| Friday, March 8, 2002 |
00:40 - Perspective
http://wepwawet.dhs.org/weblog2.html#5
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Unciaa, of all people, offers a very fair and even-handed summary of the whole Mac-vs-PC situation. It gives both sides their fair accolades for their respective accomplishments, and no bashing of either side rears its head. (Seriously, it wasn't until the end that I realized who it was I was reading.)
There's only one bit to which I might take a little bit of exception:
And though it had some missteps and shots in the dark, Macs in the present are something to be reckoned with and rightfully so. They may not create revolutions when it comes to technology [and I'm not saying they're behind here], but to say they merely utilize what they have would be an insulty.
I'd disagree with the statement that Apple doesn't create revolutions. Whether it's in style or technology, the whole industry looks to Apple to lead the way, as I've said recently. The original iMac was the first machine to popularize USB on the desktop; USB pre-existed the iMac, but the flood of USB peripherals only began shortly after the iMac's popularity became obvious. It was also the first to jettison the floppy drive. (It probably sounds silly to speak of the omission of a feature as an innovation, but it really is-- the floppy was ditched in favor of a networked lifestyle. It's like how you treat a lazy eye in a kid: you put a patch over his good eye, so the weaker one is forced to grow into the task. So the iMac helped to kick-start the idea of sharing files over the network rather than on disk, and Microsoft just recently dropped floppy drives from its "required hardware" certification listing, so vindication is upon us.) On the style front, the iMac also begat the whole "translucent plastics" craze, moving on to other styles while the rest of the industry is still stuck on candy-colored clear shells. (Hasn't anybody noticed?) Then there's AirPort-- Apple started the wireless networking boom, being the first company to build WiFi-compatible hardware into their notebooks. They also led the way with LCD monitors, digital video, digital display connectors, and a lot more. Going back through history-- remember how PC users were so happy to get CGA and then EGA video adapters, while the Mac was still black-and-white? The software only supported a few colors, but that's all the video cards could handle anyway? Well, when the Mac went to color shortly afterwards, they wrote support for full 24-bit color straight into the OS. In the late 80s, this was-- when no video card could handle more than a few colors in its meager RAM. But the OS was always ready for whatever color depth the video cards would grow to support. At the time when DOS was proud of its 16-color EGA palette, a sufficiently souped-up Mac could display a million times that many.
Also, the article makes it sound as though a Mac's price is so high that no sane person would buy one, which just perpetuates the common refrain that "I'd love a Mac, but I couldn't afford one unless I won the lottery." Well, it's true that Macs are many hundreds of dollars more than PCs that you might build yourself, with the cheapest OEM video card you can find, the monitor from your last computer, RAM that you got from a friend, your previous case, and so on. But that's not what most computer buyers, particularly in the US, buy. The PCs that people buy are Dells and Gateways, and the fact is that Macs are price-competitive with Dells and Gateways. Maybe not dead-on, but the difference is very slim. A consumer-level P4-based PC from Gateway runs about $1200-1700, just like the new iMac. The rock-bottom Dell or HP all-in-one will cost about $700, just like the G3 iMac. And the top-end Dell workstation will run up to $4000 and beyond, just like the dual GHz G4. Sure, you can compare the $3000 flagship Mac to the gaming rig you put together for a grand total of $400, but that's not the market Apple's in. They can't compete with that kind of consumer model. And you know what? Neither can Dell or Gateway. Otherwise they would.
Laptops exhibit this more clearly. You can't build a home-grown laptop, so the $1500 you'd spend on a mid-range iBook will just as easily buy you a mid-range PC notebook, and $3000 will get you a TiBook or a professional Vaio. The same economic rules apply. Macs are priced to compete with name-brand PCs, not with home-grown boxes. They're a little more expensive as a rule, but not in anywhere near the degree that Unciaa makes it sound.
But that's just nit-picking. This article is a good read, and it's worth absorbing. The best lesson to take from it is that zealotry is really not the answer; no technology is worth that much blind boosterism.
Considering the number of times I've blathered about Apple in this blog, it would be a no-brainer for someone to squeeze out "MACOLYTE" or "MAC ZEALOT" on his labelmaker and tack it across my forehead. But honestly, I don't consider myself a "Macolyte". I prefer to think of myself as a technologist-- equal parts idealist and realist, brought up in a strict scientific educational environment, seeking the true answers to life's little riddles while at the same time understanding that there are some cases where there is no right answer. I've seen the best and the worst of all operating systems and platforms: I've known the joys of passing a year's uptime in UNIX, and I've sat up nights with an ailing UNIX machine kernel-panicking for some unknown and frightening reason, and I've known the terrors of installing badly packaged software that wrecks the OS layout. I've seen Macs give me "Sorry, a system error occurred" bombs and debugger screens that made me gnash my teeth in pain, and I've been brought to tears by the simplicity and elegance of the Type/Creator-code model of application binding, ColorSync profiling, applications that are completely represented by a single icon, and the ability to paste custom icons onto any and all files. I've felt a tired, soothing sense of ease of mind when surrounded by thousands of usable programs making the world so effortless for a Windows user, I've genuinely enjoyed the sure-footed positive responsiveness of the fast Windows interface, and I've undergone the terrors of upgrading Windows and fighting with corrupted Registries and the irritations of a shoddily-designed UI. I've experienced all these things, and I've formed my opinions based on those experiences. I try to be balanced in my Apple articles, extolling deserving achievements to the best of my ability while simultaneously warning of pitfalls and shouting through a bullhorn when there's something that needs fixing.
But I could distill my feelings on the subject down to something very simple: I want all of Microsoft's balls to die, because they've reaped all their profits from other people's genius and they should not be allowed to keep getting away with it. I want Apple to be strong and respected, because they consistently lead the industry in new visionary directions and push the envelope of what technology can do, and I believe genius should be rewarded, not spat upon.
I don't think Apple should "win". Let's be clear about that. I don't want Apple to take over the world. That would suck. I don't think the Internet Revolution could have occurred if every computer was a Mac-- I don't think their prices would ever have been forced down far enough for them to achieve penetration into every household the way cheap Windows PCs have. Macs would have remained innovative and well-made and detail-driven and easy to use, but damned expensive. Or more likely still, Apple would have become complacent, begun cutting corners in risky areas, hired stupid executives with dumb visions, and started to compromise their ideals of design and innovation-- and they would have turned into Microsoft. Someone else would have had to be the small, scrappy innovator who would show them the way.
No, I think a "win" condition would be Apple gaining about a 20% market share, particularly in business and gaming. That way nobody would be able to ignore them or write them off as irrelevant, and their future would be cemented. Because that's all I really want to see: Apple's future guaranteed. My deepest fear is a world without Apple. You know what that would be? It would be one in which PCs would have reached 8-bit color in 1995, we'd still be using Trumpet Winsock to connect to the Internet, peripheral devices would still all connect via serial ports (or parallel), and every such device would look like a Sportster modem from 1996, connecting to beige rectangular boxes the size of... well, your average modern PC case. We'd still be typing pathnames manually, we'd still have "Program Groups" from Windows 3.1 instead of files on our desktops, filenames would still be 8.3 in format, and people would still consider a GUI to be a sissy toy and a useless burden on an OS. Computers would be cheap, impossibly shoddy, and a nightmare to use-- and the Internet Revolution certainly couldn't have happened in that world either.
The relationship between Apple and the Wintel world is a symbiotic one; both sides are essential. I'd just like to see the balance be a little more equitable.
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