MacPrices.net

The Mac Mystique - If I have To Explain It To You, You May Never Understand

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

by Charles W. Moore

Last week I posted a retro-flavored comparo profile of a circa 2000 IBM ThinkPad A20m and the contemporaneous Apple PowerBook G3 2000 FireWire, aka Pismo. While the IBM notebook had its virtues - very solid, rugged construction, an excellent standard of finish, easy hard drive swapping, and a nice keyboard, the choice between the two, for me, would be a no-brainer. The user experience with the Mac is just in another dimension when it comes to.... well, “elegance” is the customary and probably the most appropriate one-word descriptor.

That evaluation would carry right across the Mac vs. Windows PC dichotomy right up to the present day. I’ve played with Windows Vista a bit on a fast desktop PC. I wasn’t impressed. The Windows interface is still plug-ugly, and I much prefer the Mac OS navigation and command conventions, although I’ll concede on the latter that it is no doubt partly a matter of accommodation and familiarity. Still, I don’t perceive any Vista features or functionality that make me say “Wow; I wish OS X had that.” And did I mention that it’s ugly. Ugleeeee! As Steve Jobs once reportedly observed: “The only problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste. They have absolutely no taste.”

Another thing - backwards compatibility. The Pismo does a fine job of running the latest OS 10.4.9 version of Mac OS X. I happen to be typing these words on a Pismo running OS 10.4.9, and while it does have a 550 MHz G4c processor upgrade, that’s still the same clock speed as the Celeron chip in the IBM A20m, and I shudder to think what that machine would be like attempting to run Vista, if you could get it to install at all. I’ve also used OS 10.4.9 on a stock 500 MHz G3 Pismo, and it’s a more than decent performer there as well.

I’m picking up this thread again this week because I happened to read Simon Brocklehurst’s Technology Blog on the weekend, this entry entitled: ”Apple Laptop Sales Are Spectacular… But Why?” Simon says:

“Apple is enjoying spectacular success with its laptops, growing sales much faster than the laptop market as a whole. The company just posted 94 year-on-year growth in retail notebook sales. But why? What do people see in Apple laptops?

I ask because, whatever it is that people see in these laptops, I don’t see it myself. I don’t see that either the MacBook or the MacBook Pro look particularly stylish or desirable (compared to other laptops on the market). In fact, in many ways, they look rather old-fashioned and sometimes badly designed (e.g. white is not a sensible choice for a portable computer - it looks grimy pretty quickly). The specifications aren’t anything to write home about either (unless I’m missing something).

So, why are the sales increasing so rapidly? I don’t get it. Every time I get to thinking that I might want to buy an Apple laptop, I walk into the store; take a look; and then walk right out thinking, “No, I just don’t like this…’”

Well, it’s unclear whether or not Simon has spent any time working in OS X, but my inference is that he probably hasn’t. If he was on a Mac for a few days, he might have an easier time getting it, but not necessarily.

One of the abiding enigmas of computer life for me is folks who actually do learn the Mac (and I mean an up-to-date Mac and not some old SE or LC or Performa they remember from grade school) and still profess to prefer Windows. In my experience such individuals are rare, and most PC users I’ve known personally who switched to the Mac quickly became enthusiasts - even Mac evangelists - but Mac-experienced Windows fans do exist. All I can say is that if I have to explain Mac Mystique to you, your prospects of ever “:getting it” are probably not very lively.

That said, there are a whole lot of objective factors that point to the superiority of the Mac platform - both OS and hardware.

One of the biggies is malware, or the virtual absence of it as a serious empirical concern on the Mac, at least so far. The vast majority of Mac users don’t bother with anti-virus software and never miss it. While there have been a few “proof-of-concepts” demonstrating that OS X is not technically immune, in a practical sense, after six years of consumer use, OS X is still unscathed by the malware onslaught that benights the Windows orbit. For hassle-averse me, that factor alone would incline me heavily toward the Mac.

There is more - a lot more.

