By way of Daring Fireball, we were passed along over to Anil Dash, for his piece “Smug Ugly” about Apple taking its smugness a little too far in its new OS X. The story goes, when you’re looking at a handful of other computers on your network, the ones that are not Macs, are displayed as “aged-looking monitor and a crash computer” (see: Windows’ “blue screen of death”). While it’s clearly meant as a joke, Dash says it isn’t very funny, and we tend to agree, particularly when he gets right into it:

Arrogance is ugly. If you claim to care about aesthetics and design, it’s in your interest to keep from being completely tacky and lacking in taste.

To be honest, there’s really only room for mocking everybody else if you’re absolutely flawless. And even then, it’s pretty bad taste. I’ve seen exactly what it looks like firsthand to see people take cheap shots and make snide comments about their nominal competitors, and it invariably makes the complainer look worse than the ostensible target. When the company you’re taking a shot at is Microsoft, that’s saying a lot.