In defense of annoying stickers that appear on PC and why I can get them for my Mac

Confession: I love the little CPU stickers that computers have. Not huge billboards that scream about multiple laptop features and invariably leave a huge rectangle of sticky residue on the palm rest when you try to take them off. I’m not that weird. But I love the little, sometimes holographic messages about the CPU (and sometimes the GPU) inside your PC.

If you share my grief, I recently discovered Vinot Raghunathan’s designs that recreate these holographic stickers for M1 and M2 series processors in Apple Silicon Macs. Available for $7 each (or $16 for three), the stickers for each processor feature a different holographic color palette.

It may horrify those of you who pull those little ads off your computers as soon as you get them, but we sticker lovers are not alone. Raghunathan has sold hundreds of Apple Silicon stickers — over 450 for the M1 Pro version alone — and there is a thriving aftermarket on eBay for stickers for new and old Intel and AMD processor cases, Windows versions, GeForce and Radeon GPUs, and more. other components except. Some people seem to like to see what’s inside the computer from the outside.

In defense of the processor sticker

Why do I like these little labels when most people either ignore them or rip them off? They were originally conceived as a win-win promotion for Intel and PC manufacturers , increasing Intel’s brand awareness and partly subsidizing marketing costs for companies that agreed to it. (These subsidies have been the subject of more than one Intel litigation over the years.)

Some of them are functional. I’ve been in IT for a few years where I’ve been called in to troubleshoot multiple generations of the same looking business PCs in one day, and the CPU stickers could be an early and brief indication of how old a system is. and what it was capable of. They perform the same function on the computers of friends and family, to whom I still provide free but usually valuable IT services.

But it’s also a hint of nostalgia for the PC market 25 years ago, when processor speeds were changing and improving at a faster pace. For those of us who have had to make do with hand tools, used parts, and discount beige boxes, the little badge on the processor case could just be an indicator that we were using something newer rather than something old. Was the Celeron sticker on the front of a cheap eMachines box objectively interesting? Not for most people. But if the computer he replaced was an old used 486 that could barely connect to AOL, it was a symbol of modernity.

Stickers can also be about showing off or expressing themselves (in a strange, not-so-healthy way where people can view the things they buy as an extension of the things they value). I built my first PC from scratch in the summer of 2005, at the height of the war between the Pentium 4 and Athlon 64, and sticking this little Athlon sticker on the outside of my cheap acrylic window PC case seemed like a way to express my technical know-how and to signify my support for David AMD vs. Intel’s Goliath.

I’ve already passed this fandom, but I still like small stickers. I have a few PC cases that have been with me since a few CPU upgrades and I like to carefully peel off the old stickers and place them somewhere inconspicuous inside the case. The one on the outside represents the computer at the moment; the ones inside are a record of what the PC was, like stamps on an old passport.

All of this may seem completely foreign to longtime Mac users who have never truly owned or cared about the Windows PC world. PowerPC Mac models in the mid-90s after Jobs, prior to Jobs’ interregnum, came with “PowerPC”stamped on their cases, but this stopped when Jony Quince-era models such as the iMac and the blue-and-white Power Mac G3 came along. 6 year moved from PowerPC chips to Intel chips . (Publicly and diplomatically, he called the stickers “redundant “as “everyone knows we use Intel processors.”)

And that’s okay. I don’t mind untouched computers with no stickers. But for sticker lovers like me, Apple Silicon Holographic Stickers are a fun throwback and a way to add some old school PC to our fast and efficient Macs.