| Saturday, October 19, 2002 |
13:33 - Is your God FAST enough?
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/10/Weregonnabefaster.shtml
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I swear, that is the current slogan on a banner outside the church that stands between my workplace (coincidentally right across the street from One Infinite Loop) and the local Togo's sandwich shop.
Certainly well-educated and sophisticated Americans would never think that icons of their religion could ward off evil, could they?
This was before the creation of the Macintosh, however, and before it fell behind in technical performance and in market performance, and before Steve Jobs returned from the dead to lead the Mac faithful to the promised land. His presentations at various MacWorld's are virtually indistinguishable in style and substance from a revivalist minister, and his disciples routinely wave various icons towards the x86/Windows volcano to stave off extinction.
Sometimes the icons look like jelly beans.
Hhhyep. Here we go again.
Computers are about more than a column of numbers.
The fastest Xeon in the world wouldn't have enabled me to save my Excel spreadsheet yesterday.
But three-year-old CPUs don't prevent me from enjoying the process of rummaging through my songs in iTunes, or video-editing in iMovie, or using an OS that doesn't have a Registry. The user experience, and the existence of the software in the first place, is of much greater importance to Apple, and to Mac users, than raw CPU speed. If Apple had decided at the outset that the most important selling point for their computers was going to be speed, then Macs would have been a lot faster. Maybe they'd have used Intels. Maybe a lot of other decisions would have been made. But they certainly wouldn't be Macs as we know them today. In fact, make price another paramount initial goal, and Apple would probably be dominant today. And the software would probably also be about as good as Windows software.
They didn't make that decision, though, and the result is a fundamentally different kind of software. It's software that the user enjoys using. Regardless of the speed of the CPU. My three-year-old G4/450 can video-edit just as well as my brand-new iMac at work. Sure, the final export time is a bit different, and I appreciate that. But it's not what I lose sleep over. What would give me the night sweats is not a world in which Macs never got faster than they are today. What would drench my pillow-- in sweat and in tears-- is a world in which the magic of technology and software is completely commoditized out of existence, in which the whole world-- without exception-- sees computers as something to cope with instead of something that makes them feel good.
To people who use Macs, this distinction is self-evident-- enough so that it's impossible to put it into words. But to those who don't, the bottom line-- the numbers, the economics, the statistics-- all resolve out to a resounding thumbs-down.
Wintel machines win on the objective. Macs win on the subjective. Trouble is, only one of those can really be measured.
I'm sure everybody has had a variation on the following experience: Your company decides that it's going to implement a new billing system, a new sales-tracking system, a new project-management system, a new e-mail system-- something to replace the chugging workhorse the whole company uses. The new system looks great on paper. The numbers are awesome; it's so fast, it's so interconnected, it's so modular, it's so made by a partner company-- er, I mean, it's so cheap. Great things are expected. But once the new system is in place, it turns out that the user-interface is a disaster, the stability is abysmal, and its newness and unfamiliarity are not the only reasons why the company's employees come to hate it so quickly. They're subject to huge downtimes as the company tries desperately to make it work. But no matter what those numbers in the sales brochure say, even if they're accurate-- nothing alters the fact that the employees all wish they could go back to the old, "inferior" system.
If only there were a way to know that would happen beforehand, right? A way to quantify the user experience, the stability, the ease with which it allows people to do their work-- with the same ease as one can quantify the number of clock cycles per second or simultaneous transactions or RAM footprint? Oh, if only. That's the problem with subjective analysis. That's the problem with trying to argue in favor of a system that "feels right" over a system that has great numbers in its bottom line.
Den Beste is right to characterize Mac advocacy as a "religion"; those who aren't a part of it just don't "get it", and to them, the acolytes' actions are incomprehensible. Why would an otherwise intelligent, educated American deliberately choose such a dumb path?
As people reading this site know, I'm not religious. But in a case like this, I understand religion's appeal. It's the unprovable, the unmeasurable, the magical aspects of technology that Apple has dedicated itself to upholding. The unforgivable sin of Microsoft, in my eyes, is of cheapening the magic of technology. They've turned what was the stuff of Star Trek into the stuff of supermarket discount aisles. And damnably, for most of the world, that's "good enough".
Macs will probably always be slower and more expensive than PCs. Those goals are pretty much mutually exclusive to subjective software elegance.
However, as an engineer, I realize that speed and optimization can always be added to a system later; but ideals of elegance, once lost, are lost forever. That's why my chips lie where they do.
I know that it's intellectually satisfying to be able to resist the basic human temptation toward standing in a crowd chanting at the words of a demagogue on stage. It's satisfying to be able to point and laugh at the throngs of dupes, secure in not being part of any such foolishness.
But, well, before I got my first Mac, computers were all just about numbers to me too. I certainly didn't write or draw or program or do as much of anything creative then, either. I might be as derisive as Den Beste is of religion as a general concept. But as for what religion can do for technology, I've been made a believer.
I know that makes his viewpoint consistent and mine inconsistent. But, well, as Big Daddy says, we've got a little saying down here on the bayou: Blah!
UPDATE: CapLion has a few thoughts on the subject:
In short, the Windows world is the bumpy, rocky, boring back road. The Mac world is the super sleek highway.
What's the difference here? In the Windows world, you accept the bumps and potholes as a given, and you build to adapt to them. In the Mac world, you make the road better.
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