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I'm NOT rich!
- Thread starter Omgitsdesmond
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Personally I think the "rich" stereotype of a Mac owner is easier to brush off and less grating that the other various preconceived notions attached to Apple products. "iSheep", "only hipsters, girls and idiots who know nothing about technology use Apple products, it's just brainless brand buying" etc.
Then follows the inevitable white trash pissing contest with a point-by-point specs runthrough in an attempt to convince you that you're an imbecile for buying the iPhone because the Flingflong Jealousy S30000000 has a .2" larger screen and the Wookia KSHYK9100 has a slightly better camera and the blah blah has a better bleh bleh.
The whole specs race thing feels a bit 90's to me, I think tech has reached a comfortable level of maturity where everything's fast and powerful enough, and you start looking at other aspects. Myself I particularly enjoy Apple's anal-retentive attention to details.
If you look at premium cars, all manufacturers spend ages on choosing the right materials with the right feel, the right sound, perfect fit etc. I once watched a documentary about Volvo's design department where they did stuff like rig microphones inside the trunk to record and analyze the sound of closing the trunk, a sound that will nobody will ever hear from the inside unless they're in, uh, perhaps a body bag.
You'd expect the tech business to do the same by now, but they don't. Flimsy plastic crap that comes with a giant powerbrick by some no-name supplier. Then you get something like Apple's Time Capsule and notice how heavy and sturdy it is, how it's secured in place thanks to the entire bottom being coated in rubber, how they bothered to integrate the PSU and include a nice power cable with a velvety coating that feels nice. And you know that the cable is probably like that because Steve and Jony ordered a hundred different samples and fondled all of them, then Steve threw a tantrum because none of them had the right texture so he called up some poor dude and gave him a passionate one hour lecture about the feel of power cables, and then they had to invent some new weird manufacturing process to satisfy Steve's demands. Most customers will touch that cable for a total of about 10 seconds and never see it again. But those 10 seconds feel damn sweet to me.
Then follows the inevitable white trash pissing contest with a point-by-point specs runthrough in an attempt to convince you that you're an imbecile for buying the iPhone because the Flingflong Jealousy S30000000 has a .2" larger screen and the Wookia KSHYK9100 has a slightly better camera and the blah blah has a better bleh bleh.
The whole specs race thing feels a bit 90's to me, I think tech has reached a comfortable level of maturity where everything's fast and powerful enough, and you start looking at other aspects. Myself I particularly enjoy Apple's anal-retentive attention to details.
If you look at premium cars, all manufacturers spend ages on choosing the right materials with the right feel, the right sound, perfect fit etc. I once watched a documentary about Volvo's design department where they did stuff like rig microphones inside the trunk to record and analyze the sound of closing the trunk, a sound that will nobody will ever hear from the inside unless they're in, uh, perhaps a body bag.
You'd expect the tech business to do the same by now, but they don't. Flimsy plastic crap that comes with a giant powerbrick by some no-name supplier. Then you get something like Apple's Time Capsule and notice how heavy and sturdy it is, how it's secured in place thanks to the entire bottom being coated in rubber, how they bothered to integrate the PSU and include a nice power cable with a velvety coating that feels nice. And you know that the cable is probably like that because Steve and Jony ordered a hundred different samples and fondled all of them, then Steve threw a tantrum because none of them had the right texture so he called up some poor dude and gave him a passionate one hour lecture about the feel of power cables, and then they had to invent some new weird manufacturing process to satisfy Steve's demands. Most customers will touch that cable for a total of about 10 seconds and never see it again. But those 10 seconds feel damn sweet to me.
Then why not stick with a Powerbook, a first gen iPhone, etc?
Specs are massively important, Apple just have a way of pointing them out without pointing them out.
ECU beat UTEP a few weeks ago
Ahhhh I see! Yes, I would not doubt that, our football team is notorious for being lame. I actually think they're planning on firing Mike Price, our lame football coach (perfect for our lame team), so maybe that will be the game-changer.
I actually upgraded a 2009 MBP with SSD and more RAM last week. 5 years ago I would've brought a 4 year old computer to the Antiques Roadshow. 10 years ago I would've used a 4 year old computer as a birdhouse.
