commentary The question inevitably comes up when I meet people and they learn I write about Apple for a living: "So, what's that like?"
I usually answer, "It's crazy". There perhaps has never been a more interesting time to write about Apple and its growing impact on the computer, telecommunications, and music worlds. Unfortunately, it also means that I have to witness (and sometimes join) a daily descent into a pit of mudslinging.
Their size and degree of organisation can be debated, and it's usually overstated. But there is no question that Macintosh users are by far the most passionate advocates for their products in the technology industry. And while such passion is remarkable and even moving, it can also be terribly disturbing.
Take a recent story I wrote, "Problems with the Mac promised land". The story was about how Apple sells the Mac as a computer that "just works" in its ubiquitous ad campaign comparing the Mac and the PC. But the Mac, like anything, is not immune to problems from time to time. Anyone who has followed Apple over the last couple of months knows that Leopard early adopters have run into a few issues.
Mac users in the US line up to buy a copy of Mac OS X Leopard in October.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)Nothing in the article suggested that Mac users are revolting against Leopard, or that serious Leopard glitches have knocked the Mac user base offline, or anything even close to that effect. The majority of the discussion in the Talkback section, however, descended into the usual Mac vs. PC flame war. In addition to attacking each other, several people took me to task, saying that since they had never had a problem with their Mac or with their Leopard installation, I was clearly manufacturing problems as part of a sinister plan to either attack the Mac and put Apple out of business at the bidding of Microsoft, or through some naked self-interest of both myself and CNET to generate page views.
This happens just about every time I write about Apple. In fairness, that aggressive behaviour is not indicative of Mac users as a whole. But that very noisy, hardcore crowd distorts the issues and inflames the discussion, to the point where a rational look at Apple and its products becomes a quest to decide The World's One True Religion, which never seems to work out so well in the real world.
I think the roots of this zealotry go back to a time when Apple was on the ropes financially and someone who worked on a Mac was ridiculed by other computer users. Ten years ago, Mac users in the corporate world were viewed as rubes playing with "toys" not suitable for getting real work done, and there were plenty of people ready to remind the Mac community in not-so-subtle ways that the revolution promised in the 1980s by the original Macintosh was being fulfilled by Microsoft software.
Apple's response was to change the tone of the conversation, and it deliberately chose a spiritual motif for its message with the work started by Guy Kawasaki in the mid-1990s. Kawasaki originally worked at Apple in the mid-1980s in marketing, and was part of the team that introduced the Macintosh to the world before leaving in 1987.
When Kawasaki rejoined Apple in 1995, the company was probably at its lowest point. On his Web site, Kawasaki describes his role at Apple in the mid-1990s by saying, "My job on this tour of duty was to maintain and rejuvenate the Macintosh cult". There was a dedicated group out there who still believed in the Mac and its promise as an alternative to Windows, but they weren't organised, and their morale was low.
In an interview this week, Kawasaki recalled signing up 44,000 hardcore Mac users in 1995 on a listserv named, quite appropriately, "EvangeList". "All I would do is disseminate good news," Kawasaki said. He wanted his listserv to be a counterpoint to the torrents of bad news about the Mac, exemplified by a 1996 BusinessWeek cover story about Apple titled, "The Fall of an American Icon". For its cover art, the magazine placed an Apple icon in front of a black, funereal background.
Kawasaki's idea was to give Mac users hope, that they were not alone, and that they were on the right side of history. Hope is a powerful thing to someone at the end of their rope, and while that's perhaps overstating it a bit, that's how many Mac users felt in those years.
"It's almost like a religious experience in that you feel like you have to tell everyone you know in an effort to 'save them.' It's crazy, and I never understood those people but now I am one," said Doug Otto, a News.com reader, vice president of systems engineering for Govstar and a Sacramento, California, resident.
Some Apple fans will line up in the cold just to be one of the first to enter a new retail store.
The trouble is that most people don't like cults; they associate them with Charles Manson or rabid sports fans. Sure, you may believe you have all the answers. But there are a lot of people who automatically tune out the incessant preaching of a zealot. With the rise of the Internet, it became much easier to preach that gospel far and wide and anonymously.
"Like anything people are passionate about -- sports, politics, religion -- there are going to be some people who are goofy about it and don't have that thing in their brain that tells them they've stepped over the edge from 'fan' to 'fanatic'," said John Moltz, the editor of Crazy Apple Rumors Site and perhaps the best source of comic relief in the Apple universe.
Since it's a two-party world, however, many of those evangelists combined their love for the Mac with their hatred of Microsoft, much like Republicans attack Democrats when Democrats are in charge, only to find themselves on the defensive when the sides switch. Windows users, who had almost forgotten about the Mac, initially laughed at Mac users and their intense love for a plastic cube of electronics. But then, as Apple starting gaining market share and increasing respect for its design chops, they started to fight back.
Last year, Moltz created the "Artie MacStrawman" character as a symbol of those counterattacks on Mac users, as an allegory for the "strawman" theory of debate that intentionally exaggerates an opponent's position to make it look more ridiculous. Many of those who criticise Mac users often come back to the whole "those crazy Apple cult people" thing, in that just because one Apple fan "mindlessly worships Steve Jobs" and "blindly buys anything Apple releases no matter how dumb and stupid and dumb it is," they all do.
