Joshua Kors buys iMac, writes article, sets off link-bait awooga alarm, shows incompetence at job and life in general
Oh dear, Joshua Kors, ‘Investigative Reporter’, if only you could find your way to investigating a manual. Then you wouldn’t have had to tell everyone why you’re returning your iMac.
Kors’s story is more than a little astonishing, because it reads like something torn from a Microsoft marketing exec’s wet dream, but it’s so unbelievably bad and stupid that it’s the kind of thing even Microsoft wouldn’t run with, because they’ve too much class. Really. And yet Kors’s Onion-like article made the Huffington Post’s tech section.
The journey begins when Kors got bitch-slapped by a news director. Kors said he was working with a video editor to compact a hearing into a YouTube clip, and the director said even his interns can edit videos. Thinking video-editing skills could give his career a shot in the arm, Kors decided to invest in a Mac. (Why at this point he didn’t buy Premiere Elements for his PC is never explained. Maybe Kors thought he could grab a Mac, learn Final Cut Pro in eight seconds, and then go back to the news director and yell WHO’S THE DADDY NOW?, while rubbing his nipples in the director’s face.)
But things went wrong right away for Kors when he booted his Mac:
Turns out there’s a video camera embedded in the screen, and before I could boot her up for the very first time, she wanted to take my picture.
This is true—all Macs with a camera do this. (I’m not sure they’re overtly feminine though. Maybe Kors got a ‘special’ iMac, with boobs.) It also happens to be optional and a really nice touch. But Kors seemingly considers this neat idea for a little personalisation of your computer some kind of BIG BROTHER EVIL.
Next up, Kors discovered that those bastards at Apple hadn’t installed Microsoft Word on his computer, for free:
I had an article to write, but the only word processor I could find on my iMac was TextEdit, essentially a stripped-down version of Notepad.
After all, PCs are well known for arriving with suites of high-end software. I’m sure if you pick up a cheap Dell, it will be bursting at the seams with all the Photoshops and Offices of this world. (Also, TextEdit is, if you’re not a befuddled idiot, a surprisingly capable text editor. It can happily open basic Word documents, and it forms the text layer of many Mac writing tools. Of course, you actually have to learn how to use it, rather than dismissing it out of hand as somehow being inferior to Notepad.)
At this point, Kors also decided he hated the Mac mouse and had began to miss his old, five-button one. Oddly, it never occurred to him to plug said five-button mouse into his Mac. After all, he had more moaning to do:
I booted up my bank account before realizing the Mac keyboard had no number pad and was heartsick to learn that the thesaurus WordWeb, every author’s best friend, didn’t work on Mac’s OS. Neither did Ipswitch FTP, my file-uploader.
Man, Apple really are bastards, in not providing a full compatibility layer with software designed for their (formerly) biggest rival in software terms, Microsoft Windows. I personally find it hell EVERY SINGLE DAY having to dodder through life without a thesaurus on my Mac (apart from the built-in one) and an FTP client (apart from the several I have installed). It’s like some kind of tech nightmare.
Following Kors’s software pains are some simply bonkers claims. Unlike on a PC, he said, he knew he wouldn’t be able to connect one computer to another and transfer over documents. This is fair enough, because if I totally ignore all the many times I’ve happily connected Macs to Windows PCs, I know it’s literally impossible to connect Macs to Windows PCs. Kors decided to use an external hard drive to move files about, presumably while making burbling noises, ringing up his editor and yelling: “I’m technically incompetent! Why the fuck are you having me write for the tech column of your paper, you total dick?”
Next, Kors made more exciting discoveries:
Even moving over my iTunes playlist, I soon learned, was going to take intricate coding tweaks.
Last time I moved iTunes content between platforms, it did indeed take intricate coding tweaks. Mind you, I’ve suddenly decided that I’m a programmer and intricate coding involves ‘dragging a folder’ and intricate tweaks involve ‘dropping a folder’. Man, I’m such a great coder. Maybe the Huffington Post will give me a series of columns!
Oh, wait—Kors isn’t done!
My frustration beginning to boil, I figured I’d cool down with some swing dancing videos stored on my hard drive. But QuickTime wasn’t in the mood to play. My .flv and .mkv files triggered only error messages, and some of my .mpg clips opened to blank screens.
And, my, a moment of non-crazy. The lack of compatibility for Kors’s porn—sorry, swing dancing videos—is stupid. It’s not Apple’s fault—it’s down to the horror that is video codecs—but it is frustrating. I’ll now ignore the many apps and add-ons you could install for the Mac that would make said videos play, obviously. After all, I don’t want to make Kors look like he’s hopelessly out of his depth writing a tech column about using a Mac. No, wait:
I opened Mac’s Thunderbird, and my jaw dropped again. The font on every email was so small, I was going to need the Hubble telescope just to answer my morning mail.
