| Thursday, July 18, 2002 |
00:30 - Sigh...
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/07/MacWorldRumors.shtml
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So I was following all of the update links that have appeared at the end of Steven den Beste's recent tirade against MacWorld and the Cult of Mac, and I was (naturally) dismayed to find that almost all of them, and almost all of the comments to each of them, were negative.
Not just negative-- pathological. They joke about Mac users drinking Steve's Kool-aid; they link to that stupid iToilet spoof; they ridicule the fruity colors, which they still think are current; they call it "MAC", as in "I wouldn't switch to MAC if Steve Jobs himself came to my house and gave me a hummer"; they poke fun at the IT administrators in the "Switch" ads (who obviously are incompetent and not long for their jobs if they're willing to admit that they use a Mac at home); they dismiss the entire platform for not having all the hottest games; they snidely ask about whether the Mac OS "still displays the bomb" when it crashes, or whether Macs can be networked; they even dismiss UNIX as being some obscure, dead-end, geeky discipline that only freaks with masking tape on their glasses would want to know about.
The more erudite among them talk about how computers are tools, and if one tool does the job even if another might be better, hey, go nuts. But as usual, the longest posts tend to be by alarmed Mac defenders, writing huge, heartfelt tracts explaining why the Mac deserves more than uneducated bashing founded on ten-year-old arguments.
Naturally, when someone spends that much time putting their defense into words, they're all too worthy of being ridiculed all the more. What a fucking cultist!
What I find really distressing is that nobody seems to be pointing out what I think is the real reason to back Apple, the one that I've been writing reams about here for months now: innovation. Apple makes its livelihood on innovation-- explicitly so, right up front, as the primary product. Apple has consistently been the first to market with things like DVD burners, AirPort, laptops with the keyboard towards the back (so your hands have a place to rest-- though PC laptops still put the speakers under your hands), and a host of other things that I've mentioned here so many times that mentioning them again will obviously not make a difference. They've consistently done things right-- designed a filesystem with Unique File IDs, so apps can keep track of files as you move them around; per-file icons, no need for filename extensions, no bloody text-mode bootup sequence... how many more must I list? And most importantly today, the iApps display an understanding of what people should be able to do with computers better than any PC company has ever demonstrated. Have you seen iTunes 3? Instead of focusing on stuff like skins and album art, they've added features like "Sound Check" (which evaluates every one of your MP3s and adjusts its preamp level so they all play back the same, "join tracks" (so live concerts and concept albums don't get broken between tracks), the ability to mark tracks as part of a compilation, and frickin' Smart Playlists-- so you can organize your own lists of songs in what amounts to complex SQL queries into the song database, but presented in such a way that the user never even has to realize that there is a database or that there is any querying to be done. It's astonishing how well they do this stuff.
And yet nobody mentions it. PC people don't mention it because they've never used a Mac since some friend's Performa running OS 7.6.1 or something, and Mac people don't mention it because they're either too focused on deflecting the PC users' barbs, or they're so unfamiliar themselves with what's available for Windows that the iApps don't seem like anything out of the ordinary.
I'm telling you, this stuff is phenomenal. It deserves kudos. It represents more hard, thankless work and more disciplined design thought to make one iApp than it does to put together an entire OS based on sliding sub-windows, mouse-over effects gone amok, and the technicolor-yawn that is the Windows logo.
Look, I agree that the Mac zealot world needs work. Apple's marketing needs to come to understand how to appeal to the other side rather than to please its own followers. And we all need to figure out how to present the case in a way that people don't find threatening or freakish.
Because, quite simply, the alternative is to let Apple die-- taking with it the best thinking in the entire technology industry.
You don't know what you've got till it's gone, they say.
Apple means something. It's more than the sum of its statistics; it's more than a stock price or an ad campaign or a piece of software; it's more than just some obscure computer company that's irrelevant because Neverwinter Nights isn't available for it. It's a company with an ethic-- a vision that is simply not represented anywhere else in the computer industry. Those of us who have experienced that vision and seen what it can accomplish are in the unenviable position of being unable to explain it to anybody without coming across as Jehovah's Witnesses.
A person has to voluntarily look at a Mac, without duress and without a subconscious goal of finding reasons to write it off, to come to understand why so many of us have made this decision.
All I ask is that people acknowledge that just maybe we zealots might have a reason.
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