I have to admit it — I was one of the folks posting about Steve Jobs’ WWDC speech on Twitter today. And checking for updates on the speech while I was at lunch with my sister (so was she.) And we decided on our lunch destination just because it happened to be about a block from Huntsville’s new Apple Store.
Yes, as my coworkers said today, I’m such a nerd. Moreover, I am an Apple nerd. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned while earning my OJ levels (stands for Operating Jobs-ist) is that there are three kinds of people in this world — the people who worship Macs, the people who make fun of the people who worship Macs, and the people who have no clue what a Mac or a PC is, except that the one in the commercials is the cute guy dating Drew Barrymore and the other is that weird guy who shows up on the Daily Show once in awhile.
I should not be a part of the first group. I’m a programmer who learned my first code from my aunt, who was programming when mainframes still had vacuum tubes. Everything I learned was straight from command lines. Aunt S. did not believe in user interfaces — MS-DOS was good enough. I’m fairly certain she didn’t break down and get Windows until the late ’90s.
But there are two things that every Apple product has given me that PC hardware hasn’t (including godawful Windows Mobile):
1) The ability to use it out of the box without a great deal of drama and a minimum of documentation reading. If I have to have a guidebook to get there, I’m probably not going to enjoy the trip.
2) Never letting me down in the end.
Sure, there’s been disappointments. There’s a big beige doorstop in my closet that was the very last version of Performa sold in stores. It cost about $3,000 at Best Buy and was severely incompatible with any software that came out even six months afterwards. Apple had this nasty habit of “upgrading” frequently and expecting folks to just swallow hard and plop down another $2,000.
But I couldn’t do that, and still can’t do that. Which is why I greatly appreciate that my beloved MacBook can still do anything I throw at it, two years after purchase (and with relatively minor upgrades that were necessitated by being too cheap to upgrade the RAM when I bought it and too dumb to realize that Leopard was not going to play nice with a full hard drive.) Every journalist should seriously consider buying a work MacBook, just because it tends to cause a lot less heartache than the newsroom PC’s and because they’ll last a long time as long as you treat it right. In TV news, where cameras and tape decks break daily, dependability and durability makes or breaks a video journalist.
And even when the Performa was outdated, it still was a dream to operate. No fragmentation, few hard crashes and installation was a matter of sticking a disk in. Whereas every PC I’ve owned has been an exercise in defragging, constantly digging out hidden files in the caches or the file systems, and endless, endless crashes. And I’m not even touching the subject of native apps. There are days at work (actually, most days) that I would gladly like to take my POS system with POS Internet Explorer and throw it out the window (this is where the station’s location atop a mountain would come in handy.) I’ve never had that feeling with a Mac.
There is a good case to be made that Macs are overpriced because of the shiny and the hype. I wish they made a $699 basic lappie like Dell does. Who doesn’t? But I do know that when I bought my MacBook (named Amelie) and my Mac Mini (named iDoc) and my video iPod (named Cameron) I could take them home, plug them in and get to work doing what I really wanted to be doing, which is not installing drivers and third-party crap. And all of them have made their money back in in time productivity. And yes, they’re shiny and pretty. I’m not sure when attractiveness in computer equipment became such a crime amongst “purists”.
Finally, the programmer in me can pull up Terminal and TextMate and go to town. Previously I had been programming PHP and Java Scripts and most of my bare HTML only on PC’s (yes, I still have a couple of stragglers on my desk.) But now I’m rediscovering the joys of CSS on the Mac because it’s so suited to a visual sitebuilding experience. And I’m having a ball teaching myself Ruby and Python through Leopard’s built-in support. Yes, even on the flashy GUI you can wrestle the bare code and get satisfaction. Take that, Aunt S.
So I plan to buy my first iPhone on July 11 as an early birthday present. I was too broke to buy the first model, as I’ve been on Apple’s first version of everything (remember the $3,500 G2’s?) But now it’s at a pricepoint where I can buy it and justify breaking my Verizon contract. And I will be the happiest sheep in the herd, because I know it’s going to work perfectly with Amelie and iDoc and anything Apple convinces me I need as peripherals down the road. Most of all, I have faith in Steve Jobs that it won’t let me down.
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