| Tuesday, March 26, 2002 |
16:02 - Boy, that'll make you sit up and take notice...
http://www.macnet2.com/opinion/guest/index.shtml
|
(top)  |
Scott Boone, a guest columnist at MacNETv2:
From poor support to poor product design to marketspeak promises made and engineering promises gone unfulfilled, Apple seems to care very little about the core market that has sustained it...as though we "don’t get it". What a farce, and what an insult. I think I used to have a common feeling with Apple: they would bring insanely great things to market, understating the genius, expecting the world to see the light, and yet we'd both stand by puzzled when the market couldn't see the brilliance. Now, Apple and I are different: they simply dictate what is brilliant, and ignore the markets ignorance--they don't ask or want my (or my ilk's) opinion in the matter. And if, forbid, you offer one, you are Anti-Apple. And what makes all this worse is their utterly incomprehensible silence---on EVERYTHING. With no "free" support anymore, the online troubleshooting sites have evolved into he said-she said forums where the experts (the code writers themselves) never inform. Apple's Tech Discussions are a joke; a world where Joe Blow without source can espouse "technical voodoo". Is it me, or is the first line Tech Support at Apple merely a human tape player that recites "Okay, let's zap the PRAM. Okay, you'll need to reinstall the system software.” Rinse. Repeat. And I think that OS X is, in and of itself, the proof of the shambles that Apple, as a culture, is in.
I have been writing about OS X and its infrastructure since before Copland. It is probably because I have had, for a VERY long time, a prescient feeling about what I want a computer to do. And college, the engineering education, was the worst thing I did, because it provided me the technical know how (or at least the foundation of the know how) about Operating Systems. John Manzione, in last week’s Op-Ed piece, stated that OS X was "still the best OS ever to be developed for any computer." And he is right...but we need to stop comparing against what WAS and start comparing with what CAN BE. And when doing that, OS X is rather disappointing. OS X embodies just about everything that is wrong with Apple.
Phew, boy... there's some strong talk. Curiously, it's from a guy who lives and breathes Apple, not from a staunch PC user enumerating what makes Apple suck. It's a guy who sees the potential for Apple as being so much more than what they're actually reaching for, and it's driving him nuts.
Apple could have brought fresh new insight to how UNIX looks (metadata, drivers, installers, preferences and configuration), but they haven't, all for this elusive and nebulous concept of "compatibility". Certainly this will be improved, but Apple's silence about the journey is disheartening.
And so it goes... I fear we are a dying breed, the ones who care, the ones who are loyal, the ones who want to make a difference. Everyone else seems to merely want to be spoon-fed, and Apple and the computer and software vendors seem happy to do so. I dread the thought of another 10 years of stagnation in this market...I may go insane.
Word.
Apple isn't making it easy to be a fan at the nitty-gritty level these days. They want us to be fans at the presentation level, fans of the out-of-the-box experience, fans of iTunes and iMovie and swiveling LCD panels, not fans of resource forks and metadata and expandability. They don't want us to fixate on the endlessly modifiable UI of MacOS 8; instead, they want us to use Aqua and like it. They don't want us to tweak the Type and Creator codes on files; they want us to apply blanket settings and hide extensions in the name of interoperability when we innocently send JPEGs and Word files to our Windows friends. They don't want us to use WindowShade; they want us to fall in love with the Genie effect. And they communicate this through subtle psychological cues-- through sluggish lack of commitment on certain levels, through silence in published API specs, through gala product launches that mask silent abandonment of support for three-year-old hardware. This isn't the Apple that gives a guy a set of premium tools and then gets out of the way while you do your stuff; this is an Apple that welds your hood shut, to use a hackneyed expression, and would sooner give you a new car rather than tell you how to fix your existing one. Open-source Darwin or not, Apple's attitude recently makes for even more of a closed-shop atmosphere than ever before.
