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Carrie Bradshaw: a Mac no longer
Say it ain't so, Carrie! Our friend Christina Warren reports over at Mashable that the second Sex and the City film is featuring product placements from Hewlett-Packard rather than from Apple, including an entire site dedicated to the movie. As Christina points out, Carrie's Mac was practically its own character in the original Sex and the City TV series. The episodes were bookended by Carrie typing away on her PowerBook (a Pismo was mostly used). The laptop was the focus of its own episode when the motherboard fried and Carrie's boyfriend at the time tried to replace it with the first generation iBook, referring to it as a "purse." At age 25, moving across the country from my family for the first time, Carrie and her PowerBook were both a comfort and a symbol of power to me. They represented the modern, independent female journalist and I wanted to be like her. Okay, so I could never have the hair or the figure, but I did scrape together $175 to buy a used G3 PowerBook off of Ebay. When I did my second cross-country move, this one solo, I recorded my journey on that PowerBook and was pleased with my inner Carrie. The move by Sex and the City's producers appears to be motivated by HP's aggressive product placement program, and I'm sure that a good chunk of money was saved by having Carrie leap to Windows rather than upgrade to a 27" iMac and the latest MacBook Pro. It really is a shame, and I know I'll wince a little inside when I go see the movie. For me, Carrie Bradshaw will always be a Mac girl.
Explore Carrie Bradshaw's MacBook Pro
Like many women (and men), I'm pretty excited about the upcoming Sex and the City movie. While the show was awesome for a myriad of reasons (the humor, the fashion, the catch-phrases), what often gets overlooked is that Carrie Bradshaw was a Mac girl. From 1998 through 2004, Carrie almost always started and ended each show typing on her Mac. It makes sense; can you really imagine someone that fashion and style conscious using anything else?In season one, she used the original Powerbook G3, if I'm not mistaken (it was either Kanga or the 3400c), but she moved up to a WallStreet and then a Pismo until the series concluded its run. The official website for the movie has added a new feature, "Carrie Bradshaw's MacBook Pro" that allows fans to "explore" the virtual desktop of our favorite fashionista, answer trivia questions in "chat" windows with other SATC characters, based on clues found on the desktop, to unlock bonus content/videos and for a chance to win a Sex and the City movie poster.I'll admit, the whole thing is a total novelty, but it's still kind of cool. I especially like that the default browser on the "desktop" is Camino. It's always fun to see Apple products integrated into other promotional campaigns.(New Line Cinema, like TUAW, is ultimately part of the same media conglomerate, Time Warner).