But let's be honest: we've all seen that person in action in discussion forums on this site and many others. "Windows users aren't put off by the 'depth of passion' that Mac users have. They are put off by the sheer futility of trying to make a rational argument with someone devoid of rational thought," said Ken Webber, another News.com reader.
This "debate" has been polluting the Internet for more than a decade, but Apple is no longer a company to be laughed at. It's selling more and more Macs to first-time Mac users. College campuses and hipster coffee shops are bastions of backlit Apple logos. Even businesses, long the last line of defence against the encroachment of the Mac, are changing their mind as programs like Boot Camp give Mac users a way to gain access to corporate applications developed for Windows. And as we start doing more and more work over the Internet, rather than on our desktop software, the compatibility issue becomes less and less relevant.
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Slam
13/12/2007 03:19 PM
The Apple "knockers" in the 90s reminded me of Chicken Little. "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"...and they were right. It's been raining iPods ever since. lol
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Slam
13/12/2007 03:23 PM
The Apple "knockers" in the 90s reminded me of Chicken Little. "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"...and they were right. It's been raining iPods ever since. lol
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Apple
14/12/2007 09:58 AM
I think it's disgraceful that Australia has to wait this long for the iPhone. I have an iPod and I would love to update to the iPod touch but its absolute crap when it comes to onboard memory. $500 for 16GB!? thats ridiculous!!!! And i can't even buy theiPhone instead... it's turned me off apple for a while... go the Nokia N95 8GB
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SimonJ
14/12/2007 01:01 PM
I'm all for the discussion of Mac problems. It's a great way to thrash out your annoyance and displeasure. I've got a mac and I'm a definite adherent to the white and silver (or black) boxes. But I admit, though they are much less inclined to just breaking down than PCs, they have their share of problems. Take my powerbook G4. Yes, old, but it has this problem specific to its model where it over heats! I had the motherboard short already and had to have it replaced. Now I'm going to buy myself a Mac Pro eventually, but here's another irk (stop me if I'm wrong): you can't do much at all in terms of upgrading the insides of iMacs. You HAVE to go for the big mumma Pro if you want to keep upgrading your Mac. Sometimes I get the impression Apple can be a bit about keeping it in the family, for the family, and never beyond.
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kimono
14/12/2007 06:35 PM
Buying a Macbook last year for my wife and a Pro for me this year were the best 2 decisions of my IT life. I'm a systems engineer who works with windows & linux for a living, so coming home to such a polished fun to use OS is well worth it...
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Stargazer
25/12/2007 10:17 AM
I'm a new "kid" on the block as far as Macs go. My brother gave me a second hand G4 for my birthday and I've been learning lots ever since. I wanted a Mac, I liked what I perceived they were about, high quality, that can be built upon and upgraded rather being scrapped and totally replaced, and I didn't want to support the oppostions bloody minded work practices. Since becoming a Mac user, I've bought an ipod and am about to buy a turntable enabling me to trnsfer vinyl to my pc and eventually to CD and or ipod I'm stoked !
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MasterUWA
24/03/2008 01:29 PM
My old high school is doing a project with the Australian education department and the school ha been provided with about 700 macbooks. It started in 2003 when the school were given g4's and the original project went for three years then after it finished the school went to the education minister and asked for the project to be extended and it was. the school was then given the macbooks. but me and my *nerdy* friends all hated them every student was the school was given their own one for the two years (year 8&9) that they are there before going to the senior college. we are windows fans and were continually down in the technicians office because our macs were freezing or crashing more often then working. we eventually got so annoyed with them that we talked to the tech and the deputy principal in charge of IT about getting boot camp on them and after a bit of convincing we all got it installed and loved it. we found that the macs could not operate more than three programs at once (if that) easily and that was what the problem was. With all of our school work as we consistently had to multi task but found that the laptops couldn't keep up. They also operated very slow and opening programs in mac was terrible, Microsoft word in OSX took 1 minute 48 seconds to open and Windows took 8 seconds. the same kind of thing happened with the Macromedia applications like Fireworks and Flash (Flash took 3:24 and Fireworks took 4:16) everything operated slow and the network connections were terrible in OSX they were always dropping out. The batteries rarely ever last three hours of use even with the battery update and being set to power saving. i had never used a mac before i went to that school and now im wishing it stayed that way! i love my windows pc i have a 14 year old laptop running windows 3.1 and it still works with no trouble and the same thing goes for my xp desktop which is only two years old. By the way im a gamer and my mac could barely run halo yet my friends spare desktop (which is a server) can run it fine and it only has a 800mhz processor and a 16mb onboard video card with 300mb of RAM and can run the game fine but the mac lagged whenever there was a large amount of objects on the screen and the physics played up every now and then. so no offence to you mac fans but i dont know what you see in mac. and as this is already getting long i wont start on my experiences with ipods. which i won one of for making an animation and i sold to my mums bf so that i could buy a creative mp4 player. but yeah now we are just waiting to finish school so we can get our uni degrees and finish our own operating system!
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