itssamuel.com is the home of Samuel Cotterall, a web designer & developer from the north west of England.

In the days running up to Apple’s 30th birthday (April 1st) I have noticed something brewing in the murky depths of the blogosphere. It’s hysteria.

It’s worse than usual. Normally, whenever someone whispers over at Apple HQ there must be an exciting product about to be unveiled, or speculation about some deal with another company, or rumors that Steve Jobs is going to quit, or whatever.

Ok. I’ll admit it, even as someone who hardly ever touches Apple products I get excited about releases. I’ll go to the extent of taking time away from whatever I’m doing to watch one of the (now infamous) “Stevenotes“. I find Apple fascinating - the “cult of Mac” (as the Wired blog is called) is more interesting than half it’s products (I find it hard to get excited about an iPod for instance). No one, apart from the press, gets excited about a Microsoft product - they just come and go, it’s six months before we upgrade and all we do is pick faults in it. I tested an early beta version of Windows “Longhorn” in college (two years ago) and that’s about as much of Vista as I know. That’s as much as I am interested in.

So, with speculation around Apple’s birthday surprises (new Intel iBooks? Limited edition iMacs? iPhone? 30% discounts?) and concerns about the future of the company (to concentrate on iTunes? Jobs to quit? Jobs sells of 15% of stock! Mac to run Windows?!) I thought I’d take a look and see what makes Apple different…

Geek Chic

Apple is sexy. Well, it has been for the last ten years - I remember being sat on a beach in Abersoch, North Wales, some time in the late 90’s, reading some Sunday magazine. In it there was a competition to win one of those iBook G3 clamshell things. It was a competition for kids to enter, where you had to draw someone skateboarding (I think it was a competition for Vans shoes…). I knew I had to have one of these! I wouldn’t have known what to do with it, but I wanted one. Being a dab hand with a felt-tip pen I started my entry right away - but, alas, I didn’t win.

See, Apple is one of those Ikea like companies. It may have not been particularly practical (no floppy disk?!) but it did come in a rather cool transparent white/orange case. Apple is to Ikea what IBM is to MFI. Seriously, go round either of the stores and have a look at the fake plastic computers!

We simply don’t see this sort of aesthetic beauty from a PC company, be it hardware or software. Lian Li make some pretty beautiful computer cases, but at the end of the day, you are probably going to combine them with a boring operating system, ugly peripherals, then hide it away under a desk.

But how can I talk about beautiful hardware design without mentioning the iPod - Apple’s biggest selling product of the last few years. And why does it sell? Because it’s cool.

There are loads of iPods like devices out there and some are cheaper yet technically better than some iPods - but do they have the same iconic status as that curved white brick that fills the pockets of seemingly everyone? No they don’t. The iPod is a success because of it’s chic appeal (mixed with a great sound, and a really good interface, of course).

iLifestyle

I read somewhere the other day a bunch of statistics and facts about Apple users (if anyone has the URL, please let me know) where it basically made them out to be smarter, more creative, more likely to do well in college, more likely to live in a hip city.

You look at someone really dull, someone who’s job is more concerned with profit than it is doing a good job, someone who probably hasn’t read any good books and has terrible taste in music - it’s a Windows user isn’t it? Yes? I thought so. That wasn’t just based on the fact that Microsoft have more computers on more desktops than Apple, Linux, BSD and Sun combined - but because that’s what Windows does: it caters for the needs and lifestyles of dull people.

Apple users have more pizazz (it’s not often I get to use that word). Everyone wants to be like that. You see them in trendy coffee shops with their PowerBooks, wearing clothes that co-ordinate perfectly and ordering something way more extravagant than the guy with the Toshiba who stumbles in with his pathetic looking black nylon laptop bag, spends ten minutes taking off his coat and scraping his chair across the floor before the obligatory full-volume Windows startup tune kicks in.

It’s a “togetherness” thing. Greater connectivity, all-in-on-ness and simplicity - that’s the key. I like the idea of something “working straight out of the box” - which is what I have always expected from computers (that’s why I have a laptop) - life is less cluttered and more streamlined. I don’t have any statistics that prove that things go wrong any less with a Mac, but what I do know is that you never hear a Mac user referring to it’s computer as a “stupid piece of shit”.

