Leo Laporte: Tech Guru or Poser? August 5, 2008

I’ve recently watched a tv show called The Lab with Leo Laporte on G4 Tech TV (I don’t have this channel at home just so you know) and after watching the show it made me wonder the title of this post. At first glance, this guy, Leo Laporte (apparently a pretty well-known tech personality), seemed to be a generic tech guru who happens to have his own tv show; the show I watched was about backing up data. It was filmed in a studio on a counter where there were four different external hard drives and some other guy was explaining to him the features of each hard drive. The guy basically explained storage capacities and the different ports available – while Laporte just stood there nodding and occasionally adding ambiguous remarks like, “that’s interesting” and others. But if this self-proclaimed techie really is a tech guru, why doesn’t he present the hardware himself? This question answered itself the moment I heard him say something along the lines of, “…I have one of these with my Mac at home and it just works”. Not only that, he just plain doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about – near the end of the show, a girl in their studio demonstrated a backup (on a Mac, of course) at which point this Laporte guy kept talking about how backups are important and that if you get a virus you could lose your data – all those obvious facts that anyone with at least some computing history would know. If you’ve noticed, the show has been cancelled as stated on their website. I don’t know if you consider him a tech personality, but from what I’ve seen on his “tech” show, he’s about as techie as my mom (who is often troubled by the simplest of problems, on a MAC)