OSNews

We were told that Linux required you to edit endless configuration files by hand, that XP crashed all the time and was riddled with hardware problems from driver incompatibility. It defied all one's experience. It was simply false. But whenever one objected, a chorus of personal abuse followed. At the end of this period the Intel macs were released. The fact is, they run Photoshop in emulation mode, and very slowly. Point this out, and you will be told how unfair you are being. Unfair to who or what? It's just a fact. If you want to run the package, it is all that matters. But on the forums, to allude to inconvenient facts has become an act. You are defining yourself publicly as an enemy of the people if you do it, on however small a scale.

You could see something very odd happening if you joined the macfixit or macintouch forums, and compared what was said there to what is said outside. The public face is one of hysterical praise. In the public world, the hardware and software are perfect and work perfectly together, and Apple service is second to none and the choice the company gives is all the choice anyone ever needs. In the internal world among friends, the hardware is hot, noisy, poor quality, there are main board problems, memory problems, the software doesn't work properly with it, peformance is a real issue, Apple is unresponsive and dismissive and has very patchy customer service.

The intellectual contortions people forced themselves through on these issues were and are extraordinary. Take for instance the assertion, apparently seriously made, that a MacIntel machine and its OS are one thing, whereas a Dell and its OS are two things. Therefore it would be as irrational for Apple to allow its OS to run on other hardware as it would be for Honda to agree to sell its cars as a collection of parts. What is the proof of this identity? The fact that Apple does not sell the OS separately from the hardware! Or we had what may be called the Mont Blanc argument. It goes, in parody form, Mont Blancs are actually cheaper than PaperMates. It is just that Mont Blanc does not give you the chance to buy less product and spend less money. What extra does Mont Blanc force you to buy? Well, all that packaging and the fine presentation case. But that doesn't make them more expensive, it just makes them sell for more! Or the even more bizarre argument that Apple has higher average margins than Dell not because it has higher markups, but because its average purchase value is higher!

Apple's market share was always on the rise, but never actually increased much. It was always going to dethrone Microsoft, maybe next year. It was said to have 15-20% of the installed base, though it only had had 3% of shipments for years. (Don't ask if this is even possible). This obviously showed shipments were not a reasonable measure of market share and meant nothing. It must be some kind of anti-Apple conspiracy to continue recording them.

I had experienced this sort of thing before. It reminded me of the constant intellectual contortions and the bewildering and disillusioning shifts of the Party Line on the Far Left during the fifties and sixties, where there was a similar gap in portrayals of the East Bloc. In private, the OstBloc had problems. In public, the GDR's athletic success was a clear sign of the superiority of its system. It was not a comfortable comparison. Truth, you felt, has less to do with all this than devotion. But to what? I found the idea of devotion to a company, come what may, very difficult to relate to.

I looked at the industry outside Apple, and was struck by the way that hardware competition had reduced prices and increased availability. The rise of Linux and free software was gathering pace. The Gutenberg project was making progress. As the Apple defenders became increasingly shrill in defence of their chosen company and its chosen model, it seemed to me that the quite different one which was coming to dominate the industry was delivering a revolution in the affordability and availability of computing power, and access to information. Apple was a parasite on this revolution. It used standard cost-reduced components. But it took the savings as margin or marketing expense or to pay for expensive custom packaging, and did not pass them on to its customers. Meanwhile, the open model was quietly eliminating what in the UK had been anxiously referred to as the Digital Divide.

In search of a transportable, quiet machine for my wife, I bought a Shuttle and assembled it from barebones. In the afternoon that it took, I thought hard about hardware quality. The thing was perfectly made and thought out, jewelry was the comparison that came to mind. The heat pipe cooling all fitted together neatly, and when booted up, was almost silent. It was surprisingly cheap, and very easy to work on. This, I thought, is what the first iMac could have been, if they had not been so hung up on having that circular base.

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"