Apple Elitism. It's everywhere.

Yesterday and today I represented my company at a conference. Two things amazed me (one was simply mindblowing.... another blog about that later).

Whenever we exhibit at a conference, we give away a door prize. For a couple years it was LCD TV's, last year it was gas cards, and this year: mini laptop computers. Every single conference I've done, our door prize has brought an extraordinary amount of traffic to our booth. 95% of the people are interested ONLY in the door prize, and that's fine. We collect their cards, mail blast once or twice, and if they are interested they call us.

This year was the first year we did this particular conference. Traffic was a bit slower than usual, and maybe it's because I look like a stuffy businessman and not like a granola-eating, Prius-driving overweight lesbian like most of the conference attendees. When somebody would glance over at my booth while walking by, my coworker and I would announce "Hey! Want to win a free laptop?"

Not once, but twice during the conference the attendee said "No thanks, I'm a Mac person". And traffic stayed slow - if you put your business card in you would have had a MUCH higher chance of getting a free laptop.

A Free Laptop.

A FREE FUCKING LAPTOP.

But oh, no thanks, I don't want something FUCKING FREE that I can use to visit iTunes and download movies and watch them on the plane back to whatever airport I parked my car next to. No, if I place my business card in your little basket and win a FREE FUCKING HEWLETT PACKARD LAPTOP Steve Jobs is going to come to my house, slap me in the face and spit on my kids for not using one of his products 100% of my computing time.

Are you fucking serious?

I have an iPhone and I love the thing. But if I won a free Blackberry I'm pretty sure I'd be goddamn ecstatic.

On a side note, this was a conference for outdoors-ey types of people, and aimed at management of summer camps. For people who have chosen to make a career out of something involving a very high amount of swimming, canoeing, climbing and hiking, there was an absurd amount of morbidly obese people there.

Well, I guess you can eat an apple but you can't eat a laptop.