Why are we mac users so in love and passionate with apple? what nerves in our brain are twitched?
When I started using computers, they were pigs — all command-line interfaces with arcane key combinations, and incomprehensible geek jargon in the instructions that would go on and on to describe the simplest function.
The instructions for computers were written to impress other geeks, not the end user whose life didn't revolve around the bloody things. They forced the user to conform to some geek's notion of his own geekabilities, the logic of which, to me and countless others, was completely lacking: Never do in one step what you can do in five or six, and if you make a typo, kiss all your work, and possibly the system, goodbye. And never explain in 10 words when you can use 100 or 1,000.
When the Macintosh came along — I used it first with System 6 — the rug under the foundation of the closed computer priesthood was yanked from under it. That era should be considered the beginning of the Reformation. The echoes of this battle against vested-interest computer priests still reverberate, most noticeably in IT departments the world over.
The Macintosh was logical. It made sense. It was easy to use and easy to maintain, and the results it produced knocked the best that could be achieved with the geeks' beloved command-line interface into the dustbin of history. Who could run a command-line-only Photoshop? Who would want to?
Windows, of course, tried to emulate the Mac, always playing catch-up, or trying to. But with Windows, the command line psychology still reigned supreme. The mindset that produced it — along with a single click or two that could hose the entire system — cast its long, anti-innovation shadow onto what is supposed to be a friendly graphical user interface. With Windows, it was anything but.
Even Windows' instruction manuals reflected this, most of them being as bad as some of the worst in the height of the command-line era. It took authors who wrote books on Macs to write Windows books before these invariably droning tomes disappeared. Even now, the best books on Windows are written by Mac experts — David Pogue and Robin Williams, to name only two.
Windows was never as good as the Mac. Using Windows was like riding a horse-drawn streetcar as the Mac sports cars and limos whizzed past.
And using Windows was never
fun. The culture of Microsoft banned and still bans fun. Its mobster-like psychology was focused on the ruthless crushing of its competition and the ancillary "little people" who got in its way. It used methods unseen since the days of the robber barons, then the Chicago mob, by ignoring those laws passed since 1900 meant to prevent it from happening again. Many of the people who ran Microsoft then are running it now. A list of those victimized by Microsoft extends well beyond the companies and developers cheated by it. It extends to its customers, big and small, who have been cheated by it and are continuing to be cheated by it.
Windows has always been a third-rate OS concocted by a bloated, sociopathic organization, and nothing in Vista shows that that has changed. I wouldn't be even the inconsequential Mac "evangelist" that I am if it weren't for Microsoft. But Microsoft exists and so does this board, and now this post as an answer to the question that itself likely wouldn't have been asked if it weren't for Microsoft.
I'm not blind to Apple's many shortcomings. But destroying fun isn't one of them.