The green bubble vs. blue bubble debate isn’t just a tech issue
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 11 December 2023
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
Remember Apple’s “Get a Mac” campaign from 2006? They featured actor Justin Long as the hip Mac computer personified in conversation with a noticeably less cool John Hodgman playing a PC. Seventeen years and plenty of tech releases later, it seems the stereotypes in those ads never really went away. Take, for example, a recent TikTok trend in which women respond to the question, “He’s a 10, but he has an Android phone. What’s his new rating?” For some, the answer is 1 or 0. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Brian Chen, personal tech columnist at The New York Times, about “green bubble shaming.”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Green bubble shaming. It's a thing. |
| 0:04.0 | From American public media, this is a Mac and I'm a PC. will remember these ads from Apple. |
| 0:23.0 | Hello, I'm a Mac and I'm a PC. |
| 0:24.8 | Whoa, whoa, what happened to you PC? |
| 0:27.0 | Kids happened. |
| 0:28.0 | The featured actor Justin Long as the hip Mac computer personified, |
| 0:32.0 | in conversation with a noticeably less cool John |
| 0:35.6 | Hodgman playing a PC. The first ad in Apple's Get a Mac campaign came out in |
| 0:41.4 | 2006, 17 years and plenty of new tech releases later, it seems |
| 0:47.0 | the stereotypes in those ads never really went away. |
| 0:51.5 | Take the recent Tik-Toc trend, he's a 10, but... He's a 10, but he has an |
| 0:56.1 | Android phone. What's his new writing? One. Under what I can't do? |
| 0:59.5 | Brian Chen, the personal tech columnist for the New York Times, has been writing about |
| 1:04.1 | green bubble shaming, which has pitted iPhone users against their Android using friends |
| 1:09.6 | and family. For more than a decade, smartphone users have confronted what's known as the Blue Bubble versus |
| 1:16.0 | Green Bubble disparity. When iPhone users text other iPhone users, their messages appear as a blue bubble. When iPhone users text Android users, the messages appear green. |
| 1:27.0 | And from there, everything gets worse. Images and videos look horrible. All sorts of things break. |
| 1:33.4 | And over the years, this has created tension |
| 1:36.5 | between iPhone and Android users. |
| 1:38.4 | It's led to this deeper divide that's sociological in many ways, |
| 1:42.4 | and that's where we are today. |
| 1:44.0 | Yeah, well as you say you know this issue has been around for a long time. |
... |
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