In the fascinating world of Facebook statuses, there are two sure things. If a person posts a temperature as being too hot or too cold to bear, someone, with no regard to geography, season or relativity, will trump it. The other is when a person posts a question or complaint about their PC, one of the comments will be: "Get a Mac".
In the early days, when Mac users really were the quirky minority many of today's Mac fans fondly believe they are, there were some oft-quoted advantages of Apple over PC: Macs are easy to use; they are easy to connect things to; they don't get viruses; and they never crash.
Anybody who has used a Mac for more than a couple of days will know how laughably untrue the last claim is. Macs do crash and they crash a lot. In fact, in three offices I've worked in, the sound of restarting Macs regularly rent the air like howls of anguish. But as for the ease-of-use argument, it's true that PCs used to need a strong whip arm to stay running.
Say "Windows 3.11" to a person of a certain age, and watch their face start to twitch.
But Windows did catch up, and I've used XP for five years without needing to know anything about registry settings or drivers. And as for plug and play — that vaunted Mac feature — everything I've ever plugged into my laptop has just worked. Viruses? I keep my software updated and have never had a problem. (I backed up my data after typing that sentence.) Some people argue that PCs get slower with age, but I know from tooth-grinding experience that Macs do too.
What about the beautiful design, I hear you bellow. One of my former editors once observed of early iMacs, "They're beautiful, but they'll soon look terribly dated." And he was right — those rounded, transparent machines that looked so futuristic even in 2003, now look… well, so last millennium. And let's not even talk about those giant boiled sweets they sold as notebook computers.
New designs
Apple seems to have realised this, and the current aesthetic is less modish transparent plastic, and more classical brushed metal. But how can you churn out startling new designs every season without evaluating how they work in the real world? Remember the little round iMac mouse that looked so cute, but didn't fit any known human hand? Or those beautiful keyboards that had jammed keys in less than a year? And then there's the iMac my mother has on top of a cupboard because of the prohibitive cost of repairing all those non-standard, non-modular parts.
Taking all this into account, I venture that there is no rational basis for all the Apple love. Yet, I succumbed too. I knew Apple's wasn't the most value-for-money, best-equipped or even best-sounding MP3 player out there, but I still bought one for my wife. I didn't want to give her ‘a digital media player' for her birthday, how boring. I wanted to give her ‘an iPod', how cool!
That slappably smug man in the Apple ads only encourages this feeling of running with the cool crowd. But being cool is actually calculated conformism. Cool people might reject a mainstream choice, but cleave like sheep to the conventions of their chosen subculture. (True individualism is too eccentric and gypsy-like to be ‘cool'.) When that subculture goes mainstream, it quickly loses its aura, and the cool crowd moves on. With computers though, there's really nowhere to go but back round again, and that's probably where the cool kids are now: buying Dells and Vaios.
Gautam Raja is a journalist based in the US.