This bit is followed by semi-comprehensible babble about font sizes and how they’re apparently really small on the Mac but giant-sized on a PC. Fonts do differ across platforms, but not to that extent. I’m guessing he was running his PC on blind-o-vision. Later in the article, he claims an Apple Store employee reckons:
Yeah, that small-font thing really is a problem. We have a lot of people who face that, then come back to return their computers.
First I’ve heard of that one, but we should all take Kors’s word for it; after all, the rest of his article is clearly full of win.
I had battled the QuickTime player, which proved unable to make playlists, […] and grimaced at the dock shortcut to my MP3 folder, which malfunctioned after one day, topping the inert folder icon with a question mark.
I can’t make playlists in QuickTime Player either, to be fair. Mind you, I can’t make toast in Photoshop. Question marks instead of Dock folders? That’ll be Kors either deleting the source or having it on a disk no longer connected to the Mac, then. Mind you, I do hate the way Macs cannot connect to things that they’re no longer connected to. Steve Jobs and Apple and Macs and unicorns really suck like that.
The final straw came when Mac’s Firefox took me to my website. To my horror, all the spacing was askew, the graphics tossed left and right like the wreckage of a hurricane. I asked myself: As a web designer, how can I design web pages when I can’t see what 90 percent of my viewers are seeing?
I asked myself: as a web designer, I wonder whether Joshua Kors is a web designer, or whether he threw together some shit in Dreamweaver years ago, and has in fact left it to fester on the internet, like a mouldy cabbage. I then discovered, as a web designer, that, indeed, Kors’s website looks the cat dragged it kicking and screaming from 1998, and then the cat thought “You know what? I’ll just put it out of its misery” before shooting it through the head. Twice. Kors: as ‘a web designer’, perhaps explore some trends and technology that’s standards-compliant as of this century.
For a second I thought, well, I could load Parallels, the Mac OS program that allows you to run Windows applications on your iMac. But that plan was squashed fast. Before I could complete Parallels’ installation, it asked for a copy of the Windows CD. I shook my head in disbelief
Yeah, those bastards at Parallels are nearly as bad as the ones at Apple. What they hell are they thinking in not giving you a free copy of Windows with their inexpensive, powerful and hugely impressive virtualisation software? Kors: you should sue. Hell, you’re American, so you probably already have.
I’m returning my iMac, then headed to Best Buy to snag a PC, one four-times faster than my current computer and $400 cheaper than that iMac. I’ll spend the difference on a video editing program, a new haircut and a first-rate pair of swing dancing shoes.
Maybe you should spend the difference on getting a clue.
Idly wondering what ‘a first-rate pair of swing dancing shoes’ is a euphemism for…
On the plus side, I now know even I could work for the Huffington Post tech dept.
You had a cool premise for the article, and you could have lampooned the guy gracefully. What you chose to do instead is disappointing. You’re correct in identifying a number of instances of total lack of technical knowledge in the article you have cited. The way you made fun of these things is also occasionally pretty amusing (unicorns — ALWAYS funny). However, the underlying tone of your article – set by uncalled-for jibes at his ‘porn collection,’ the suggestion that his website is somehow representative of websites from 12 years ago, and the various other attempts at 8th grade humor (nipples? really?) – argues for your consignment to the same wastebasket of the blogosphere as every other “fanboy” of anything (technological or not). On the other hand, if this was not written as the tiring drivel of yet another Apple zealot, you have invited other readers and me to wonder to ourselves what Joshua Kors could have done to you to incite such vitriol…
@Peter: A couple of the silly jokes are in bad taste, perhaps, but on the website, I’m not being vicious—I’m being truthful. I’ve been in the web design game since 1996, and his site looks exactly like the crap I was cranking out a decade ago (which wasn’t crap at the time, but things move on).
Blaming Mac Firefox for his website looking wrong is boneheaded. Had he said that alone, I’d have let it slide, but when he did the whole ‘speaking as a web designer’ thing, that irked. If you’re a web designer, ensure you’re not churning out cruddy code before you blame a browser (especially one that renders very similarly across Mac, Linux and Windows anyway).
As for vitriol, it’s not like Kors crapped through my letterbox or anything, but I’m sick to death of people flinging out such unremitting garbage and getting paid to spread bullshit, regardless of platform and subject. As a basic op-ed on a blog, fine, have a ball. But when writing a tech column for a major publication, Kors should know better and The Huffington Post should certainly know better.
win. one hundred and sixty-nine percent of it.
