I came to Gilmore Girls at 39, expecting to find it insufferable. What I found instead was one of the most precise pieces of class-coded visual storytelling on television — hiding in plain sight behind rapid-fire dialogue and a town full of quirky white people.

The show ran from 2000 to 2007 and looks, visually, almost identical across all seven seasons. Same sets. Same lighting. Same intro montage and same Carole King song. Where Friends — which ran a nearly identical timeline — is unrecognizable between its first and seventh seasons, Gilmore Girls chose a deliberate timelessness and never broke from it.

That's not laziness. That's Stars Hollow functioning as a character — a place suspended outside of trend and time, which is the whole point of what the show is doing emotionally.

The laptop in Lane's kitchen

In Season 6, Episode 9, Rory is at Lane's house using a laptop. It is not a Mac. Every other laptop on this show is a Mac. This is not an accident.

Apple had a product placement relationship with Gilmore Girls that was consistent and deliberate — Lorelai and Rory as Mac people is a character signifier as intentional as their coffee cups. But Apple's placement agreements have conditions. One of the documented ones: villains and morally compromised characters don't get Apple products. Another, less documented but visible in the footage: the brand follows the character's status, not just their identity.

In Season 6, Rory has dropped out of Yale. She's estranged from Lorelai. She's living at her grandparents' and then, in this scene, sitting in a band house that is visually coded as chaotic and broke. She is off her axis. And she is on a Dell.

The production is telling you she's lost before she says a word.