OSNews

My new machine shipped with XP. It was very fast, it had lots of memory, the disk was absolutely huge, there was lots of software, and I found the user interface different but perfectly acceptable. It was much more complicated than the old Classic, the wizards got on my nerves, but at some level it just worked. The sense it gave me was that the hardware and the software were what Apple people call integrated. There was a well known set routine for installing new hardware, plug in and insert driver disk, after which, it just worked. It was the same with all hardware. Well, with the exception of wireless LAN, which gave me as much trouble on Windows as on Mac.

I carried on reading about Apple and Macs. And I carried on using my iMac. When you have been a committed user and advocate of a platform for so long, your interest doesn't just vanish overnight. Market share had continued to decline, prices had continued to be high. Jobs had returned, however, and the company stabilized. I became increasingly aware, as the Jobs resurgence got under way, of a curious and disturbing phenomenon. It was hard to say exactly what was happening to Apple, but whatever it was, it made one deeply uneasy. Perhaps the first sign was the appearance of the LCD iMac. Why, one wondered, do we have a round base? How much did that cost? What real use is it? The Cube was another worry. A friend of mine, who had been a senior manager in Apple Europe, bought one. Then he found to his surprise and dismay that he couldn't use his screen with it, and had to buy a completely new screen. The connectors were not standard. Why? You had to wonder, was the inability to source hardware from anywhere but Apple great for the buyer and for Apple, or just great for Apple? Was it even all that good for Apple?

My wife bought me a new Apple keyboard and optical (one button) mouse as a present. The price was at least 4 or 5 times what comparable PC components would have cost, and for what? The new towers came out in pretty shades of pastel and perspex and sounded like jet engines taking off. We kept hearing about the superiority of the PPC; the advertising claims, which seemed incredible, became more strident, and finally were ruled to be false by the UK authorities. My friend's Cube looked elegant and different, but was underpowered and pretty soon was overheated.

It seemed that we had a combination of two things which may appear to have little to do with each other: a reliance on lifestyle marketing, and consequently lifestyle product design, and a continuing committment to locking the hardware and software together, and locking the customer into Apple hardware. The result was higher prices for less performance, but heavier marketing, and marketing of a different sort.

When you joined Internet forums on which Apple was discussed, you became aware of an even more disturbing but related phenomenon. I only later realised what it was. The symptom was an increasing rudeness and intolerance and hostility towards any other platforms. And it was couched in lifestyle terms. Windows machines were ridiculed for being boring beige boxes. Windows users were the subject of snobbish jibes. Contemptuous references to Walmart appeared. Macs kept being compared to high end designer brands, in particular to cars. If you chose differently, it was because you had no taste, no class.

BMWs appeared to have a particular fascination for the Mac aficionado. You didn't know whether to laugh or cry. The chorus of people who seemed to think that Macs were high class, and that buying them was a route to social mobility, was astounding. Could there really be so many people who were so naive about how social class really works in America? And could so many of them be Mac users? I shivered a bit at the thought. You could understand why Hypercard had withered, if this was now Apple's target market.

Finally at the end of the period, one would see flat out lies, and a chorus of abuse when they were refuted. Posters would assert that Macs were cheaper, peformed better, had better components, when it was clear that they were more expensive, performed worse on most benchmarks, and mostly had the identical components. In some ways, they had worse ones. Lifestyle marketing had entered the design process and corrupted it. We now had cases made of dysfunctional material, with interiors arranged for aesthetic appeal rather than cooling efficiency or noise reduction. We had wild and silly claims about productivity. We had a constant rewriting of history. For example, it was now admitted that OSX 10.0, which at the time had been greated with applause for its enormous superiority, had been a total dog. This was because the newest greatest thing was 10.2 or 10.3. Similarly, PPC had been the latest and greatest, but after the switch to Intel, it was admitted to have also barked and walked on all fours on occasion.

1. "Why I Will Probably Never Buy Another Mac, 1/5"
2. "Why I Will Probably Never Buy Another Mac, 2/5"
3. "Why I Will Probably Never Buy Another Mac, 3/5"
4. "Why I Will Probably Never Buy Another Mac, 4/5"
5. "Why I Will Probably Never Buy Another Mac, 5/5"