Computers

When I first got my BP6 I put it in a case, but then I realized cases were gay so I took it out of the case. I have some modular shelf/racks I got from Lowe's and it sits on there. The power supply is strapped underneath with a bungee cord. No need for case fans. You will be a better person and more of a man or woman if you take it out of the case. I threw mine in the dumpster…. Cases are for fags.

The words above belong to an unregistered user at the Ars Technica open forum posted on April 15, 2000, at 19:05. The (re)actions of this (homophobic?) computer user and builder actually illustrate well the significance and complexities of human-computer interaction at the object level. When the same user continues his criticism, it becomes clear that he despises the design and looks of some of the computers in Apple's iMac line, just introduced at that time, and associates them with his homophobic definitions of "gay" identity and iconography: "Of course if you don't have a case you forgo the opportunity to select a gay blue imac ripoff case or more likely paint your case pink and stencil, 'I'm so Gay' on it."

Indeed, this user was not alone in his reaction to the iMac's design and colors, and similar reactions arose to the many "iMac-wanna-be" PC imitations. Numerous PC users and "I Hate Macs" sites constituted a virtual Internet campaign against Apple's revolutionary designs and the "sexualization process" of computer cases.

Starting in 1998, the colorful and "juicy" iMac computers became best-sellers in their class. The iMac colors and transparent designs took over the entire all-in-one sector of the computer market, and thousands of everyday consumer products such as coffee makers, toasters, pens, toys, and irons began hitting the market with similar colors and designs. The iMac look became an object design cult in popular culture.

Outraged by such an invasion, a user in France came up with a now-defunct "I Hate Macs" web site, where he or she posted numerous anti-Mac images mocking the design fetishisms of Steve Jobs, the cofounder and CEO of Apple Computer, and the sexualization and genderization of computer cases and other plastic objects.

In fact, the company itself sought to impose a "She" identity upon its early iMacs. Apple's famous TV commercial "She Comes in Colors" successfully established this gender association with the personal computer. With the five different iMacs positioned in a circle, monitors facing out, the Rolling Stones's 1967 psychedelic rock ballad "She's a Rainbow" accompanies the twirling rainbow of feminized machines, this time in a postmodern setting:

    She comes in colors everywhere    
She combs her hair    
She's like a rainbow    
Coming, colors in the air    
Oh, everywhere    
She comes in colors

In February 2001 Jobs introduced the new and improved iMac SE, and, according to the web site apple-history.com, two new patterns "were molded into the case using a technique which took Apple 18 months to perfect." One wonders if Apple's CEO and his designers wanted to capitalize more on the already established public conception of the previous iMacs' gender conno-tations. On March 3, 2001, Jack Maher, writing on the MacFixIt web site, related the following about his family's flower design iMac SE:

Our family just received a Flower Power iMac SE from the Apple Store. The site said to expect a seven day wait, we got it in three. My wife and daughter think the Flower Power design is beautiful. The coloration is subtle and not as garish as it may appear from the photos on the Apple site. The colors are pastels and translucent. The machine sits on my wife's desk, alongside a window. When the sun passes through the case, it creates a very pleasant appearance. Definitely NOT your standard Beige Box.

The user's comments about the plastic enclosure of the computer are fascinating. Indeed, his and his family's interaction with their new object is not a classical human-computer interaction. He does not talk about how fast their new computer is, what it is capable of doing, and so on. He focuses solely on the flowery plastic, thus equating the plastic clothing with the machine's body itself. Perhaps more than any other hardware company, Apple invests heavily in researching human psychology and consumer interactions with objects. For potential "male" users, the iMac SE's see-through graphite design is quite revealing and seems to be based on the voyeuristic tendencies of the male gaze.

Computer magazines dedicated to the Mac platform seemed to be delighted that the minority status of the MAC OS (operating system) could be changed with the success and popularity of the iMac line. The Macintosh "geek" culture was happy that the iMac runs only Mac OS and not Windows. A cartoon published in the May 2000 issue of Mac Addict magazine not only expressed Apple's "victory" over Microsoft but also provided further testimony of the accepted gender status of the iMac: "Sorry…. I don't do windows!"

Following the gender success of the iMac, many small companies saw the business potential in producing iMac peripherals (quite similar to the multitude of later products that claimed to add more functionality to the iPod line). Many of these peripheral companies focused on the sex and gender associations of their iMac products in hopes of rapid sales boosts. One of the most successful such companies was Contour Design, which, among many other peripherals, developed and produced "nice legs" for the already beautiful female iMac.

The portable partner of the fruit-colored iMacs (Jobs being a vegetarian) were the iBooks. On July 29, 1999, on his TechTV show "Silicon Spin," John Dvorak described Jobs's new laptop computer:

The only thing missing from the Apple iBook is the Barbie logo. The system, which looks like a makeup case, promises to be a disaster once people come to their senses…. [T]his system is an embarrassment…. I can only describe it as a 'girly' machine. You expect to see lipstick, rouge, and a tray of eye shadow inside when you open it. You don't expect to see a 12-inch LCD; you expect to see a 12-inch mirror. No man in his right mind will be seen in public with this notebook.

