When Bill Gates was on The Daily Show last week, we were all geared up for him having some fun with John Hodgman—the Daily Show’s “Resident Expert” and the pudgy nerd in the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” Apple commercials. It never happened—apparently because Gates really hates those ads! Check out this excerpt from the Newsweek Bill Gates interview, where he pimps the new Vista operating system, and shit talks John Hodgman. NERRRRRRRRD FIGHT!

Are you bugged by the Apple commercial where John Hodgman is the PC, and he has to undergo surgery to get Vista? I’ve never seen it. I don’t think the over 90 percent of the [population] who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are.

How about the implication that you need surgery to upgrade?
Well, certainly we’ve done a better job letting you upgrade on the hardware than our competitors have done. You can choose to buy a new machine, or you can choose to do an upgrade. And I don’t know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don’t even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you’re really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There’s not even the slightest shred of truth to it.

Does the entire tenor of that campaign bother you, that Mac is the cool guy and PC—
That’s for my customers to decide.

Sounds to me like Gates is enjoying his plate of sour grapes—if he had really wanted to shoot down the commercial, he should’ve ignored the Hodgman angle and focused on the smarmy hip guy. That dude is a prick.