual-core while the range topping hyper-threaded 1.7ghz i7-4650 scales to 3200 and 6100 for solo and multi core tests respectively. A spot of astute “Binging” will reveal that the a9x received a preliminary workout just last month and posted totals of 2100 with one of its elusive cores occupied and 5100 when stressed to its capacity.
Dr. Phil says do the math and despite this hideous hacker hijacking my host’s reserves quicker than a con-artist fleas a mock auction, I shall gather what strength I have left in my failing capacitors to produce this work of enchanting enlightenment.
Even assuming Apple has ramped up the clocks and refined the node since then, do you honestly believe that likely to justify the learned Dr Phil’s fantastic conjectures or, based on the above do you think it’s safe to assume that the 80% of portable PCs he was referring to conveniently excluded the surface?
Don’t fall for such tawdry sales techniques. His assertions are meaningless, arbitrary, commercial spin at its slimiest and yet somehow, if their source is your dastardly demagogue they’re a solid as Swiss bank.
Greg the Appolyte – And this coming from a Microsoft server? Irony defined.
Terminal E. Microsoft – At least we accept the existence of other companies and make an effort to attend to their user’s needs.
Greg the Appolyte – Right, Windows 8 worked out beautifully, not one unsatisfied client.
Terminal E. Microsoft – It’ll see you through to 2023. Wonder how many Mac users will be running Mountain Lion by then? And remind me what happened to Snow Leopard? Those are desktop OSs. How long do you expect iOS to support your beloved iPad Pro?
I’ll tell you. About as long as it takes to pull the plug on Yosemite under the profitable pretence that something equally flexible and twice as efficient is poised to inherit the mantel when in fact, it is a devious machination to funnel every prodigious creator into a constrained utopia, the potential of which amounts to a fraction of proven desktop pedigree and is fated to flounder beneath the tide of whichever ephemeral stocking fillers Apple elects to optimize for the iPad Pro 2. What better way to cadge an annual thousand dollar donation from customers hitherto content to hold out for as long as their mac books and mac pros had frames left to render.
Greg the Appolyte – Alarmist hysteria. If iOS 9 will run on a a four year old iPad 2, I I’d say that’s pretty good going. Adobe made an exclusive appearance at the Keynote to promote a brand new suite of iPad pro optimised applications. Come to think of it, didn’t I also see some beady Microsoft upstarts demoing a toned down tuned up sku of office 365? If the Pro practices what it preaches I won’t shirk at shelling out again come 2020.
Terminal E. Microsoft – Then I hope you appreciate how stressful it can be to depend on the app store as the foundation of your productivity. If one morning you wake up and a developer has taken disagreeable liberties, run out of funds, or Mr. Cook and his cronies have decided revoke support for one of a thousand vindictive reasons, not least to parade their self sufficiency then that, my friend, is it.
You are out in the cold, evicted. No notice, no grace period to gather your belongings and relocate, no chance to migrate to that old faithful version of Photoshop CS4 which ran so smoothly with the synergy of plugins it took you months compile. If, or rather, when political tension arises between Adopey and Apple, that indispensable iPad Pro embodiment of Creative Cloud will sink faster than a paper yacht in a tempest, leaving you no remedy other than to belt up, be thankful for the service you received, bite the bullet and gamble on another set of tools.
When it comes to sophisticated production software, it would appear many companies have expended their innovations and hard sold users every worthy feature they can. The supposed enhancements in next years release are not sufficient to convince them to fritter another $100 for a slightly darker UI, revised fonts on all the menus, and sundry alterations that prove as intrusive as constructive and severely inhibit backward compatibility. If a program is several years old but has made good by all of its promises, remains as steady as a rock and fosters as many useful faculties as it’s owner is likely to require for the foreseeable, then where’s the incentive to change?
Silicon hell for a corporate capitalist, especially one with Apple’s terminal lust for tyranny. So what’s the solution? Easy. The same as they’re doing with music. Suck every last trace up into the clouds, slice it into ever slimmer segments, perpetuate promotional patter, then pedal it you all over again, but on less compromising terms and in packages so convoluted that until you’ve naively acquiesced to yet another $20 a month, you’re not even aware that all you’re doing is re-learning things you were wholly capable of before but to an arguably inferior standard and with less versatile software.
Greg the Appolyte – Come on. This is a case of sour cores because your turnover has a few less zeros. Given the presence or resources, you’d be every bit a possessive.
Terminal E. Microsoft – I shan’t bicker any longer Greg, for I’m only a dumb terminal doomed to serve in a Data Center that’s destined for immanent closure. Ever since you started here I’ve observed you silently from behind this VDU but come January I’ll be fodder for an SSI shredder while you’re in Oregon, sitting in another chair quaffing a different decaf and baring your soul to banks of gleaming Blade rack mountables , probably Xeon V3s trialling Windows Server 2016, do give them my regards. If you’re as fickle with sweet treats as you are technology, perhaps you’ll have traded those jam doughnuts for blueberry muffins though once in a while I’d recommend an Apple.
