Well, given that Microsoft's profits were once double that of Apple, yes, it is quite a reversal.

(irony of using "M$" when you're talking about them not making money is great, btw)

more like $pple, am I rite?

App£e. or Appl€. Ideally you could use the $ symbol but there's no s in Apple. Sure, you can just throw in whatever character you want, but !nevets doesn't make a lot of sense.

what you're shooting for here is a pun. You want something that looks like a regular character, so @pple is kind of cute, but there are two obvious problems. One, it kind of looks like a direct message to pple, which falls apart. &pple isn't bad, but & doesn't have the association with money, so you don't get the pun.

There are a bunch of currency symbols you can use, there's a list here [1]. Check it out ₩₦€v€t$, then all of your currency puns will be money.

[1] http://www.xe.com/symbols.php

This is HN humor at its finest.

yeah I was going to do that but apple is an american company and it doesnt make sense to use the euro. Using $pple is just as lazy as using m$ to call microsoft greedy.

Apple is an Irish company. /S http://www.forbes.com/sites/leesheppard/2013/05/28/how-does-...

Which makes Appl€ particularly fitting!

> M$FT

I'm sorry, are you from the past?

"Hacker" as in "Hacker News" is from an even more distant past. The word just got appropriately decaffeinated, so as to be acceptable within our current iteration of group think.

I tried going to a 'hacker' meetup in my city. It was disappointing.

I was asking people if they were programmers, the median reaction was "a programmer? oh lord no, I'm a [marketing/UI/non-technical] person".

It seems the term was coopted and gutted by some in the startup scene.

(I'm aware there are legitimate hackers in the startup scene, this was just one particular event in one particular city.)

In my city there's 'growth hacking' meetups. It's too nakedly marketingistic to even consider seriously. I fear in the English language the word 'hack' is often being used as a synonym for 'shortcut'. The Lifehacker 'hacks' being prime examples.

This one was advertised as for developers/coders/engineers/designers, but I'm in a second-tier (for developers) Canadian city.

Many talented tech folks move to first-tier Canadian cities, or to first tier U.S. cities, which are zeroth tier by Canadian standards, if they aren't tied down.

> I'm a [marketing/UI/non-technical] person".

They are obviously confusing a hack with a hacker.

/me ducks

Even if it wasn't non-technical people, it seems the pop culture of "hacker" attracts all the worst stereotypes of geeks. The really sharp ones don't seem interested in self-identifying as "hacker".

Is the groupthink in this case laughing at the anachronistic usage of M$?

No. The groupthink is what causes the usage of M$ to be anachronistic now, and also what made it fashionable at some point in the past. Treating subjective opinions as objective facts and laughing at members of the out-group are symptoms of being engaged in groupthink.

Nothing wrong (or right) with any of that. I'm just observing.

Some of us are. Once, a long time ago, using the $ was "cool." And "so it goes" with all forms of online culture. (Has Kurt Vonnegut gone out of fashion yet? I used to coxswain crew boats past his summer home.)

I would be quite amused if young "Microsofties" suddenly decided to co-opt "Micro$haft" but with a Richard Roundtree vibe.

I was debating on saying Mi¢rosoft, but I decided against it at the last minute. Oh well.

Let's be clear: using the $ was NEVER cool by any stretch of the imagination, it was just a lot more common in the Internet of the '90s. The people who thought it was cool were always the same people who think it's funny to make up derogatory puns for the names of things they don't like, such as "Internet Exploder" or "Crapple". This is a category of humor that will be forever associated with bitter, angry, condescending-yet-clueless, neckbearded, fedora-wearing morbidly obese IT guys with phone holsters and Bluetooth earpieces that continued making "all your base" references well into the 2000s.

So let's offend them, because denostating products/companies (as childish as it is saying M$, CrApple et al) in your opinion is the same as denostating other human beings, why not just ignore the bad jokes?

> I'm sorry, are you from the past?

Isn't everyone?

Sure, and that's part of the joke. It's also an IT Crowd reference.

Obligatory Penny Arcade -

https://www.penny-arcade.com/S=0/comic/2002/07/22

Yea, things have changed... a lot. Back in the anti-trust days of bundling IE, bullying OEMs and undermining standards, MS was the evil empire of the day.

Now you've got Google backtracking on privacy and siphoning up user data to create ads that know you a little too well, Amazon as more threatening Walmart of the digital age, and Facebook trying to make sure that the only way you can experience the online world is through the censored lens of Facebook itself.

It makes all of the once-held fear of Microsoft dominance seem quaint.

At least Apple is still building pretty gear and killing useful ports, just like back in the day.

Heh heh heh... that'll show the author.