Apple of my iMac

Which makes sense, really: Apple products, like attractive people, are fun to look at, which is why the people in charge of these things make sure to put both categories on the screen as often as possible.

In the painfully fashionable coffee shop around the corner from my old house in Venice Beach, the hipsters all tapped their fingers on some kind of Apple product. Some would be typing on a MacBook Air, some would be editing music or video on a MacBook Pro, some would be flipping the pages on an iPad, and some managed, somehow, to be doing three of these things at the same time.

Around the corner from my apartment in the West Village of Manhattan, it’s the same thing, except they’re all also wearing AirPods in their ears and talking loudly into the middle distance. People in New York are the same as people in Los Angeles, just with more talking.

So, it’s a sea of Apple products. And if there’s a Dell user in the pack somewhere, you’ll spot it instantly, like someone wearing a tuxedo with brown shoes.

When you walk in, it’s a line of Macs. It’s a veritable Apple Store. And then, someone has to go and open up one of those clunky, unfashionable Lenovos or something, and it just brings the whole vibe down, you know? It messes up the set, the perfection of hip people in interesting T-shirts and complicated eyewear tapping away on some creative and fulfilling project, which you really can’t do with a Dell or an HP or something even worse, if there is something worse.

People who own Apple products often festoon them with decals and symbols of their ancillary coolness. I have seen $3,000 MacBook Pro computers nearly covered with stickers from interesting microbrew pubs in Subaru-heavy outdoorsy locations such as Boulder, Colorado, and the Outer Banks. A person sitting next to me at a local coffee spot even had a “Nader 2000!” sticker across his 2022 MacBook Air, which almost obscured the shiny silver Apple logo at the center of the laptop’s lid.

Almost, that is. He didn’t cover up the logo, of course, because that might have led to some brand confusion. The glowing Apple logo on the other side of your laptop screen is like a universal symbol to others: I am creative and current and plugged in.

But it’s also something more. It’s a kind of a crucifix to ward away the vampires of self-doubt. Get away, feelings of insecurity or hackdom. Be off, sense that the project I’m working on is second-rate or doomed. The glowing Apple, the shiny brushed aluminum — they’re more about what we need to tell ourselves about ourselves than what we need to tell other people about ourselves. The Apple brand elevates whatever we’re doing on the computer, even if we’re just playing Wordle or, inexcusably, tweeting. Somehow, doing pointless things on the Mac makes them seem cooler, more important, more creative.

That may give us the confidence we need to push through on that project we’re doing, but mostly, Apple products just make us think we’re more creative than we really are. Put it this way: It’s impossible to maintain a deluded sense of your own cool genius on a Dell. And that’s probably the best reason to buy a Dell.

For the record, I’m writing these words on my MacBook Air. It syncs automatically to the cloud, so if I choose to finish proofreading it at the local coffee shop, I can do it easily, either on my impossibly slender MacBook Air or my shiny WiFi-enabled iPad Pro. In other words, I am one of those irritating people at the coffee shop, one of the terrified army of Mac users who think that my stuff is better because I did it on a thing with a shiny Apple on it. There’s a guy two seats down from me using an ugly black Lenovo. He looks perfectly content, and I can’t help but wonder what he knows that I don’t.

Rob Long is a television writer and producer and a co-founder of Ricochet.com.