| Tuesday, March 5, 2002 |
10:17 - Beware of Zealotry...
http://www.freep.com/money/tech/mwend5_20020305.htm
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Mike Wendland wrote an iMac article a little while ago, and it had good and bad points, as any fair article will. But if it has even a single negative point on it, and if there's an e-mail address visible on the page, the Mac fans across the world will descend upon it like a flock of screeching, accusing jackdaws.
Interestingly, it's a wide and varied spectrum. Some people write well-thought-out analyses of the issues and suggest alternatives and workarounds. Some, the other extreme, cast dark aspersions upon the columnist's parentage. And still others apologize for the behavior of the latter.
One reader apologized for the rudeness from some of his fellow Mac fanatics. "We do tend to be too reactionary," he said. "It is just that we feel so strongly about the platform we use and worry about negative remarks that could further damage its reputation and make it more difficult for Apple to compete."
Which is a point I've often thought about. Isn't it odd that, at least in our minds, the Mac has to not only have an entry into every given field-- it has to be the best? Well, it does, or else the public will ignore it. Isn't that weird? They ship a GeForce2 MX in the iMac, and PC users dismiss it and point at the GeForce 3. The dual 1GHZ Power Mac has 2MB of L3 DDR cache, and the Wintellers consider it worthless because the main RAM isn't DDR. The iPod has 5GB of space and fits into a shirt pocket and sucks down tunes 40 times faster than a USB player, but the pundits compare it on the same terms as 20GB USB-based devices the size of Handspring Visors. In order for anybody to take anything Apple makes seriously, it has to be the most impressive competitor, or, preferably, the only competitor.
And I just have to ask, what other company not only has an entry into all these fields, but an entry that can be considered the best?
They make iTunes, which is possibly the best interface for interacting with your music that anyone has devised. They make iMovie, which is unmatched even by the new thing in XP. They make iPhoto, which the pundits compare favorably to the organizers that come with every different kind of camera. They make iDVD, which really doesn't have much of an analog in the PC world. And the list goes on. Final Cut Pro. The best flat-panel LCD monitors in the business (and they had them long before the competition did, too). The iPod. The dual GHz Power Mac, which (depending on the benchmarks you use) is the fastest machine around. The iBook, which many have called the best all-around notebook value ever. The TiBook, with its slim widescreen coolness. And, of course, the iMac.
It'd be one thing if Apple were an also-ran, a stumbling company running on fumes who produced boxes that didn't really compete, that appealed only to a weird isolated group of die-hard fans; if the software they wrote was quirky and clumsy but lovable in its own way, or if the hardware was ungainly and bulbous or had some trademark quirk like square screens or something; if the machines were too slow to run modern apps but people got around it by writing really efficient software, or if it had an OS that looked like it was designed by aliens who came to earth in 1989; if, in short, they were a niche computer maker whose products were interesting but not really noteworthy.
But that's not the case. Apple's an industry leader. They're the exact opposite of irrelevant-- the entire industry looks to them for guidance and leadership. Everybody from Microsoft to Dell knows that they can't afford to lose Apple, because then innovation would fall out of the budget. I'm being totally serious here: innovation is bad for business if you're Microsoft or Dell. It risks costly mistakes. It threatens your current moneymaking product line. It abandons a sure thing and forges ahead purely for the sake of forging ahead. Microsoft and Dell are more than happy to let Apple do their innovating for them-- to outsource their R&D, as Lance puts it. And so Apple's place in the industry is secure. Some of us just like to get to the cool new stuff first, and where it's integrated as elegantly as possible, and so we spend a little extra money and get it when it's in a Mac.
But that doesn't mean we don't get touchy about criticism. Largely it's because the criticism is from people who don't understand the arrangement I just outlined. But more often it's because those who react are deathly afraid of something Apple makes getting a bad review-- and all it takes is one bad review, and suddenly the industry will stop paying attention, and will press a big red button which will open up a trap-door in the ground under Infinite Loop and fling Apple onto the dung-heap of history.
Or at least, that's what they think. The reality is much more benign. A bad review is just an indicator that something didn't work out quite right-- that one of Apple's entries didn't make it to the very top of the heap. Oh, the horror! It's not worth getting worked up about. If there were a lot of bad reviews about a whole range of Apple products, then yes, I'd worry. But for a columnist to point out a flaw or two in the course of an otherwise glowing review... well, that's just being a responsible journalist. You don't do anybody any favors by ignoring reality, and the reality is that everything sucks in one way or another. Including Macs.
Apple's cultlike following is legendary. One reporter who covers technology for another newspaper once confided in me that he seldom writes about Macs because "it isn't worth the hassle of having to deal with the constant nitpicking" from Mac fanatics.
Touché. Bear this very firmly in mind, any Mac users who read this. Let's not make the journalists so afraid of backlash that they won't even make the effort to write a positive review.
But I must say I am impressed by the passion most of those Mac users who wrote me have for their machines. Their loyalty is impressive. I can't think of any other consumer product that has so many user-boosters who instantly mobilize like they do against slight criticism.
I can. Amiga.
That's the trap into which we will fall if we get too strident.
This isn't a plea for sanity so much as just a way of outlining where all these phenomena come from. What we have right now is Amiga the way Amiga should have been-- it has its zealots, but it also has a large silent and pseudo-silent majority of people who understand the technological landscape and have sane reasons for using the machines they use. The company they back is healthy and continues to lead the industry and bring out the best new products all across the board. They have everything in the world to be proud of. They're riding high; life has never been better.
Let's just not blow it, huh?
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