OS X is not perfect, but it comes closer than any other personal computer operating system so far. I am astonished that Microsoft spent some seven years developing Longhorn/Vista, with the advantage of OS X to copy, and still came up with another steaming pile of an OS that is so unmistakably and depressingly Windows-esque. The biggest reason of all to use a Mac (incorporating the relative malware immunity) is the Mac OS, which is solid, stable, powerful, user-friendly, and an all-round superior productivity tool. It also looks great. Did I mention that Vista is sooooooooo ugly?

And OS X works in closely interwoven harmony with Mac hardware, a degree of integration between hardware and OS that simply doesn’t exist on any Windows PC. (However, OS X is superior even running on PC hardware, as a friend of mine who managed to install Tiger on a Pentium-based Dell can affirm).

Simon mentions hardware aesthetics, saying he doesn’t think “MacBook or the MacBook Pro look particularly stylish or desirable.” Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I’ll happily concede that there are some very attractively styled and appointed Windows PC laptops out there. I am personally quite smitten with Acer’s Ferrari series, Asustek’s Lamborghini notebooks, and ThinkPads have always been reasonably tasteful-looking. If OS X would run on these machines, I might be tempted. But it doesn’t (at least unhacked), so for me its a dead issue.

And there are no flies on Apple’s notebook designs. Yes, the MacBook Pros in particular date back in appearance to the 17” PowerBook of January, 2003 and the 15” PowerBook of September, 2003, but when you get it right, there’s no reason to change for the sake of change, and Apple got it right with the aluminum PowerBook/MacBook Pro form factor. It’s not as flashy (some might say rococo garish) as certain Windows laptops, or as plain-vanilla boring as the ubiquitous Dells, but it’s a look that grows on you and wears well, as tasteful and elegant industrial designs do. Think the now 41-year-old shape of the Porsche 911.

As for Simon’s parry about white cases being an element of alleged “bad design,” I’ve owned a white iBook for more than four years, and it’s still my principal road warrioring laptop. It still looks great. There’s a minor scuff on the front edge of the lid, but it’s certainly not grubby, and in point of fact, I find the matte black finish of my Pismo more of a challenge to keep looking spiffy than the white iBook.

My daughter dragged her G4 iBook through five or six countries of Europe in the summer of 2005, and now has it with her in Japan. It still looked nice after the European jornada and two years as her college workhorse.

Personally, white would be my preference for a notebook computer, but if one is not partial to white, only two of the six currently available standard configurations of Mac notebooks are white anyway.

There’s still more. Connecting peripherals to a Mac is still the closest to no-hassle plug-and-play as is available with any personal computer, with driver installs a relative rarity (but they usually work without difficulty when they are required.) Digital cameras just plug in and mount on the OS X Desktop, or with iPhoto if you prefer, making the lack of built-in memory card readers mostly irrelevant. If you really want or need on, they are available inexpensively as USB peripherals.

Sound support in the Mac OS is superb and also no-hassle. It just works. iTunes and iPod support are integrated into the OS X experience.

So is WiFi support. Enter a WiFi hotspot with a Mac notebook and you’re online with a few clicks.

Which segues us into all the functionality you get built into the Mac notebook which in many cases pretty much erases any up-front price advantage a Windows box might enjoy. Airport Extreme, Bluetooth, FireWire (400 and 800 on the MacBook Pros), iSight cameras and Front Row, the incredible inventory of software bundled with the Mac OS, scrolling trackpads and sudden motion sensors, illuminated keyboards on the MacBook Pros, and so forth.

However, perhaps the biggest factor in the Mac notebook sales surge currently underway is, er, ahem..... the Intel Macs’ ability to run Windows natively facilitated by Apple’s Boot Camp or the third-party Parallels virtualization software. This has eliminated the obstacle to Mac ownership of the necessity to run certain Windows-only applications for work-related tasks that previously obtained. I think most people who use the Mac platform-ambidextrously will end up spending most of their discretionary time on the Mac side, but you don;t have to deprive yourself of the advantages of Mac-userdom in order to have Windows compatibility any more.

Elegance, elegance, elegance. Elegant looks; elegant function. An OS that functions superbly as a productivity tool without getting in the way, becoming infected with malware, or nattering at you with “wizards” and other unsolicited “help” at every whipstitch. A machine that won’t go obsolete in a couple (or even half a dozen) years. If all that doesn’t speak to you, than you’ll probably never “get it.” Go figure.

CM