| Tuesday, April 2, 2002 |
14:46 - FUD dispersal
http://www.sundayherald.com/23324
|
(top)  |
Okay, time to take apart a rather mean-spirited article piece by piece. This thing, by Iain S. Bruce of Scotland's Sunday Herald, reads like a bitter piece of techno-fascist doomsaying that preaches technological damnation for any people who suffers the aberrant and degenerate race of Macs to live unmolested.
One wonders what horrible Mac experience this fellow once had to live through. Did a Performa once beat him up on the playground? Did his wife run off with a Mac person? Or has he just lived through a horrific Windows troubleshooting experience, and thinks that if he should have to suffer, then dammit-- so should everyone else?
Read on, for smug rantings and screedish FUD. And for the original article too.
THE trouble with IT is that, like so many other good ideas in life, no sooner have you come up with a wizard field of invention and endeavour than people begin attempting to fix the same ludicrous rules, values and obsessions on to it that they seem determined to attach to every other aspect of life.
Take, if you will, the example of Apple Macintosh users, a body of men and women whose state of computing existence is all too often defined not by utility, but by the colour of their monitor casings. They have hijacked the information revolution and led it blindly down a route mapped out by superficiality and style.
That's right: according to this guy, Macs not only still come in translucent candy colors, but their machines are otherwise irrelevant. Nobody pays any attention to what they do or tries to compete with Apple's features and innovations. Nobody has adopted FireWire or AirPort, nobody has incorporated DVD burners, nobody has tried to make laptops small and power-stingy and attractive, and nobody has tried to develop movie-making software or MP3 organizers.
If we don't snuff Apple out of existence right now, they'll only steer us further down this dead-end road of freedom, connectivity, stability, attractiveness, fun, and capability. We can't have that, now can we? How will the IT people maintain power?
One can only hope the repellent new iMac, resembling a £1380 angle poise lamp with a particularly expansive backside, will bring them to their senses.
Not likely, Bucko. Some 40% of the new iMac sales at Amazon.com are going to PC converts, and all their feedback comments are about how great the new machine is. David Coursey has gone from PC zealot to Macophile on the iMac's strengths alone. Pundits on both sides of the divide have been praising the iMac's design as one of the best, most significant pieces of innovation ever to grace the computing world, and more of it is coming from the PC press than from the Mac side. Sounds to me like if buying a Mac represents taking leave of one's senses, we're on the verge of mass mania rather than the sterile calm of sanity.
For some years now, Apple has managed to divide the computing market with a strategy based on modern good looks blended with historical myth, and it is time the aberration was ended.
Yeah, the computer world would've been better off if Apple had never existed. Screw all this "innovation" crap-- Microsoft would have come up with AirPort, FireWire, ColorSync, DVD burners, iTunes, type and creator codes, and the GUI all by themselves. Macs are an aberration on our pure, pristine Celtic soil. Gas 'em. And erase 'em from the computing history books.
There are reasons that Apple owners still recite by rote to defend their choice of system, chief among which is the machine's famously intuitive interface. But while this was once a valid differentiating factor, the fact is all mainstream operating systems have now adopted the principles that made Macs so easy to use in the first place, rendering the point somewhat moot.
And that makes Macs an aberration, right? Hey, we all use electric power now, so Edison wasn't such a genius after all, was he?
Another defence, most often propounded by designers and their ilk, is that the Mac is better suited to creative pursuits. Again, this was true back in the day when Microsoft targeted the business market and Apple concentrated on multimedia applications, but as all major applications will increasingly run on all systems, unless they develop an aesthetic values chip pronto, these days are over.
Ah, another person who has never used iMovie, or has never compared the Photoshop experience on one platform to that on the other.
There is new ground to be explored in what technology can do for creativity. Oh yes, there's all kinds of progress yet to be made. And you know who's doing it? Quick hint: It's not Microsoft. It's not even Adobe. It's Apple, a company that has tooled its entire modern operating structure into building tools from the ground up which are designed to push the boundaries of what technology can do. Did FireWire just come about by accident? Who makes Final Cut Pro, the software that is democratizing the entire film industry? Who is opening doors to UNIX and Windows developers alike by providing open frameworks and free tools so that they can have the best and most flexible value in a desktop operating system that money can by? This ain't Windows XP I'm talking about here, just in case it was somehow unclear. If you enjoy how your menu options have all been arbitrarily rearranged behind the pustulent green Start button, and how Microsoft is doing everything in their power to limit the playback potential of MP3s and to side with the SSSCA backers to put policeware on your computer to make sure you're not copying your CDs onto your portable MP3 player, well, be my guest. But don't sneer at me because I'm not subject to those problems. I'm not as stupid as you think I am.