What I'm getting at is that all tech evolution plateaus at a certain good-enough point. We had noisy analog tapes and scratched up vinyl records with very obvious shortcomings. Then we got CDs with 44.1k digital audio. There were talks of a next step... DVD-A with 192k/24bit. But no, it was already good enough. Too good, apparently, since people gladly put up compressed formats like MP3 with occasionally abysmal bitrates. Even when nothing stops them from going with 256 AAC or FLAC.
The first digital cameras were a joke. Then it got to a point where there were enough megapixels for the megapeople. You could motivate them up to about 8. But it's not an ever rising curve where people will line up around the block for a 128 megapixel camera that lets you study everyone's pores on a family photo.
iPod and iPhone storage space would go up every year and it was a main selling point... now we've had this 16/32/64GB thing for a couple of years, it's no longer The Big Issue and there's no longer any expectation that they'll double whatever the capacity was the year before. People are fine with that. They're not going to pay extra for the capacity to hold a thousand apps and a million songs any more than they'd pay for 192k/24bit audio recordings or a 1000 bhp family car.
We spent the last 20 or so years with computers wishing we had more, more, MOAR. We watched spinning hourglasses and beachballs for eternities, agonized over lack of memory, lack of storage space, holding back and making do with what we had. We had crappy and small CRT screens with 8-bit color and pixels the size of fuzzy dice. Anything 2 years old was obsolete. But that frenzy has started to slow down. We've reached a point where RAM and hard drives cost peanut money and we often have much more storage space than we know what to do with, where 24/32-bit color can be taken for granted and screen resolution on more and more devices has gone past the point where the eye can make out pixels.
Once all laptops have quad core, 16 GB RAM, SSD and retina display... what then? 16-core, 64 GB RAM and sub-sub-retina display? UltraQuad ThunderboltX that lets you daisy chain 2000 hard drives or displays and transfer a file so fast it actually travels back in time? Nah. In a few years' time, consumer computers will have reached that DVD-A/1000bhp point where specs are "meh". Apple, who are known for skating to where the puck's going to be, not where it's been, are no longer doing crazy redesigns every year like they did in the 00's, they're no longer bumping specs every 6 months, because they know that the adolescence of personal computers is coming to an end.
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It goes both ways.
I have a neighbor who is a doctor, lives in a nice house, drives a nice car, and always seems to have all the "toys". I also know he is upside down on his house, leases the cars, and has over $200k in student loan debt.
I also knew a professor who gave millions back to the school who drove a 90's sedan and lived in the same little cottage he and his wife bought when they first came to town in the 1960's.
People will talk behind your back. College is weird that way. Some folks never get over trying to keep up the High School "Pecking Order" thing. When you don't "act your wage" some people don't know what to do with you.
I have a neighbor who is a doctor, lives in a nice house, drives a nice car, and always seems to have all the "toys". I also know he is upside down on his house, leases the cars, and has over $200k in student loan debt.
I also knew a professor who gave millions back to the school who drove a 90's sedan and lived in the same little cottage he and his wife bought when they first came to town in the 1960's.
People will talk behind your back. College is weird that way. Some folks never get over trying to keep up the High School "Pecking Order" thing. When you don't "act your wage" some people don't know what to do with you.
Well, here is the bottom line post, IMHO.
It answers the OPs question, that is for sure.
But to the OP, I understand what you mean. I once owned a '76 Corvette. I test drove it and hit the gas and the front end went up and the back end went down and I nearly passed out as the blood pooled at the back of my brain from the acceleration. That was all I needed, at that point of my life; done deal.
But I hated the way people perceived me. I wasn't out to impress anyone; I just loved the car. But I started to love it a lot more when it got old and ratty, because then it was obvious I didn't drive that car to impress anyone. masrmissions is absolutely spot-on correct; people ARE dicks.
(BTW, I wouldn't be caught dead in a Corvette today)
In high school...yes, I was known as a "rich kid". Always wearing nice clothes, driving a Cadillac, owning an iPad, always had the latest model iPhone and I brought my MacBook Pro in once...BUT I was humble about it. I never went out of my way to brag to others and tried to brush it off like owning this stuff isn't a big deal when others bring it up. However word gets around when you're the only student driving a Cadillac to school every day in a graduating high school class of 100 students.
