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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Friday, June 21, 2002
10:58 - It's the details, stupid

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I've never really been someone who hated Macs, though I did go through a phase during high school and early in college where I was dismissive of them and engaged in the usual chortling (What's the best way to accelerate a Mac? -9.8 m/s2!). However, as time went on and I learned from experience the difference between Photoshop on Windows and Photoshop on a Mac, I became much more tolerant and open and respectful of Apple's products, and then I had the fortune to work for Pacific Internet for a few years-- an ISP run by a former manager of the WebStar group at StarNine. That meant we were a Mac shop, and it meant I got a Power Mac 7600/120 to use at work. Outstanding little machine. I never wanted for anything-- I liked its telnet better than the Windows equivalents, it had Photoshop and plenty of RAM, and... well, hey, what else was there in 1996?

But I still wasn't interested in making my own personal machine a Mac; no, at that time I was still in that libertarian phase of free computing r00lz & Linux is da b0mb!!111`` in which I spent a futile period trying to make FreeBSD suffice as a desktop OS. (Being used to Photoshop and having to make do with GIMP can make a guy bitter.) The iMacs were out, but that wasn't for me. Nah, I was a geek, right? Those things weren't for geeks.

Some people recently have been seduced to the Mac by OS X. Some people have been drawn in by the iBook or the TiBook or the flat-panel iMac-- irresistibly cool as those things are. Some people have succumbed to peer pressure and bought iPods-- and then decided that they may as well just go all the way, because how can a company that makes something as damn-cool as the iPod be as bad as it's cracked up to be? Then they discover that it's not. Hey, any way of breaching the barriers.

But that's not what sucked me in. No, I was lured in by something much more obscure, but to me earth-shattering: the case design on the G3/G4 PowerMac.


Pull a ring on the side of the case, and... the whole thing just swings open. The motherboard is attached to the door segment. PCI cards and half of the back panel swing out with the door section. Drives are mounted in the body of the case. Cables are routed out of the way. To close the case, just snap it shut. No screwdrivers, no thumbscrews, no cutting your hand open. They made opening the case as simple as opening an oven, yet managed to keep it somewhat "hidden" so as not to be inviting people to open it if they had no reason to. You can even pull a tab out the back panel (which moves an entire plate into interlock) and padlock it shut. How cool is that?

Too cool for any other PC manufacturer, apparently, because nobody else has managed to do anything like this. Not even Dell. Why is this? I'm sure it can't be that Apple has a patent on this kind of design; it's just a clever variation on something that everybody else had been doing for years. It's deceptively simple. So why hasn't anybody else-- even those who specialize in case design-- been able to do anything remotely so good, even after Apple's design hit the market? All I can attribute it to is incompetence, sad to say. Nobody else has the motivation to make screw-free and blood-free cases, because their current products sell just fine-- and people either take their computers in to the shop to be serviced, or they accept that some physical pain is inherent in adding new PCI cards... right?

This case sent me a strong message, in about 1998 when it appeared: it said that Apple is all about geeks. They know what it is we value, and they know what we don't have time for. They were willing to put in the effort to design a case that would make geeks stop short and their jaws hit the floor in amazement at how good it is. Geeks like to be excited by technology, and Apple realized through some stroke of insight that while a case design like this might cost a lot of money in R&D and implementation, it would make drooling fanboys out of people who appreciated that kind of attention to detail-- those who were excited by such things. And hey, it worked.

The current swing-open Power Mac case design has undergone only minor revisions since its introduction in 1998, and it's due for a full-scale revamp-- it's expected in July. Fans of the current case can't much imagine that a new version can be much of an improvement; we can only hope that it won't be worse. But while it's lasted, I know it's made more converts than just myself-- and so whoever had the idea for it initially ought to be given some kind of award for insight above and beyond the call of duty.

And that's just one detail out of thousands.

Do I want to be condemned to a world where nobody has the competence to do the kind of design that Apple has been doing all these years? Obviously nobody's qualified to fill their shoes, otherwise, someone would have done it by now. Do I want to live in a world where mediocrity in design is not only the norm, but the only standard with no superior alternative?

Not just no-- hell no.



Okay-- in the course of his habitual fact-checking of my ass, Chris informs me that Apple does in fact have a patent on this design, and that's why nobody else has done something like it. Well, okay... though I have to imagine that this can't be the only possible good case design that doesn't involve screws or sharp metal edges. Can't someone come up with something else that's just as good, let alone revolutionary? And in any case (hyuck), what's to stop other companies licensing Apple's design for their own cases? Nah, gotta keep those boxes cheap, right?

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© Brian Tiemann