Posted on 06/20/2005 8:42:07 PM PDT by quidnunc
Not since Walter Mondale suggested that he might raise taxes have I had such a terrible, sick, sinking sensation deep in the pit of my stomach.
Things like the Michael Jackson verdict, using Christina Aguilera’s music to torture prisoners at Gitmo and the rising cost of gasoline are inconsequential compared to Apple Computers’ abrupt surrender to Intel.
This is serious business. To put things into perspective, my devotion to the Macintosh is of an intensity similar to Paul Greenberg’s feelings for "the South."
This has been going on since 1987. I think my first Mac was called an SE, and it had one full MB of RAM and two floppy disk drives. There was no internal hard drive, so you had to save whatever you did on floppies.
Of course, there was a keyboard and the trademark mouse. IBM people just detested the mouse. Somehow, using that thing made traditionalist computer geeks feel less professional and superior, but Mac people never cared. We just wanted to get our work done.
I paid $3,400 for that first system, and that was in 1987 dollars. We’re talking real money, folks. There was not much software for the Macintosh, but Mac-Draw and MacPaint made ordinary people into (drum roll, please!) MacArtists. The word processing program was known as—what else?—MacWrite, and it set the standard for a decade.
All the while, IBM folks were scrambling to learn weird and incomprehensible codes. Life was good.
After awhile, I decided to add on a 20 MB external hard drive. That cost $400, but it was so much more convenient than shuffling all those dadgum floppies. I vividly recall the serene sense of empowerment derived from possessing such unprecedented storage capacity. The 10-inch screen and processor fit in a case, and the display was black-andwhite.
Mac users become personally involved in the life of their computer and are always trying to improve its operating environment. In due time, I also expanded the RAM to 4 MB, and that probably cost $300.
When you pop open the case of one of those old Macs, the signatures of the original design team are represented on the interior surface, including that of Apple’s founder, Mr. Steve Jobs, the traitor.
Jobs may someday be excused for crossing over to the dark side, but those of us who have come up through the ranks are not happy people. While we were paying more for a more stable and useful operating system, those rascals on the other team were stealing the clever desktop analogy. They even added a mouse.
We went through a lot to stay loyal to the superior computer. My present iMac G3 is the first Macintosh I have ever owned that had an internal modem. Friends, this little puppy has a 500-MHz processor, which was scalding hot when it was new three years ago. If you watched the Apple commercials, you know that it was registered as a national defense secret or something like that. That is one reason this switcheroo is so bewildering.
The iMac G5 desktop computer is a thing of beauty. Its PowerPC processor is an engineering triumph, except for one little thing. It’s too darned hot. That really matters on laptops, which are supposedly the biggest selling models.
Macintosh has been held back one full generation with a G4 PowerBook, which is just a cat’s hair slower.
It is a business decision for Apple to make nice with Intel, but I don’t have to like it. Usually, when I am informed that some action was purely a "business decision," I have just gotten the shaft, so excuse the skepticism.
When you think about brand loyalty, remember Macintosh, "the computer for the rest of us." Its superior operating system and amazing stability have far outweighed the expense and inconvenience, but it would be nice to see the corporation display a tiny bit of sensitivity to the folks who consistently give this company a 3 percent share of the personal computer market. That may not sound like much, but Steve Jobs seems to be doing OK.
We mere customers are now left to wonder about whether our software will work on the next generation. Should I buy a Mac to replace this aging G3? These are also provocative business decisions.
Memo to Mr. Jobs: Change is always bad. Uncertainty is worse.
I'm not sure those words
go together. And, besides,
real sane programmers
might prefer to use
a niche machine for their first
implementation
because then they get
reasonable feedback first,
before porting to
the more wide open
and uncontrolled Windows world.
(That having been said,
for the life of me
since PageMaker came and went,
I can't think of one
program that started
on the Mac and is still strong
in the Windows world!)
Must be the weather :)
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