Form vs Function

I just found a cool new blog! This is a perfect blog post to read after my Consumers as Citizens class had a bought of Mac-product-love, to my never-ending disgust. I was actually shocked at how vehementalty my professor professed her love for the cuteness and sterility of Apple products. I have never seen her so unreserved with lusting after something. Especially Ipods. I’m just amazed she fell into that. Anyway, this blog post is simply awesome. It’s not very long, so I recommend everyone read it. It’s an analysis over the excitement over the Macbook Air, and how form is more important than function (although this is what I believe about all Mac products). I’m going to reproduce a section:

But the most interesting – and incendiary – post has come from Devin Coldewey at Techcrunch who has called the Macbook Air “basically useless“. The writer goes through a series of very practical criticisms – the proprietary ports, the lack of an optical drive and the slow CPU etc – and they are all very valid critiques. Trouble is, he totally misses the point. Coldewey is trying to suggest that people buy consumer goods like iPods and Macbooks purely out of a need for how they are used; they do not. It is precisely the ’sexiness’ of the device – i.e. the desire it elicits in us – that creates its success. When Coldewey asks “What is losing that last half an inch doing aside from attracting stares?” what he refuses to understand is that the stares are the important thing. This is not about how ‘people are shallow’ – it is the difference between use value and exchange value. In most circumstances, there is in fact less use value to a Macbook Air than a regular Macbook – it can do less. But its exchange value – i.e. its worth to us as a cultural item rather than just a practical tool – is far higher, precisely because it “looks so damn cool”, because our friends want one and because owning one will be a marker of not only our savviness but also of our success.