Ease Of Use

That brings me nicely onto my next point: Macintosh are so simple.

I have fixed hundreds of computers, I have studied hardware and software for a few years, and I know that 90% of the time someone refers to that dull grey box under the desk as a “stupid piece of shit” it is actually his/her fault. This is where my problem lies with Windows: people don’t know how to use it properly.

I have been using it for the last ten years and there are things I still can’t figure out how to do - I can’t remember where things are in menus, or why I can’t change the property of something at certain times - it’s cluttered. There is, even in Windows XP Home, too much technical stuff too close to the user: I really wished Microsoft shipped Windows with minimum user privileges enabled, to protect stupid people from themselves.

This is what works with the Mac and Mac OS - simplicity. Click, done.

Believe The Hype

It’s a bit of everything pushing everything else. Firstly you have Apple producing great computers that people want to buy, and they are so good that people adore them, and people who adore their Macs also adore the Internet.

People who adore the Internet are the ones that write the blogs, participate in the forums, and start the rumors, which start the hype.

Apple events create a frenzy - people assume that Apple are going to release something because one person posted it in his blog. I haven’t heard anything from Apple about the “iPhone” (but I have seen hundreds of different computer generated images of them…) so I don’t know where the idea came from. I say this but I too am willing to make my bets on the next release, but I’m playing it safe (and seeing as Apple said they were moving all their current line to Intel by the end of the year…) and saying we’ll see the iBook’s replacement, but it will be simply called the “MacBook” (after Apple said they wanted all their computers to include the word “Mac”).

So, as either you can imagine, or you know first hand, there is quite a lot of speculation on the run up to an event - the Mac fanboy forums’ bandwidth is maxed out with wild assumptions, Technorati’s top tag is “Apple” and twentysomethings around the world are hammering CTRL + R to see the first glimpse of a new product.

But whatever Apple deliver is wrong in the eyes of every Mac user on the planet (Two button mouse?!?! Only DVI?! No 12″ or 17″?! “MacBook Pro”… Eugh!!) - things go back to normal and the whole thing starts again.

See, these products aren’t bad. The Intel Macs are a huge success so far, and the Mighty Mouse (from everyone I know who uses one) is the best thing since slices bread. Apple make brilliant products, only Apple users are afraid of change, which I suppose is the cause/effect of having a Mac.

Individualism

I hope that’s a word. Apple has a minority share of the desktop computing market therefore to own one makes you slightly more individual than someone who, say, plays the guitar. Everyone likes to be individual, and be more into something than someone else.

Creative types like musicians, artists, web designers tend to be quite individual (in the sense that they don’t want to sit in an office typing data into spreadsheet for the rest of their working lives) and Apple cater for them perfectly.

As a former Linux geek I can appreciate this. I would read Linux Magazine every month, and I even had a sticker of Tux on my college folder and I’d mock people who don’t understand it. And I’d find myself saying things like “Do it in Dreamweaver?! They don’t make Dreamweaver for Linux! I’ll be using VI thank you very much!” in class, just so the lecturer knew I was running an “alternative” operating system.

This, I believe, is the thing that drives Apple fans. Why would they evangelise to people who already know about Apple products? They don’t: they evangelise to people who’s computer isn’t as exciting as theirs in a loud voice in public places so that other Mac users (or just anyone they want to impress) might overhear. Have you ever told your friend about a really cool yet obscure band in a loud voice in a record shop, just to make sure everyone else knows that you know more about music?

End Note

I have no problems with any of the other companies mentioned in this text - and I have owned/do own products by them all and if I thought they were bad products I would have said so. I love my Windows XP ThinkPad.

Nice Links

http://www.apple.com/
http://blog.wired.com/cultofmac/
http://www.macrumors.com/
http://www.macworld.co.uk/
http://daringfireball.net/
http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/

Tags: Apple, Mac, iPod, Microsoft.