| Tuesday, March 7, 2006 |
17:55 - The Apple Stare
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2006/03/06
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The Penny Arcade guys have done it but good, now.
I never thought of myself as the sort of hipster that would appreciate the Apple experience. What I am though is a proud dad and it turns out that’s just as good. I’ve already burned a DVD of lil’ Gabe, created a slide show of his pictures and sent them off to the grandparents. After a day I had my own .Mac site made using iWeb and I was photocasting by Sunday.
I can’t say much more than what Tycho already said. It’s just really fucking good and that’s all. I found that any time I had a problem this weekend it was because I was over thinking something. I was looking for some sub menu or a hidden setting when what I wanted to do was right in front of my face.
Add in the fact that it plays WOW like a dream and I’m set. I’m not ready to star in one of those annoying switch ads but it’s safe to call me a convert. I’m not going to ditch my PC anytime soon but I actually get excited when I think about using the Mac.
Today's installment in the continuing saga really does capture the feeling well. You end up turning the pages in the little instruction booklet with vintage-comic-book tweezers so you can be sure to absorb every intricately crafted word according to its intended placement and timing, and you find yourself smiling over font choices and line drawings of gender-neutral human hands and computer outlines, even when the instructions say things like "Press the power button to turn on your iMac".
Something weird has happened with Apple. Over the last four or five years, Macs have taken on a mystical, otherworldly aura such that people who are taking their first steps into the platform are doing so without any prior expectations that have any bearing on reality. Time was that everyone had encountered a Mac at one time or another—say, a decrepit and decal-stained Performa in a high school math classroom, or a gaudy clamshell iBook brandished by some insufferable friend. Such experiences were ubiquitous, and everybody thought they knew what Macs were all about: weird, counterintuitive computing, a gunky one-button mouse that didn't move fast enough, no good applications, and an interface that made you feel like you were walking on beach sand. Pretty, but you kept getting sucked down into moist pits.
Those old Macs are gone now, though, and today's hipster class hasn't seen a Mac except in the movies. It's a whole new ballgame now, and the modern Mac world—with its iPhoto and iWeb and GarageBand and .Mac and iSight and backlit keyboard and Pages and Mail and Exposé—has no analogues in anyone's living memory. I keep expecting Gabe and Tycho to snark about how the one thing you can do in Windows that you can't on a Mac is right-click—ho ho ho—but so far they seem too busy giddily learning their way around a genuinely welcoming system to air age-old and irrelevant gripes.
It's such a different world now that it's no longer hip and cool to show you're above being affected by Apple Magic. It's actually managed to become hip and cool to show how thoroughly won over you are by it.
Also, I keep waiting for the inevitable crash after the honeymoon—the first rude awakening, the first rants, the first railings against things they thought they'd be able to get used to but can't. I keep poising myself over my keyboard, as though it's somehow up to me to make sure the new converts don't make a potentially bad-impression-forming misstep, like accidentally changing the whole system's icon size or associating Word files with an app that stops working or that isn't the best thing for handling them (like the Pages test-drive). But so far this hasn't been necessary. I have to keep reminding myself that the Mac can take care of itself. It needs no spokesman anymore. It needs no apologist making the case for puck-shaped mice or recommended memory sizes or flower-patterned cases or even the two biggest historical stumbling blocks, slow CPUs and high prices. The CPUs are now a non-issue, and the prices are a gripe that's fading into the woodwork, clung to only by the same people who boast about not needing a BMW because they can get to work just fine in their '83 Corolla.
I wonder if Steve reads Penny Arcade. Surely at least someone has sent him these recent strips, and surely he's sitting in his office rubbing his hands and going, "Eeeeexcellent..."
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Brian Tiemann
