MacBook Woes

I use a mac and that's never been an issue. Granted, I don't play computer games, but still, I would have to go out of my way to require a function of my computer that it could not perform. Plus, owning a PC for me would mean having to become a lot more wary of the web and its nasty downloadables. So life's been easy in my mac bubble.

Until I got to Korea.

In Korea, macs are still some kind of a weird fringe fetish. iPhones have given the Apple brand a bit more respect and retail space, but the public has yet to hop on the mac train the way the Western world has. Thusly, a whole bunch of Korean websites lack mac compatibility for many of their necessary functions. Ordering Domino's pizza, paying by credit card on G-Market and doing online banking with KEB all require me to download an .exe file, or else just go do business elsewhere.

Then there's the websites which just plain refuse to function unless they are being accessed through the medium of Internet Explorer. Like some banjo-plucking country folk who don't take kindly to Google Chrome's "fancy talk", the website will pull up a white screen, have non-functioning drop down boxes or just sit idly and refuse to budge as you continuously click on something. You need to dumb it down and use the browser of the people.

The easy solution is to, of course, use ol' dusty IE, but then, once again, mac woes rear their heads. Internet Explorer on mac exists, but Microsoft stopped supporting it 8 years ago. So it doesn't work, effectively rendering certain websites inaccessible. I can't do my online progress reports or book tickets from certain airlines all because the websites will not talk to any of the browsers my computer supports.

But, I have hopes for the future. Just as folks in Korea are broadening their horizons to include different brands of beer and automobiles, soon they shall too embrace the exotic pleasures of the Apple computer. And why would any website want to deny its services to that kind of forward-thinking, taste-making clientele?