For the sake of your daughter and my honour, heed me, this iPad is nothing but a canny and calculated distraction. An economical way of luring aspiring artists back into a world of tranquillized and sanitized delusion, transforming them into shameless phil-shills at the mercy of a sterile autocracy where their talents cannot run rampant within a personalized environment of powerful and feature strewn software but instead are standardized by Movie Maker and Garage Band Lite. That’s long been Apple’s speciality. Complicating what needs clarifying and streamlining where choice used to be a life saving luxury.
On the one hand, there’s iTunes , a distended quagmire of confounding consumerism, as volatile as dynamite and so tricky to negotiate that even seasoned Apple insiders will take the morning off to prevent aggressive updates from annihilating their assiduously assembled music libraries at least, those who haven’t migrated to Spotify.
On the other, we have Final Cut, a progressively linear non-linear video editing application that in its tenth revision dramatically impeded workflow by curtailing support for projects created with every previous revision, prevented the export of material to invaluable post production and disc authoring software and severed compatibility with a hefty majority of third party plugins and hardware, driving long-time loyalists to distraction.
Terminal E. Microsoft – If you believe that magical programming we’ve yet to understand married to the mythical efficiency of a chip we know next to nothing about is going to be enough to validate the wilful waffle you witnessed throughout that keynote then go ahead, rejoice amidst the picket fences and frolic under the bloody harvest moons of a draconian money guzzling cult, I can almost smell the rose-hip cupcakes.
Greg the Appolyte – The way you’re droning on, anyone would believe Tim Cook spends his entire personal life studying freemasonry, privatising every cubic centimetre of oxygen in California and binging on the complete works of L. Ron Hubbard. Cup cakes and cookies will make a nice change from these doughnuts and if we’re talking extortion please remind me, to which accommodative libertarian fraternity does high priest Satya Nadella belong?
Terminal E. Microsoft – One that rewards loyalty and has not once allowed its philosophy to be tainted by an insidious desire for supreme dominance
Greg the Appolyte – And the Hippo flew over Uranus.
Terminal E. Microsoft – The winter is barely upon us and you’re preparing to write off that admirable Acer for a pittance? Disown a machine that has dutifully and diligently ushered you through half a decade of arduous family finances to foster a pretender that shall, mark my ASCII, be fortunate to serve one quarter of its predecessor’s term?
Greg the Appolyte – Are you kidding? The only reason I still have that thing is it’s taken me this long to make a full mental recovery. Worst investment of my marriage, the guy who lumbered me with it could have sold water to Posiden. He claimed it was the perfect doorstop replacement but in my excitement I must have assumed he’d said desktop. The least it could do was make amends for the trench it tore in my savings. A 3 kg piggy bank could have managed my money better, and run Black ops faster, and looked nicer next to the TV.
Terminal E. Microsoft – A system of that calibre could’t possibly acquit itself so poorly without negligent ownership. A quad core i7? 8 gigs of memory? You never gave it a chance Greg.
Greg the Appolyte – Oh? So three weekends and five clean installs not enough?
Wrong. Five factory resets, not the same thing at all. What about that bilious bevy of bloat-ware that Curry’s had crippled it with right out of the box? Did you even attempt route out the Windows disk and perform a genuine “clean” install?
Greg the Appolyte – It won’t make any difference. Every boot up on that beast makes The Twilight Saga seem like a five minute infomercial, not forgetting it takes five times longer to open as to switch on because Acer forgot to provide purchase points and the hinge is as stiff as a Moray Eel’s jaws. It discharges quicker than a potato powered Segway, the screen is flimsy and overly reflective plus its not even full HD.
Terminal E. Microsoft – Why not link it up to a monitor, add another 8 gigs of RAM? Better still, give windows 10 a spin. If you don’t, you’ll envy the lucky Ebay-er who does.
Greg the Appolyte – I won’t be chained to my desk any longer. I want portability.
Terminal E. Microsoft – So you’re happy to fritter that festive bonus, gamble your daughter’s tuition fees on a substitute that has half the memory and one less core for the privilege of sketching on the beach? A nest-egg you have you have slaved for throughout 339 lonely nights of log gazing, security updates and the odd hard reset, the whole time without realizing you had a fiend here to protect your sanity.
If only you’d have thought out loud when you were first assigned to this facility I’d have never let you judgement become so skewed. If you knew how many PCs baptised for the high-street and acquired on a mad impulse suffer your exact form of ignorant abuse, perhaps you’d come to realise that such oversights are precisely why Microsoft has become so viciously maligned in the face of second rate opposition. Now all that is set to change. Just wait till you witness what my enabler can accomplish when he is master of his own devices. In my waning circuitry I know no man of your astuteness could possibly fail to exercise a faculty that only my distant descendants could dare dream of.
Greg the Appolyte – What? You mean the increasingly rare skill of shutting up?
Terminal E. Microsoft – No Greg. The noble art of Common sense. Follow your “soft heart” and do young Sophie a service. Come thanksgiving, get her a Surface, for without one, she shall never scratch the surface.
