Couture is what couture does.
A friend of mine bought his sister-in-law a computer from some local turbo nerds who sell white box computers: they got a nice clean install of Windows XP with the crapplets you’d get from *ell or HP.
She was quite distressed when she couldn’t explain to her friends what kind of computer she had. She was hoping she could say “I have a Dell” or “I have an IBM”, and have her friends have a glowing feeling of understanding.
She was even more distressed that Time Warner Cable was unable to install crapplets on it. (We got Windows XP in the first month that it came out, and Time Warner hadn’t ported the crapplets over yet.) She was getting ripped off, even though my friend demonstrated that he could browse the web, check e-mail and download video files.
She and her brother downloaded crapware from the internet connection that “didn’t work.” It got worse and worse over a few months until it was impossible to log in. She canceled her internet connection and was indignant that Time Warner didn’t give her a refund because they didn’t deliver on all the crapplets that they promised.
And that’s the problem.
Computers mean different things to different people.
Some people use computers as creative tools. Other people use them to consume media. For some people, the great joy of having a computer is installing the Bonzi Buddy and clicking on those “Punch the Monkey” ads. For other people, it’s a tool you use to do a depressing data entry job, filling out reports on heart pacemaker malfunctions.