Since you were kind enough to respond, I’ll grant you your point about the “speaking as a web designer” line. That was, to me, the most bothersome line about his whole article, since without it he would be off the hook for his technological ignorance. One shouldn’t claim to be a ‘web designer’ just because one has built oneself a basic website, just like one shouldn’t claim to be a nuclear physicist because one owns a Geiger counter and a microwave. Still, being as apparently naive about technology as Kors is, it’s really no surprise (and almost pardonable, if one wishes to be generous) that he thinks of himself as a web designer and someone capable of contributing something worthwhile to a tech column.
The other thing I’ll heartily agree with is that the editor of The Huffington Post should never have allowed this to make it to publication, because it will lessen both Kors’ and (worse) the Post’s reputation. That was actually my first thought upon reading – how in the hell did this make it past the editor(s)?
If you look at the source code of his website you’ll no doubt conclude that it was done in dreamweaver, and quite a while back, which does not a designer make.
@Craig: lol you think HuffPo pays people. They don’t.
Also, Firefox et al render exactly the same across every OS.
Maybe the Huffington Post editor just switched to the Mac too, and couldn’t read Kors’ copy in TextEdit due to the weird Font size issues that Macs are famous for?
Or perhaps the HP’s editors are the same type of snarky entitled incompetent dicks as Joshua Kors?
I’m going to question his methodology regarding his website. I checked it in the latest builds of Safari, Chrome and Firefox on OS X 10.6.5 and all three browsers render the page exactly the same. It looks like poo, but the same poo in each browser.
I see no hurricane-tossed pictures or skewed spacing. I just see a horribly designed website reminiscent of what I built in high school in the mid-90s.
I feel dumber for reading his original article. The reptilian part of my brain thought “WTF FTW”
“My frustration beginning to boil, I figured I’d cool down with some swing dancing videos”
Classic.
As a web designer (Blogger counts, right?) I have to say I agree with the HuffPo guy. Until Apple can design a computer that works EXACTLY like a PC down to the last detail, no web designers will ever use a Mac to create a websight, and Mac sales will continue to fall until Apple goes out of business or Microsoft buys them out of pity. (Shame that iPhone thing never worked out for them!)
Detecting just a *hint* of sarcasm there, Stephen. (Maybe you should, with a straight face, if you can manage that, submit your idea to Huff Post—they’d probably take it on.)
Amusingly, the vast majority of web designers I know these days use Macs, which is almost a complete reversal of the situation only five or six years ago. Mind you, it’s the browsers that are important, and anyone with a basic grasp of modern web standards (i.e. not Kors) should be able to get a site working nicely in WebKit browsers, Firefox, Opera and IE, across all platforms. It’s not rocket surgery.
PLEASE: add this too:
> I had an article to write, but the only word processor I could find on my iMac was TextEdit, essentially a stripped-down version of Notepad.
WHAT was the article he had to write? Was he doing layout? Why was he writing an article in word? Do you actually know journalists who use fonts in articles? This is a very important point, what the fuck is he pretending to have to be writing?
What you say about not even Microsoft would run with it, I am pretty sure they would do something this blatant and stupid. It does read exactly like some cheap stupid astro-turfing by a 22 year old grad who thinks he can win over some department head with his little tricks.
@Please: You’d be surprised how many writers use Word. It boggles my mind too. I was only using it recently because of its excellent grid view, for ‘many up’ pages (great for hacking together body copy for lengthy commissions); Scrivener does that better now though, and I use that or WriteRoom for everything.
I read Kors’ article – thought about replying but there was just no point. If one points out his deficiencies one will be accused of being a fanboi. If one points out his inaccuracies – fanboi again.
However, I noticed that he got his first college degree in 2000, and a 2003 Masters degree in Journalism from what I thought was the finest J-school in the country, Columbia. It occurred to me that in 2003 there was a J-school not teaching at least one course in digital media, with rudimentary training on audio and video editing. Fail. And this guy paid a huge amount of money for his failed degree. And there are news organizations paying this guy to do reportage for them when he can’t do basic video on either a PC or a Mac, and in fact he thinks he needs a Mac to do video. This guy needs to turn in not only the new iMac but also the old PC and just revert to a portable Underwood or Olympia.
“. . . rocket surgery.”
LOL. It’s not brain science either!
Can someone honestly be so dumb as to expect software that has a very high price to be free on his computer? This is absolutely unbelievable. With my Mac mini I went to his website and, though it’s very 1998, it displayed perfectly. Maybe it’s because I’m using Safari, the free web browser that comes with a Mac, maybe not. A “web designer” he is not. I almost sent him an email from his website asking how he could be so stupid.
This Kors in his original rant refers to anybody on an Apple discussion forum as a “Mac dork” and then whines about the “vitriol” that filled his inbox.
He who casts the first stone better strap a helmet on.
@CG
Yeah, but who actually cares? If I hadn’t clicked your link on WosBlog, I’d never had read your post and I’d never have heard of this berk.
The lesson: do not feed the berks. All publicity is good publicity.