| Thursday, July 25, 2002 |
11:28 - Hardware Choice
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There's something else that I'm afraid escapes me about the usual anti-Mac propaganda. It's this thing about "limited hardware vendors".
What exactly are people complaining about? What choice are they missing?
First of all, you're buying a computer from Apple. That means they have a motherboard, case, and power supply that they make; it's no different from Dell or HP, who use certain standardized components. And don't argue that Apple should be more flexible in hardware choice than Dell or HP. That's insane.
Okay, so beyond those: What's to choose between?
(Let's get one ground rule taken care of: we're not talking about iMacs or laptops. Those are single packages. They're whole-widgets. Especially for the consumer machines-- they're specifically being targeted toward people who won't ever want to tweak their hardware. Computers for getting stuff done, not for tinkering with and loading up with game after game. Lack of confusing choices is a selling point for those machines. No, we need to make one thing quite clear: if you want hardware choice in a Mac, that's what the Pro towers are for. They're specifically designed for expandability. That's their whole point. Start with a Pro tower if you want hardware choice, and we'll continue.)
So: What hardware choice do people want?
Let's see: Uh, the video card. And... well... hmm. Yeah, let's start with the video card.
Dude? What more choice are you looking for in a video card? The towers give you options for RADEON or GeForce3/4 cards that you can BTO, just like in the PC world. What other chipset makers are there these days? What are you missing-- the on-board Intel video that PC motherboards come with? Is that the "hardware choice" that you have in mind? Something "default" that you can upgrade from and feel all superior about? Or maybe it's those super-high-end 3D cards for rendering, or video capture cards from Matrox, or those $15K ones that drive SGI monitors. Dude, if you're in that narrow a market segment, you're not in any position to make fun of Apple. Even if the card you want isn't supported on the Mac, which it probably will be.
Oh-- oh, wait, I know. People want choice between individual video card manufacturers. They want to make sure their GeForce4 Ti is the best GeForce4 Ti on the market, and if it isn't, upgrade it. They want to prowl AnandTech and compare the ABIT card, the Inno3D card, the Gainward card, the Prolink card, the Visiontek card, and whatever other dozen Taiwanese OEM card makers are represented on the shelves at Fry's in their boxes with pictures of Porsches and spaceships on them. They'll all turn out to be almost identical in performance, but hey, that choice is all-important, right? Computing just isn't computing without an incomprehensible Engrish manual and drivers that won't load. It's all about that extra four frames per second.
Well, all right then, Mr. Hardware Geek. So how come you're not building your own video card from off-the-shelf components and a soldering iron and a breadboard? Huh? Huh? After all, that's what a real computer person would do.
Okay, so that's the video card. What else is there that people want? Let's see now... hmmm. There's-- er, no. There's SCSI-- er, no, not anymore. Uh... Oh! Wait-- sound cards! Yeah, that's right! Sound cards!
<yawn> Give me a break. Sound cards have become so commoditized that there isn't even any competition in the PC world anymore-- not that there ever was since the AdLib/Sound Blaster wars. Everybody's got a Sound Blaster 64AWE Live! 1394 Handjob Portblast 128 or whatever the hell these days, and everybody's machine sounds the same. Who is going to claim that choice in sound cards is essential to the computing experience? Again, the only choice involved comes down to whether you stick with whatever crappy anonymous on-board sound chipset your motherboard has, or whether you got the Sound Blaster of the day and plugged it in. And when it comes to sound quality and features, the Mac has always had it all over the PC-- to such an extent that nobody's even tried to debate it. And if it's a question of whether the card has FireWire on it, all Macs have had FireWire for like two years now-- three in some cases. Next.
Okay, so what else is there? Well... hmm. Ethernet cards! Oh, come the hell on. Anybody who is enough of a tweaker to take issue with the on-board Ethernet in a Mac has bigger problems than network throughput. Okay, what about... FireWire cards?! Oh, shut up. Ooh-ooh! I know! Mice, and trackballs, and keyboards! And monitors! Dude, those things work with Macs just as easily as they do with PCs. Well, what about CD-RW drives and DVD/DVD-R/DVD-RAM and so on? The Mac supports almost all of those out of the box too. You really want to add a third-party one or replace whatever the Mac comes with? Well, you can, but I for one don't consider it unreasonable of Apple not to offer such an option in their BTO catalog.
Peripherals? Like what-- digital cameras, scanners, DV camcorders, scanners? They're all supported natively in OS X, no drivers required.
What does this really come down to? Are people still just bitter about having to spend an extra fifty bucks to add a USB floppy drive, so they can feel like they're looking at a "real computer"?
No, really it's just the video card, if anybody will admit to it. People say they want hardware choice, but what they really want is the ability to swap out their video card when it becomes too decrepit; and they have the impression that that's not possible on the Mac. People want to buy a low-end computer and then soup it up with their own off-the-shelf video card and RAM, and Apple's low-end machines aren't designed for that kind of upgradeability. Everyone wants to build a gaming rig that they can keep current with a new video card every few months, and maybe a new mobo every other year or so, instead of buying a whole new machine. Sort of a pathological mindset we've gotten into, if you think about it. And naturally, because the Mac doesn't pander to that mindset, it's not worth taking seriously.
At least Apple realizes that the Mac isn't a good gaming platform, if purely because of the lack of titles. But what they have to combat is the fact that the entire industry thinks like gamers.
UPDATE from Steven den Beste. Though I must clarify that I do believe competition is a good thing, and it wouldn't displease me if there were more of it on the Mac side natively. But my point was that the average user, who mocks the Mac for its lack of hardware choice, isn't thinking about the good of the free market. He's thinking about Warcraft.
I'm not arguing against competition; I'm arguing that Apple does in fact support the kinds of competition that people want, and the kinds of competition that they don't support aren't important.
That said, competition isn't everything. Lack of competition doesn't seem to have prevented Apple from developing AirPort and putting it in all its laptops over a year before Dell claimed to be the first to do so, or from creating FireWire and putting it on all its machines by default (and with actual powered ports, too, not those twinky little non-powered ones that can't charge a connected device), or from making laptops with trackpads and with the keyboard toward the back of the base instead of right up front where it gives you RSI, or from being the first computer maker to build-in 24-bit color support or self-calibrating monitors with OS-level out-of-band controls or on-mobo video capture or multiple monitor recognition, or from creating zero-latency CoreAudio or flippin' ColorSync, or from bundling free applications for DV editing and DVD burning. Lack of competition doesn't seem to have hindered these developments, except in the sense that they're under pressure to keep the entire PC world guessing and two steps behind. Yeah, I like having cool toys first too. That's why I got a Mac.
All I had to get past was that there didn't seem to be any competition challenging Apple in these areas. They came along later. Aw, shucks.
Genuine innovation over petty scrabbling for supremacy I'll take any day.
Oh-- and I can't speak to the DDR issue (and I'm sure we've covered it before anyway), but... on a machine where the video is AGP and the sound, modem, Ethernet, and FireWire are all built-in, why on earth would you need six PCI slots?
Another UPDATE-- Marcus reminds me that while the Mac's built-in audio is very nice, to a level that the PC's sound subsystem honestly doesn't come close (it's really not "almost as good" at all), it doesn't support five-channel output like the top-end PC sound cards-- and there isn't a Mac solution for that. So, well, I'm bollixed on that count.
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