Sunday, November 28, 2010

The Cult of Mac

I still remember the very first time I saw a Macintosh computer. It was January 1986 and I had just been hired as a technical writer by McDonnell-Douglas. The man who hired me was building a team of outside-the-box thinkers and wanted us all to be working on an outside-the-box computer.

So I started writing on a Macintosh Plus. To say I was unimpressed is being kind. This was the beige box with a 9-inch diagonal black and white screen. At least it had an external hard drive to actually store some documents. I wanted a real computer--you know, an IBM PC.

Well, I got past that initial reaction and eventually fell in love with the cute little computer. I even bought one. I even found myself completely immersed  in the cult of Macintosh. We cultists tolerated no criticism of our computer; I once even launched an email attack on the Chicago Tribune’s technology columnist because he damned the Mac OS with faint praise. Poor guy’s inbox was overwhelmed.

By 1995 I owned a PowerBook 190 and was attempting to run a freelance writing business using mostly that machine. Problem is, that machine was spending a lot of time in Apple’s Dallas repair facility.

It was in Dallas more than it was in my home. The cult couldn’t help me at that point.

That’s because, at about the same time, I got a project that involved an animated tutorial. The best software I could find to deliver what the client wanted ran only on Windows. And the price for the project was enough to justify buying a shiny new PC.

I discovered that Windows 95, for all the jokes, was pretty sweet. It was usable and I could deliver files to clients who insisted on PC native files. So I broke up with the Mac. I said good-bye to the cult.

Fast forward to today. I was looking for a small, light laptop with long battery life. Netbooks looked promising, but they seemed slow and underpowered for what I wanted a computer to do. You can beef some of them up, but then you’re spending almost as much as you do for a full-blown laptop.

“Get a Mac” is what I kept hearing. Apple’s making quality again, and Macs just work.

So I bit the bullet. In August I bought the 13-inch MacBook Pro. It supposedly had this long battery life, great keyboard and all sorts of other stuff.

Some things have been great. Macs in the past were difficult to network, and that’s putting it mildly. But the MacBook Pro latched onto our wireless network and Internet connection with just a couple of clicks. All I had to do was name this computer and type in the network password.

But at times the pre-installed Safari browser wouldn’t launch. So I got hold of Firefox and use it instead. But the battery life is about hald what was promised. And the DVD/CD drive choked on a DVD. The computer wouldn’t recognize the drive. I had to reset the System Management Controller, and a person on the Mac support forums said that, yeah, that problem sometimes just happens.

I had forgotten what it was like to deal with the cult. Mac believers will tell you that Macs just work, even when they obviously don’t. That problem sometimes just happens. PC owners bitch and moan about every little glitch in the Windows OS, but Mac owners gloss over them. That sometimes just happens.

Something tells me I won’t be renewing my cult membership anytime soon.

1 comment:

  1. Not quite a cultist, I belong to the larger group of Mac users who know that it's the OS that gives the advantage over MS. However, there are caveats we are aware of:

    1. As Mac hardware became less proprietary, it became more obvious that Apple products are no less prone to HD failures, motherboard issues, and the like. Hyping the product as foolproof magnifies these problems when they do occur. The DVD drive in your laptop is made by Mitsubishi, who makes drives for PCs. The drive issue could be either software or hardware based.

    2. The Mac OS is easier to use, but Apple has been lax in making that point to new users. There is no obvious place that lists Mac keyboard shortcuts, for example. Screen grabs are fairly simple--assuming you know the keys to select.

    The cultlike devotion to Apple is little different from other brand loyalties. Such a level of devotion often requires a certain amount of denial.

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