| Why I no longer proselytise the Mac. | | Date Created: 08 Apr, 2006, 02:45 PM |
 There was a time when I was a sincere proselytiser of the Mac. Not necessarily Apple itself, for whom I was a sincere apologist ready and I dare say able to take on naysayers during those beleaguered days of yore when Apple was about to go under for the third time, and presumably never come up again.
But with its suffusion of oxygen via CPR specialists Jobs and Ive (the most spectacularly obvious of the saviours), and the introduction of OS X in 2000, it has been decreasingly necessary to explain my 20 year affection for the Mac, or to apologise for not using the most abundant PC platform on earth.
No, in recent years, while watching Apple's ascendency (and yet not backing my own judgment by purchasing Apple shares) and Microsoft's Tweedledee and dumming (allowing me to blog about Windows refugees in an earlier post), I have found myself rarely chiming in to conversations nowadays about personal computing where I could state the obvious:
"Why don't you cut out all the unnecessary coddling of your PC and get a Mac. You'll be happier in the long run."
I continue to recommend Macs when asked my opinion. I now never offer it, with its implied contract of once having recommended it now becoming the de facto troubleshooter when things go wrong, as they will certainly do in the hands of switchers, newbies or both.
Publicly, as Vice President of my local MUG, I am an advocate. But privately, I can answer questions about my Powerbook, help my switcher friends with neat, funky software unique to the Mac, and basically help them get on with being more creative with apps. like iMovie and Keynote. And leave it at that.
There has been a shift in the zeitgeist for me. While I support more people coming to the Mac platform for all the right economical reasons and to support those hardworking shareware developers whose creations make so many Windows professional apps. look positively childish, I really don't care that much about the Apple market share increasing for the mere sake of numbers. We are now well away from a "survival at all costs" mentality.
If there is to be an increase in people using MacBooks for instance, perhaps by virtue of dual booting with Windows Xp, or via virtualisation software in or outside of Leopard, let it be because newcomers have made intelligent purchasing decisions, and thus embrace Apple's way of thinking (where less is more), and social computing way before Web 2.0 was on anyone's lips.
Social computing? Yes, the social support of other users to problem solve, find solutions and offer solace during those years when Apple users were remorsely laughed at for choosing the Betamax of personal computing. Apple users invented social computing and networking if only to circle the wagons during those misbegotten years when many jumped ship and went to Windows in order to continue to make a living rather than wait until it was "too late."
I wonder how eager many of them must now be, with the public release of Bootcamp beta, to return to the fold and leave behind them a decade of virus-avoiding and malware-mishaps?
You see I doubt anyone will buy an Intel-Mac just to run their one Windows app, and then happen to discover OS X under the hood and tinker with it in their spare time.
No, more likely potential switchers will seek out their Mac-using friends and ask for some demo time: "Can you show me how Word looks? Can I use Powerpoint the same way I can on my Dell? Can I access my bank's website? Is there a Mail application that lets me have more than one email address?"
I'm not talking here of very savvy IT professionals, although even in this domain I continue to meet huge ignorance of the Mac's capacity to do almost all things their Dells can do, even joining their corporate's network with minimal fuss.
I'm thinking of thoughtful citizens who have begun to embrace the digital world, and wish to do more than email and occasional surfing. This group has a creative element to their personality, although if it was better developed they would have gone to Macs in the first place. This group is smart enough to see the potential to run their businesses and personal interests online, to stick it to mainstream media who keep moving The Sopranos and West Wing around the programming schedule and hence have learnt about Bit Torrent, and wish to use their PCs for self-expression via podcasts, blogs, and documentary making, even if there's no immediately conceivable audience. They also want to keep up with how their children are using these technologies.
I'm not interested in convincing this group to come to the Mac, but if they ask for help, I will be there for them. But I no longer want to go out of my way to unduly praise the Mac, more preferrring to call it as I see it: It's not the perfect platform, it's still evolving and it's been an exciting journey and an enjoyably risky one not knowing where it's eventually going.
Bootcamp's release is another twist, which makes sense from Apple's perspective. No doubt they've been using a version of Windows on Mac hardware utilising Intel's chips since OS X was developed, as Steve Jobs revealed last July when announcing the Intel transition.
It was only a matter of time before the Mac fraternity embraced the transition (Intel turning face, as I wrote after January's Macworld) and its more daring members sought to run Windows in an Everestian way ("because it's there" or more accurately, "because we can").
While the blogosphere is teasing out the various consequences of Bootcamp's arrival, the main show will continue to be the slow but inevitable return of the Mac to mainstream thinking as a legitimate platform for education, small business, creative industries (not that it ever left), and indeed some parts of the enterprise market. If there is a Master Plan, this is it, and all the secretiveness, going after bloggers who reveal IP, and out-of the-blue product releases serves to keep the Master Plan on track.
This utterly leaves aside the iPod economy and the noise from the drones who wanted Apple to split into two enterprises. This is to misunderstand Apple which is about the user experience in its totality. That you can buy products online using the same software you use to listen to the product (in the case of iTunes) is an outstanding example yet to find its equal in Windows.
Right now the IT world is all atwitter about Bootcamp, and this will no doubt ramp up further in the next month when it likely comes bundled with the Intel-powered MacBook replacements for the current iBook range. There is a task ahead for Mac heads who have stuck by the company and can now glow in backing their early judgment against all prejudices. This will be to welcome switchers and guide them as they undergo a transfer of training from working in the Windows world to how OS X works.
The conversion will not be easy but having guided more than a few and watched with some pride as they have discovered the Mac's virtues and themselves commence a prozelytising stance, I am more prepared now to stand back and watch a new generation come along and delight in their discovery of a different way on personal computing. Arguably better and more satisfying than Windows, and for some better attuned to their desires for products which better match their growing appeciation of the changes the digital world is bringing.
And if you hear me saying to someone "See, I told you so!" you have my permission to give my email address to Nigerian spammers as punishment - not that they need any help to generate mailing lists.
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