The Big Switch to Mac part 1 – a discussion of Apple
So after a number of years of Windows system administration I jumped from the good ship Redmond and bought myself an Apple Mac. Now if you like me have ever gone into any Starbucks in a major city or town you will have seen Them. You know Them the smug look, the very bohemian attitude with every. little. thing. Just. So. The centre piece of this smugness? normally the Apple Mac they are on. As with nearly all Apple products there seems to be a very studied approach, a very deliberate attempt to be cool, and you know what it seems to be working out for them.
Think back a few years to when the iPod first came out, the MP3 is just taking off and Apple, who were at that point were not long come from a spell of making utterly horrible products have just welcomed Steve Jobs, one of the founders of apple, back to the fold. He brought with him a new focus – Design. This design focus has two objectives: firstly to create a desirable product and secondly to make the user interface as easy to use as possible. These two principles are summed up in the Ipod, the simple clean lines, the revolutionary interface made it an instant hit with people as they hadn’t seen anything like it before. Even people who were not normally gadget orientated (and shame on them!) wanted to be part of this, they too wanted a piece of the ineffable cache of cool that the Ipod seemed to represent, and so a phenomenon was born.
But everything isn’t so simple as that was it? No, with the launch of the iPod came the launch of iTunes which, love it or hate it, is now the biggest music retailer in the States which is a fairly big claim for a company who had never made a music player or online service before. It was a very smart move by apple to integrate a music store with the software you use to manage your iPod. That being said however they did cop for some flak as they tied your music purchase in with DRM or Digital Rights Management, it is essentially a copy protection but something I will go into more in a future post as it is slightly off topic for this piece. However even with this flak it marked an upturn in the fortunes for Apple.
The Mac resurgence continued with the iMac. If you watch any American based TV you will have seen one, an all in one computer that looks like a screen with a lamp base (or it did at the time). Again a simple an elegant design that most importantly is not a beige box with another beige box attached to it for a screen. The iMac was white and curvy and again was projecting the a factor of cool as it looked and was different.
The final three stages of Apples resurgence came in the following items: The Intel Dual Core Processor; the Macbook and the iPhone.
When Apple announced they were dropping their previous chip lines and moving to Intel chips the geek world was all of a chatter, most of which your host ignored with an air of complete indifference – “so the Mac’s now use Intel chips, so what PCs have had them for years” and then went on with my day. I had really missed the point. With the adoption of the Intel chips makers of PC software suddenly had a really god idea how to make their programs run on Mac hardware, and makers of emulation software would be able to make Windows run on the Mac. As a change of direction it was huge and ushered in a wave of new development.
This new development included the Macbook, which to this day remains the best selling Mac Apple have ever produced. Take a look at the Macbook and again there is that “cool” factor we have been discussing. It has very simple lines which are not disrupted with ports for this that and other strewn willy nily around the case meaning it has a very distinctive look, and of course has the Fruit logo set inverted on the lid so that when you open the screen you announce to the world just what you are using. But if you actually sit an look at what is inside these machines you may be surprised as they generally feature more power then a desk top at the time and included wireless, Bluetooth fire wire, an integrated webcam and either DVD/CD Writer or DVD/DVD writer on on all the models. A very high spec for what is for most of the range a 13.3” (or 33.78cm for our metric friends) laptop. The spec and the software (another post) made for a very attractive package.
Lastly we come to the iphone, an object which at its heart is a phone, you make calls on it and everyone wants one. Including me. Again there is Apple’s design principals at work, a simple non fussy casing with an elegant user interface. Damnit them it is like crack…. The latest iteration of the iPhone is of course the iPhone 3g which won so many awards for :gadget of the year” last year I think Apple must have been sick of the awards and have given up counting. At this point I am going to stop talking about it however as currently I am an informed spectator where as soon I will be an owner so will talk about it more then.
One of the things I have avoided talking about so far is the price as this is normally the argument that people make against Apple products, however I will cover this but again it will be in a future post.
The next few posts are likely to be continuing this subject with a discussion about the Mac software and my experiences and frustrations so far as another post, so join me for our continuance in a couple of days. As right now I am off for a vodka and some food.
