Everything that's Wrong with Apple: Wired on Mac's 20th Birthday · 625 words posted 01/07/2004 11:06 AM
Happy birthday! The Macintosh is 20 years old.
Let me prove my pro-Apple creds right now, because I’m about to rant. I love Apple computers. I still own a working Apple //c, as well as the Macintosh PowerBook Duo 210 that carried me through law school over 10 years ago. I wouldn’t part with my iBook running Panther (on which I am typing this blog entry), and one of my biggest clients is rolling out approximately 30,000 iBooks to the students of a New England state. Finally, I think Exposé windowing is the coolest UI innovation in a decade.
Wired has posted numerous goo-goo love notes to Apple in the form of articles, but the most illustrative (in the sense that it inadvertently highlights almost everything wrong with Apple, straight from the mouths of Apple supporters) is We’re All Mac Users Now. Here are representative quotes:
Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple:
It’s real easy to see that every computer in the world’s a Macintosh.
Well, sort of, in the sense that most GUIs are inspired by Macs. But in the sense that matters (market share), Apple has only 2% of desktop computers. Thus, Mr. Wonziak’s quote corrected for accuracy should read:
It’s real easy to see one in every fifty computers in Western Europe and the United States is a Macintosh.
From Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun and co-creator of Berkeley Unix:
I would have taken it [an OS based on Unix with a usable interface] sooner, of course, but with the alternative being using Windows—the OS equivalent of junk food—I am sure glad that I have the choice of Mac.
Underlying Mr. Joy’s statement is the idea that Windows is fine for the hoi polloi, but for you and me, for those of us in the know, Mac is the way to go. This idea is related to the hoary contention that Apple has roughly the same market share as BMW; thus, Apple is doing just fine, thanks.
From Bob Metcalfe, founder of 3 Com:
My hero Steve Jobs figured out how to bring Xerox’s ground-breaking bit-mapped/ windows/ mouse/ icon/ laser-printing/ hard-disk/ Ethernet technology to market, hitting the right price points and with style.
While I agree with Mr. Metcalfe’s assessment of the Mac style, his assertion on price point is demonstrably wrong: if Macs had a better price point, they would occupy more than 2% of the market. Macs have almost always been more expensive than comparable Windows machines.
From Tim O’Reilly:
Apple has been able to reinvent itself because it has what is, at bottom, an aesthetic vision, rather than one that is solely based on profit and loss.
Hello? Apple (AAPL) is a publicly traded company. It has a legal and ethical responsibility to its shareholders to take profit and loss very seriously. Many of the men interviewed by Wired are multimillionaires who have become wealthy by innovating and competing aggressively in the marketplace. To court financial success on the one hand while disdaining it on the other is simply disingenuous.
Taken in the aggregate, the quotes from the Wired article depict Apple as a baldly elitist platform. Ironically, two of its primary markets are students and creatives—two demographics that may be unusually sensitive to branding but may not have the resources to afford a Mac.
Anniversaries can occasion two reactions: first, the sort of feel good, self-congratulatory thinking evinced in the quotes above; and second, critical self-reflection that asks: what did we get right, what did we get wrong, and how can we better ourselves before the next anniversary? Much of the world is moving to Linux as Windows scrambles to maintain dominance. If Apple and Mac are to celebrate future birthdays as anything more than niche bystanders, Apple needs to ask itself the hard questions.
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