As only they can do, Macintosh users from all walks of life are completely freaking out at the news that Apple is switching to processors from Intel.
From San Diego to Bangor and all across the globe, some users dwelt on fantastic doomsday scenarios while others postulated extreme flights of performance fancy.
The New York Times‘ David Pogue intoned morbidly “All is dark now. No light escapes the black hole of our future. We are lost, forever lost. Dark defiler, stealer of innocence, love and beauty, thy name is… Mactel.”
Pogue’s lugubrious take on the situation was shared by most, but was in sharp contrast to a minority opinion characterized by the giddy outlook of the Wall Street Journal‘s Walt Mossberg.
“PowerMacs with 3.6 GHz Xeon processors running Mac OS X 10.4 may very well lead mankind into a new era of truth and enlightenment,” Mossberg claimed. “It’s quite possible that the combination will be so glorious that users will ascend to a higher state of being, such as Zen satori, or the state of perfect knowledge the Sufis claim to attain by practicing dhikr.
“At the very least,” Mossberg concluded, “it should give the user a tremendous boner.”
Numerous Mac users actually reported vacillating back and forth between Pogue and Mossberg’s assessments of the situation.
38-year-old Mac user Matt Kulick of Los Angeles, Calif., said “Earlier today I was anti-Intel. But I had a nap this afternoon and when I woke up I was pro-Intel. Yesterday the same thing happened but the other way around.”
Kulick said that his doctor prescribed medication to reduce the violence of his Mac-on-Intel opinion swings.
“The doctor said I had ‘multiple opinion disorder’ and gave me a prescription for MODoff, made by the fine people at Glaxo. Now I really don’t care what processor the Mac runs on, as long as I can use OS X.”
Shares of Glaxo, not coincidentally, were up on Apple’s announcement Monday.