Dvorak's angry, and somehow sexist, reaction to the new Apple laptop was not the only one. In an interview with Business Week published online on January 18, 2002, Jeff Raskin, who joined Apple's Cupertino headquarters in 1978 and shortly after that became the manager of the "Macintosh Project," sounded as straightforward as possible in his criticism of Jobs's attachment to the form fetish:

What Steve Jobs did was decree that the Apple II was to have an aesthetic enclosure. He said we have to put this in a pretty box. We can't sell a naked board. He was absolutely right. But what he has been doing ever since is repeat that formula. They keep the hardware up to or slightly above the standard set by PCs, but they can't think outside the pretty box.

No matter how much the new revolutionary designs of Apple's enclosures were criticized by some leading analysts and computer experts, millions of consumers embraced the unusual form fetish found in these machines, from iBooks to Power Macs. It came as no surprise that the October 2000 issue of Playboy magazine featured a playmate on its front cover, posing with an Apple iBook. The color of the playmate's shorts and the curves of her body were photographed in unison with an iBook in an effort to make her look like the computer and the computer look like her. Just like the reified model, an object of the male gaze, the computer itself is transformed into an aesthetically pleasing plastic object by focusing only on its colorful shell. Neither of the two models, the human or the machine, manifests any other sign of their being beyond their enclosures.

At the MacWorld Expo in January 2001, Jobs introduced his high-end notebook computer for "professionals," the PowerBook G4 Titanium, which featured a 15.2-inch "megawide" LCD display, a slot-loading DVD drive, and a 400 MHz PowerPC CPU, all housed in an enclosure made of titanium. Quite a luxury at the time, the titanium look and power was a departure from the flashy plastic color designs. As argued above, the lower-end iMacs and iBooks had "sex appeal." Jobs made it clear at the expo that the new PowerBook G4 was not only powerful but also sexy: "We think it has the power and the sex."

The Wired News web site used the headline "Titanium titillation" for its article on the new computer:

[It] is very small and sleek and has just about everything you'd need to replace a desktop machine. And when you look at it up close, you realize just how amazing the attention to detail is…. At the Apple booth, a bunch of guys (they're always guys) [were] admiring one of the new PowerBooks on a revolving pedestal…. They started dancing and clapping with glee.

Apple certainly is not alone in assigning sex and gender identity to computer products. Regardless of their operating systems, many companies have tried to sell their products (from small peripherals to computers) through a clever manipulation and, in many cases, exploitation, of sex and gender values and perceptions. Research on this subject suggests that the weaker the quality of the product is (including of course the entire iMac line), the greater the need for the usage of sex and gender in marketing it. The buyers of high-end machines (from workstations to highly expensive servers and other specialized computers) do not need to be manipulated through sex- and gender-obsessed advertisements. Indeed such a business strategy would backfire. Generally speaking, these buyers are highly educated and possess a great deal of technological knowledge, and their attraction to the product is based on the technology itself, not the color and "sex appeal" of the enclosure. Compaq, known for its run-of-the-mill budget PCs, had once placed great emphasis on the "gender qualities" of its Presario desktops and notebooks in its advertisements and attempted to provide its potential male and female buyers with an "iMac taste" based on the buyers' sexual "chemistry" and their presumed gender/color associations (see PC World, September 2000, p. 61, and Maximum PC, September 2000, p. 1).

Personal computer companies' feminization of their budget machines is neither country nor culture specific. This is more or less an international marketing phenomenon. An ad published in the Turkish version of Chip magazine targets the potential male buyer with a sex-centered interpretation of an all-in-one PC ("The Best Model of the World," Chip, August 2000, p. 41). The woman in the ad is "en ince" (the slimmest), "en șιk" (the most stylish), "en modern" (the most modern), and "en kullanιșlι" (the most utilitarian). The camera's focus is on the model. The machine itself is just a pretty background prop hoping to be sold in the chaos of a cognitive confusion.

The models featured in the ads for VAIO FJ computers continue Sony Corporation's determination to establish the "female" identity of its FJ series notebooks. VAIO FJs are known to be middle-of-the-road computers designed for middle-of-the-road computing tasks. In general, Sony's VAIO desktops and notebooks have a reputation for their high-end parts and impeccable attention to detail. Only for the FJs, however, is this much emphasis placed on sex and gender. The FJ's advertisers (like those of the early iMacs) have been paying special attention to the feminization of the machine by showing the "special" and "sweet" color enclosures being carried by professional models with black, blond, and red hair. Especially through the FJ, VAIO engineers, designers, and advertisers seem to be attempting to create a new level of human-computer interaction, an interaction that goes above and beyond the user's traditional computing needs and habits. The FJ and its ads seem to center around the establishment of new postmodern lifestyles that are colorful, polished, flirtatious, and daring.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Can Jobs 'Think Outside the Pretty Box'?" 2002. Business Week, January 18. Available from http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2002/tc20020118_5216.htm.

"iMac (Early 2001)." Apple-history.com. Available from http://www.apple-history.com.

Kahney, Leander. 2001. "Jobs Tells It Like It Is." Wired News, January 13. Available from http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,41160,00.html.

"Nice Legs." 2000. Mac Addict, May, 103.

                                                  Kemal Silay