Apple's only significant difference, as far as we can tell, is that they have condensed the mouse to a single button. Why? Reducing the number of buttons to press might briefly benefit the weak and feeble minded, but in actual fact all that has achieved is to decrease the variety of muscle movements employed and thus increase, in this column's most humble opinion, the risk of repetitive strain injury (RSI).
Oh boy. Well done. Well done. Here's where we find just how well-informed Mr. Bruce (descended from royalty, perhaps? Sure talks like it) is about his chosen victim. "Condensed the mouse to a single button"? It's always been that way, Mr. Warrior Poet. It's not some new "innovation" designed to protect the "feeble-minded" from the horrors of multiple things to press. I've covered this before, but to say it as briefly as possible: The single mouse button is a concept based on studies which show that the vast majority of the computing public don't even know what the difference is between the left and right mouse buttons. People intrinsically understand how to open menus and look inside for their options; they do not make the implicit logical leap necessary to know that they can make objects do things by right-clicking to activate menus that change based on context. That metaphor is a luxury, one that can provide useful shortcuts to people who know it's there. But to those who open up the hard drive icon after months of doing nothing but click on the Word or IE icon and are startled to discover a window full of folders and files ("Whoah! What's all this stuff?" someone I was helping over the phone actually said), the mouse encompasses the following actions: Click, double-click, drag, release. The primary place to look for functions is in the menus. Oh, and the Mac OS fully supports multi-button wheely-mice if you want to plug one in.
And to posit that a single-mouse button makes the user more susceptible to RSI (oh look, he expanded the acronym for us-- that must mean he's learnéd) is pure speculative bullshit. That one statement right there should put this guy's words into a suspect light for even the most PC-centric reader.
(Besides, who's this "we"? The "royal we"? The Bruce clan have decreed that the single-button mouse causes RSI, and so the Crown orders all such aberrations stricken from the market. They'll ne'er take our freedom!)
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but if you have bought a Mac, then you've bought Betamax. Think of all the justifications for it that you want, but at the end of the day ownership of a fringe product means losing the benefits of ubiquity and adding to the expense, and is thus illogical.
Oh, now he's gone from kilted gauntlet-wristed warrior to Vulcan. It's all about logic now, like the logic of using Windows because of all the software that's available for it-- when for a given purpose there are 50 mediocre or downright crappy pieces of shareware, while for the Mac there are three or four excellent ones. Not to mention that on the Mac you'd be virtually free of ad-ware, spy-ware, and viruses. Sorry, but I don't mind paying a little extra (and it is a little extra) for those luxuries, plus those of hardware that's guaranteed to be inter-compatible, cutting-edge features like DVD burners and flat-panel screens and AirPort and gigabit Ethernet and FireWire all standard, and-- contrary to what you must think is popular opinion-- a vast community of some of the most helpful, knowledgeable, accommodating, and high-achieving people in the entire computer industry all too happy for you to join their ranks.
Besides, they still use Betamax in many high-end studios-- because it's still better than VHS. The "marginalization myth" doesn't get in the way of some people's ability to see what is the right tool for the job.
Diversity is good, of course, but pre-OSX, Apples only run one brand of operating system, the Mac OS. PCs will happily accommodate Linux, Unix, or any one of the Microsoft product range. You want to talk about monopolies? Talk to the Mac, man. The PC ain't listening.
<brrrinng> <brrrinng> Hello, Yellow Dog Linux? LinuxPPC? MkLinux? Yeah, I have it on good authority that you guys don't exist. <pause> This guy at the Sunday Herald. Yeah, I don't get it either. <pause> Uh-huh, that's what I thought too, but he says Apple has just recently condensed the mouse down to one button in order to increase your chances of RSI, so he must know what he's talking about.
Oh, and to say nothing of VirtualPC, and the fact that OS X is really two or three operating systems in one-- UNIX on the Darwin level, NeXTSTEP on the applications level, classic MacOS, and the whole new framework that makes them all sing and dance together. All this on hardware that's specifically designed for a particular OS in a "whole package" deal like the entire computer industry is moving toward (quick-- how many of your friends buy off-the-shelf Dells now instead of building PCs from individual components? I don't know about you, but around here it's a whole lot more than it used to be. Why? Support, compatibility, and a lack of hassle, perhaps? Fewer choices, but more peace of mind? A little extra money for the luxuries of ease-of-use?). Sorry, dumb argument, and one that the realities of the market are making self-evidently false.
