The Product Placement You Allow

Last Updated on February 24, 2022

How important are the brands you use every day? What’s the big deal about one line of products versus another? I was browsing through the blogosphere trying to fix some links that had apparently gone bad in Bloglines, and I found some old sites that suddenly showed up with new posts after not registering anything for a while.

One of the newer posts I found was last weekend’s Weekend Assignment, a collaboration of Karen and Carly, and a recent one got me thinking about my favorite brand names.

The question, now closed, was this:

We all have a certain product in our lives we simply couldn’t live without. Tell us about your favorite product. How long have you used it? Why is it the best? If it were no longer on the market, what would you use instead? Give us all the details!

There’s not a lot of brands that I feel like I really couldn’t live without. Perhaps one of the closest brands that gets to this is Apple. I’ve been a Mac guy since the early 1990s.

Mac people have a reputation of being somewhat unconcerned about computers themselves. That, for me, was one of the biggest advantages to going the Mac route. I was the guy in Computer Science class who could do those assignments to write programs that would do this or that, and find that though my code looked identical to other people’s in the room, theirs would work and mine wouldn’t.

In fact, at one point, I told my teacher, as she scratched her head looking at a printout of a program I’d written that just would not work, that if she couldn’t figure out why it didn’t work, I should be awarded an A. She looked at me like I was crazy, but then relented. Just that once.

I have friends who are as adamant about PCs as I am about Mac. Almost all of them are into the inner workings of computers. I’m not. I don’t care how many slots or buses or ports a computer has. I don’t care how many gigs there are — as long as I can do what I need to do without running out of space or memory, that’s all that interests me.

I also have an iPhone, which I like a lot, and would like much better if I got better service from AT&T. The phone syncs with my computer and I can transfer music and podcasts I listen to from iTunes and transfer pictures back and forth as well.

What would I do without it? Based on my experience at work with various PCs over the years, I assume I’d be working on machines that hang much more often, or worse, give you the blue screen of death. And I’d probably have one of those “crackberries” as well…which I probably wouldn’t use…out of spite.