In college? Not so much...outside of my friends I keep to myself and don't flaunt what I have, but I do have all the same stuff.
I paid for my Retina MacBook Pro, my iPhone 5, and my iPad 2. The Cadillac was kind of a gift from my parents but I'm on my own for most everything else.
In college? Not so much...outside of my friends I keep to myself and don't flaunt what I have, but I do have all the same stuff.
I paid for my Retina MacBook Pro, my iPhone 5, and my iPad 2. The Cadillac was kind of a gift from my parents but I'm on my own for most everything else.
Sounds like a really poor college . A MacBook Air is typically the bare minimum and should be expected. An iPad may be pushing it for some, but it seems like the majority of college students have MacBook Pros anyway so you are not carrying around any more than is typical.
. A MacBook Air is typically the bare minimum and should be expected. An iPad may be pushing it for some, but it seems like the majority of college students have MacBook Pros anyway so you are not carrying around any more than is typical.
Ey! Yue! Yeah! Ole boy with that hellacious gamin' laptop right over thar! What kinda RAM yue got in 'at rig? Corsair? DDR3 1866? Sheeit, son! And a gawdaym Geforce680M SLI? HOLEE FUGGIN' HAYL! I bet you get sum daym GAWN in Crysis on 'at thang! 120 FPS PER, I BETCHA!
Daym, son. DAYM! 'at's tighter than cousin, know whut 'am sayin'? Yue mus' be rich.
Yeah. I don't think you know what white trash is.
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This.. I'm a freshmen in College myself, and I had a ton of anxiety, similar to the kind you have, the first week of school. I lightened up, went to a few parties, met a bunch of people and now things are going GREAT.. I actually love going to my classes now
Alright brah, it's not a bad thing for people to think you're rich. When I want into class on the first day with my swag on with various Italian merchandise and Lacoste shoes, I'm sure people are thinking, "Man, if I had that kind of swag, I would be getting all the girls." Although I haven't had much luck with the ladies in school lately, I do get compliments from girls and get some jealous looks from guys, similar to how you do too. It's okay to flaunt your peacock feathers to get some attention and reel in girls. You've evidently worked too hard for your money for your purchased items to go unnoticed. So yes, there is nothing wrong with being labeled a rich kid. You'll always have haters, just be classy (like me) and be one better than them, whether it's in fashion or technology.
And under this rock where you've been living since at least the 1830's when the term "white trash" first came into common usage, I suppose "gay" still means "happy"?
The term white trash went global long ago and has been adopted and tweaked to best apply to each culture. I the UK I'd imagine that white trash equates to so-called "chavs" and various other working class demos. In my country where poor people are quite the rarity (5%, in the US I think you have approx. 15% below the poverty line), white trash has come to be a label that gets slapped on anything that communicates a desire to brag, impress or project an image above your means, since this suggests (regardless of your actual income) that at heart, you're poor trash with an inferiority complex and a pent-up need to overcompensate. Obviously it applies to tacky attributes like tattoos, gold chains, pimped cars, or their retarded cousins pimped/modded PCs, certain brand clothes etc, but also to any kind of audacious materialistic bragging. So yeah, around these parts, if you're overheard engaging in a specs pissing contest desperate to prove that your gadget has the longest d*ck, you expose yourself as having no class and you just bought yourself a 'white trash' forehead tattoo and an imaginary mullet.
Have fun in College; I'm sitting in my College library as we speak anticipating the upcoming weekend
I'm a CS student so I have to ask, what's a library?
When I was in college, most of the CS students split their time between the lab and the science library
Did you happen to go to college before the internet existed?
Rich in intelligence. There is nothing wrong on being poor or rich.
Start worrying on real important things and move one.
Just start charging them for your advice and you will be rich, be smart about it.
Start worrying on real important things and move one.
Just start charging them for your advice and you will be rich, be smart about it.
Exactly. You'll notice in college no one gives a **** about what brand your jeans are. There aren't those cliques like in high school. If someone calls you a rich kid and your this upset about just drop out and live at home because life gets harder.