Hate Microsoft? Tough, because the Redmond giant owns a percentage of Apple, and every pound spent on a Mac sees a few more pennies poured into the luxurious foundations of Gates's mansions.
If you really believe that the evil empire must be stopped, buy a PC and run Linux as your OS -- it's the only way you'll stop big Bill. Thinking different? Not thinking at all, more like.
There's this guy named Mitch that I really hate; he owns some Apple stock. Guess I'd better just go buy a PC, because my Pure Lifestyle Choice is tainted now.
This is rumbling dangerously close to the Righteous Fatalism mentality that Lileks wrote about some months ago-- the feeling that if we can only make some difference in a situation rather than achieving the absolute perfect ideal outcome, it isn't even worth trying. We shouldn't fight the war in Afghanistan because we wouldn't be sure to wipe out all terrorists in the world. We shouldn't picket against teaching creationism in public schools because evolution isn't "proven" and therefore is a potential target that we'd have to, y'know, defend and stuff. And we shouldn't buy Macs because if our sole purpose is to stick it to Bill, we're still filling his pockets.
Well, you know, that's not the reason I use a Mac. (Well, it's a reason, but not the reason.) I use a Mac because Apple has a vision of the computing world that's about ten years ahead of anybody else's, and always has been-- and by using a Mac I get to benefit from that vision and enjoy myself while I'm doing it. What's that you say? Apple is doomed because they're standing up for the rights of consumers to rip MP3s from their CDs and organize them with ID3 tags and burn them onto CDs and listen to them on portable players, and they'll lose that entire advantage once the SSSCA passes, which it will because Microsoft is helping sponsor it? Sorry, I can't hear you-- I've got my iPod turned up too loud.
Here's the scoop, folks: your computer is not a lifestyle statement. It's a bog-standard machine intended to fulfil an array of user-defined functions, and spending extra to distance yourself from 90% of the evolutionary pool sounds like muddle-headed foolishness to say the least.
The sooner we stop pretending it is anything other than that, the quicker we realise a computer has no value in itself and only in the things it does, the sooner we will get our heads around these things and start making them really work for us humans. So there.
So what you're saying is that the computer should be transparent, that it should enable you to accomplish things as an extension of your own mind without getting in your way? Funny, because that's what people have been saying all along that their Macs do better than PCs do. Who needs to think about MP3 files and bitrates and filenames and folders when we have the effortless organizational intuitiveness of iTunes? Who needs to save files to mysteriously hidden and buried folders when you can simply drag them from one application to another? Who wants to strain their eyes to meet the gaze of their 30-pound CRT, when they can have a flat-panel screen that slides into place no matter how they slouch?
Okay, look: Apple is a minority player in the computer world... if you only think in terms of sales numbers, market share, and what your office uses. But as Microsoft and Dell will be all to glad to admit, Apple is the mind that directs the future of the computer industry. Everyone looks to Steve Jobs for guidance. Everyone waits to see what Apple will bring out next. If Macs were so irrelevant, then why would translucent candy-colored casings still be the norm from Ethernet hubs to water coolers? Why would Microsoft have included Windows Movie Maker into Windows XP-- where it provides limited, half-implemented functionality on computers that mostly don't even have anything faster than USB for real-time video transfer to work? Why would the iPod be on every magazine cover and tech column's masthead, and pinned next to the drawing board of every product designer at every MP3-player company?
The Bruce here wants to see the visible underdog squished like a grape, excised from the computer landscape like the unclean infestation it is. It's only his obvious lack of research and knowledge that prevents him from seeing that without Apple, the tech market would lock up into a stagnant sink-hole with no direction, no accessibility, no insight, and nothing for him or any other computer user to look forward to. Sure, we'd have those invisible beige boxes letting us paw through web pages or trudge through our e-mail. But would we enjoy a moment of it? Or would a computer devolve into the equivalent of a high-resolution telephone, blearily ringing on a stuffy Sunday afternoon, summoning our resentful asses to come heed its needs?
I prefer for my computer to remain fun, your Highness. And as long as there remains breath in my body, you'll ne'er take away that freedom.
Computers are lifestyle choices, whether you like it or not-- just like cars are. They all get you to work in the morning; but some, Mr. Bruce, do it in more style.
|
|
