I really hate Chicago

I've realised that for some reason people have been quite intrigued / horrified that I would choose not to buy an iPod because I don't like its use of Chicago as a font. (Example - heck, I even got a link at the Cult of Mac blog.) To which I say, hey, it's not like Apple needs my money. And typeface design is a very big thing to me - when I was working at the Let's Go offices, I hung out with the designers and talked typefaces all day (and all night - we shared an apartment). So if I'm getting something that's being sold on the quality of its design, all the parts of its design have to mean something to me. Of course, now that the iPod Photo uses Myriad, I don't really have an excuse...

That new Mac Mini though, I've thought about. Would be nice to have it in the house for my parents to use. Which I guess makes me one of those people Farhad Manjoo is talking about in Salon, who treat the Mac Mini as another household appliance, to run in parallel with their PCs:

But if you think of the Mac Mini as an appliance, as a device for photos and making movies, you can conceive of using the Mac without "switching," Snell notes. You can use the Mac alongside your Windows computer, in much the same way you can use an iPod in your Windows home. Stephen Baker, an analyst at the NPD Group, a market research firm, echoes this thought. "The whole 'switching' thing isn't the way to look at this," Baker says. "People who are buying these are not switching all their Windows PCs to Macs. As more and more households get more and more kinds of computers in the house, they have a range of PCs for different uses. It's reasonable to expect that the Mac will be part of that range," he says.

Back to Chicago: fortunately, I see from this article on reviled fonts and elsewhere that I have good backing on the I-hate-Chicago movement. And even on the "I hate Chicago so much that I won't use any product that uses that font" movement. Type snobs of the world unite. We have nothing to lose but our kernings.

By the way, this page displays in Georgia, which I fully admit looks crap on some systems (those that don't run ClearType, perhaps?). Pot, meet kettle.

Tangential link: Typophile Forums.