Juiced Pixels

What do personalised number plates and apple macs have in common? To me, they’re both extremely pretentious, that’s what!

I really don’t get personalised number plates:

1. Why would pay heaps extra (to the G-Man) for something when you can have the vanilla standard issue for no extra cost?
2. Why would you want to be singled out? Personalised plates make your car stand out, and this can’t be good when you’re somewhere you shouldn’t be (like at the 24-hour KFC drivethrough at 2am on a Wednesday morning).
3. What happens when you’re checking into a motel and they asked for your number plate? Especially if it’s something like HOT-69.
4. Personalised number plates on a pretentious car makes it even more pretentious. Like the Porsche I saw with the numberplate SOLD. But vanilla plates on an expensive car can even make it ok: I saw this new 300K+ Bentley with stock standard vanilla plates and I was like “yeah”.
5. Personalised number plates on a cheap car (bomb) just look stupid. Isn’t your money better spent on basic vehicle safety and maintenance?

Likewise, I really don’t get apple macs:

1. I’m so not a fan of microsoft but no matter how many ads apple make it isn’t ever simply a binary choice of windows or mac. Because there’s this thing called Linux that is as simple and elegant as a mac, but without the associated pretentiousness and price tag.
2. Apple try to sell this whole ‘operating system’ thing but that’s so 1998.  Every one uses the internet and the internet doesn’t really care if you’re running a mac or not. You can use firefox on any operating system, and the internet is still the internet. You can still read this post and you can even create a web 2.0 blog, all without a mac!
3. Apple profit on how prententious its customers are. For example, they bought out a notebook called the BlackBook. It was cunningly US$150 more than the same white MacBook for one simple reason: it wasn’t previously available in black, and it wasn’t the standard apple white. What other computer company can get away with charging you hundreds of dollars for a different colour paint?

So, if you want to be less pretentious, sell your personalised plates and 24 inch super glossy imac on ebay. Then buy an cheap computer somewhere and install Ubuntu on it for free. Apple won’t pester you to buy their new increasingly bloated operating system every year, and besides you can get a new version of Ubuntu for free every six months. You can then donate all that spare cash of yours to help someone less fortunate, or at least earn 8.25 % on it. I don’t think that’s pretentious.

Update (10 June 2008): Apple’s new 3G iPhone is only available in white as a limited edition, more expensive 16 gigabyte model.