In 2006, televisions across the country were bombarded with a blitzkrieg-eqsue marketing campaign, featuring one bed-head bombshell by the name of Justin Long and one nerdy ne’er-do-well named John Hodgeman.

The commercials depicted the opponents battling over the superiority of the platform of their choice: Apple Macintosh versus Microsoft Windows (PC), respectively. This marketing strategy, spawned by Steve Jobs’ brainchild Apple, depicted Macs as being relaxed, easy to use, reliable and having pretentious haircuts, while PCs were quite the opposite (sans the haircut part).

While the campaign was apparently successful, judging by the total amount of comments reading “lol” on their YouTube pages, the commercials also surprisingly won over a market they were probably not even anticipating being penetrable: the educational sector. Macs have always represented some sort of curious, gleaming ideal in the eyes of educational figures, dating back to when rainbow-colored iMacs were used to attract children to computer literacy, like a trail of candy leading a fat child to the lipo surgeon. Indeed, this tradition still appears to continue today in the college setting, although they have since traded in their technicolored dream lab with a blinding, pearly-white, high-gloss dystopia.

Walking into any of the 22 computer labs on campus today, one might be amused at the discrepancy between the Mac and PC platform availability, both in terms of quality and quantity. The rustic Dell PCs, which may have been perfectly adequate when Britney Spears was popular, have since become dilapidated, shells of their former selves, inhabited by the aging operating system known as Windows XP. Meanwhile, while not fresh from the box by any means, the Macs in the labs are much more approachable, let alone useful, thanks in part to their grime-less exterior and placement closer to the front entrance in most labs. The Mac machines also seem to not suffer from the mysterious phenomenon that plagues the PCs in certain locations such as the Worcester lab, where most of the fun wheelie chairs that still manage to roll somehow find their way over to the screens brandishing the Apple logo, while the poor Dells are stuck with chairs left over from when the WWE last came into town. One cannot help but feel pity for the PCs, left alone for so long with that look of a deathly blue screen on their faces.

While the cycle of technological upgrades on campus eludes me, it would seem to benefit all those poor students without immediate access to their portable Facebook devices if there existed more of a performance balance in the labs throughout the campus. Though the gap between the different operating systems has indeed been reduced with the recent release of Windows 7, among other things, the Office of Information Technology should really consider throwing a bone to those of us who prefer to click with two buttons instead of just one. Upgrading the PCs from Windows XP to Windows 7 might be a helpful start, although hardware improvements should be made to ensure there exists a balance in the force between the Longs and the Hodgemans among the students and faculty.

Mark Glaros is a senior government and politics major. He can be reached at markglaros at gmail dot com .