The weird thing is, it's working. I'm a seasoned veteran when it comes to operating systems. I've spent the past 15 years building up a hacker's knowledge of everything from ProDOS to Windows 95 to FreeBSD to Mac OS X, and while in every case before this one I've rigged the system full of cute little shortcuts and home-grown tools for me to use in my daily machinations, in OS X I find myself wanting to follow the prescribed script. I see the path they've laid out for me-- iTunes and the iPod are the total music solution. Don't worry about hardware compatibility, or naming your MP3 files and the folders they go in, or setting up synchronization protocols, or bitrates or metadata or skins or any of that crap-- iTunes will do all that for you. Just think about CDs and music. Put the CD in, and we'll handle the rest. Plug in your iPod, let it sync, unplug it, and go. I could do all kinds of power-user tweakage, but why? They've covered all the bases, and I find that I don't need to go beyond the edges of the path to do what I need done. They don't say a word about their vision, about where they see all this going, beyond what gets said in the PR pages or during the keynote speeches; but somehow, that's okay by me. I just follow the script, and it has yet to fail me.
Lately I've found myself ditching some of my long-held habits, parts of my life that I haven't changed in over five years because I'd never needed to (and because they were still the best way of handling the task in question). Many of my lingering problems with OS X, for instance, arise from my need to use Pine for my mail. Just a few weeks ago, though, I was unwilling to run Classic on my beautiful pristine new iMac at work, just so I could use NiftyTelnet/SSH to get to my Pine terminal as I was accustomed-- so I opened up Mail, configured it for secure IMAP, and now suddenly my primary e-mail account is transformed. I have HTML formatting and rich-text layout and instantly visible attachments. I have folders for mail, and I can move messages between them-- even between accounts-- just by dragging. I have offline reading capability! I have the ability to select who I send mail as. Sure, the HTML spam is annoying and bandwidth-intensive, but hey-- I can now receive Japanese and Korean spam and watch in bemusement as all the gorgeous antialiased Kanji text renders right in the message. No more Telnet windows full of gobbledygook! Sure, it's just as meaningless and destined for the trash can as it used to be, but now I'm following the prescribed path-- and everything is just so much easier. Now I can put my machine to sleep and it won't lose its connection to my mail. I don't have to run Classic at all, except for Photoshop-- which is on its way to me as soon as it ships. I don't even have to grumble about the lack of Command+Click execution of URLs in the Terminal window, because URLs in Mail are hyperlinked already-- like they are in any modern GUI program.
I'm being a Model User, eschewing the power-user hackery that I've always been used to. I guess it's because all the tools I normally have to hack together are already right here for me to use.
Nonetheless, Apple's silence is unnerving-- and it's with no small amount of fretfulness that I immerse myself in the Out-of-the-Box Experience with each new piece of the puzzle that they release; driving all over the Valley with my camera now that I have iPhoto to play with, taking my camcorder skiing with me so I can throw it all into iMovie. It makes me smile ear to ear, but my eyes are still darting back over my shoulder. I still worry that after all this success they could blow it somehow.
If they do, it'll be by alienating all the long-time, die-hard Mac fanatics, the ones who live and breathe the Mac Way, having seen the vision of What Computing Could Be-- only to have that vision snatched away by a modern Apple concerned only with courting the hippest and trendiest modern technogeeks, the ones most easily seduced by the flash of their current product lineup. By organizing the company around developing an army of intensely loyal new fans, fans of a somewhat different "ease of use" ideal than the classical Apple one, they're putting into practice a new strategy, one that isn't likely to appeal to everybody. Here's hoping it brings them success.
It may be that the old ideal, that of a stable and simple foundation with an infinitely hackable presentation layer, is dead. Equally, it might be that we've returned to the original ideal, the one that came before that: the "Computer For the Rest of Us" ideal. Remember that one? The 1984 one? The one that ensnared the original crop of Mac zealots, before they became acolytes to the Immortality of Nostalgic Hardware? Before they became Amiga types?
Apple's silence on these matters, coupled with their tendency towards extreme secrecy on all subjects, plus their string of recent runaway successes in the market, to me suggest that they've got a long-term plan which will only be revealed to us at the rate that Steve sees fit. And if it's anything like what we've seen so far, I'm not too worried. I'll just be standing there with my arms flung wide and my head back, like Kent at the end of Real Genius. Bring on those God Rays!
|
|
