Published in the Laissez Faire Electronic Times, September 22, 2003
Escape from the Mac Cult
by
Pierre Lemieux
If a cult is, as my old Webster's defines it, "a small circle of persons united by devotion or allegiance to an artistic or intellectual movement or figure," then Apple computer enthusiasts are cultists. Add to the definition: "oblivious to evidence."
I know what I am talking about because I was a member of the Mac cult for ten years. Neglecting the TRS-80 I bought for my children in the mid-80s, my virtual life really begun in 1988, when I purchased my first Macintosh. I am still persuaded that this was, at that time, the best computer for an author, independent consultant, and high-class vagrant. Among the many problems of DOS machines, writing French accentuated characters was a challenge. About a year after my Mac purchase, I had a very short affair with a Zenith portable computer, whose bright green DOS commands on the black screen background brought air hostesses to my seat. But I soon went back to my Mac love.
Although often innovative, Apple Computer was slow to react to its competitors' innovations. It was not until late 1991 that a Mac laptop became available. In early 1992, I grabbed one of the first PowerBooks on the market, and started roaming the world. By that time, alas, air hostesses were already blasées with laptops (they were anyway becoming older, affirmative-action types). Now, people were looking at me as a Martian when I asked their e-mail addresses, or when I crawled under hotel beds in search of phone jacks for my Internet connection.
Over the following years, I owned a number of desktop Macintoshes. By the end of the 90s, it was my oldest son who let me have his old Macs instead of the other way around.
Something else had changed. Apple was down quite a lot from its market peak (of perhaps 10%) in the early 90s, and Windows 95 was now powering PCs. Mac cultists were still persuaded that the one-button mouse was ordained by God, and that their computers were at the cutting edge of technology. Indeed, they often were, for two or three months, after which they trailed the competition for one or two years. Moreover, Mac versions of Windows software were often nonexistent, and a Mac owner found himself often wondering about compatibility and apologizing, "But I have a Mac..." Worse, there was no more excitement in the Mac world: you would find tens of PC magazines and fun gadgets for every dull Mac equivalent. Mac cultists were isolated in their own little world. "But wait for System Five [or whatever]!" they kept repeating. Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna.
In the last days of December 1998, I bought the brand new, top-of-the line PowerBook with the ultimate System Whatever-Number-It-Was-Then. Like Macintosh machines, it had a sleek design, with conspicuous flashing lights everywhere. Macs were beautiful pieces of jewelry, although perhaps not yet the real women's computers they have since become. Within hours, the supposedly uncrashable operating system crashed. I brought back the machine to the computer store, and exchanged it for a Pentium I Toshiba laptop. This was a real man's computer, and I christened her Cunégonde. Cunégonde did everything my Mac did, and more. I had to buy tons of new software, but I was finally liberated from the Mac cult.
I could only find one command in Excel that was more complicated on my PC than on my former Macs. I must admit, though, that from an aesthetic point of view, I still preferred the screen appearance of the written words in Mac WYSIWYG to the slightly different Windows WYSIWYG. For a hermit who does only word processing, a Mac would be quite acceptable.
Since my love affair with Cunégonde, I have owned Hildegarde, a Pentium II clone desktop, Églantine, a Pentium III IBM laptop, and Euryale, a Pentium IV Dell laptop. Like an intolerant ex-smoker, I now pity my few remaining Mac-cultist friends, with their brightly lit Apple logos shining in the night, their difficulty to communicate with anybody but the 3% of computer owners who have Barbie's computers, their compatibility problems with everything, their constant one-alternative solution, and their unassailable belief that they have the most advanced technology and that System Whatever will solve everything.
At about the time I got my Hildegarde, I also purchased a Pentium I machine as a birthday gift to my youngest, teenage son, thereby liberating him too from the grips of the Mac cult. He did not immediately discover how Windows machines are more efficient from a capitalist business viewpoint, but he quickly found out something that was more important to him: the computer games available on a PC compared to a Mac were like color TVs compared to black-and-white radio. Some time later, a friend asked him what he had before his current PC, and he replied, "I had... nothing!" Of course, the cultists will say, this was before System Ten.
A parody of Apple's switch-to-Mac TV ads explains that working on a Mac is not so much operating a computer as "sharing the Mac experience."[1] There is even a feminist argument for the Mac. A Mac cultist has many tricks to reject empirical evidence. When his machine is not compatible with something, which happens often, he says it is "too powerful." And when faced with the fact that Macs have less than 3% of the personal computer market, he replies that the "PC market share covers large market segments where Apple is not competing — including markets where Apple doesn't want to compete."[2] Apple has a 100% market share, among its own customers.
Now, as an economist, I believe in subjective individual preferences and, therefore, I can't, qua economist, criticize those who prefer Mac computers or juice extractors to Windows machines. Economists believe that cultists have a right to their cults. Moreover, Windows' dominance and the coexistence of alternative operating systems (like Mac, Linux, and UNIX operating systems) show the capacity of the free market to both establish standards and keep them open to challenge. Apple helps keep IBM, HP, Dell, Toshiba, and Microsoft on their toes. But this economic argument does not forbid an aesthetic, and pedagogical, assault against the Mac cult.
For years, my little sister has been after me to rid her garage of my old Mac screen. She tried to sell it for basically nothing, but nobody wants it. A few days ago, I finally picked it up, remembering that there is nothing more fun than to shoot old TV screens. I assume that it is the same for Mac screens although, who knows, they might explode instead of imploding — especially the ones before System Ten. In the meantime, I put the old screen in my dog's kennel as a mock TV set. Every dog has a right to a Mac.
Several months after liberating my son from the Mac cult, I read in the newspaper that the young salesman from whom I had purchased either my Hildegarde or my son's computer (I don't remember which one) had been arrested and condemned for killing a prostitute he had brought to his apartment, close to the computer shop. The crime was brought to light by his roommate who, after complaining many times about the smell, discovered that the garbage bags stuffed in the wardrobe contained the total whore in small pieces. Since the guy had sold me a PC, this story proves nothing against the Mac cult, but I invite the reader to reflect on the fact that "mac" in French means "pimp".
[1] See http://www.thehoucks.com/happynowhere/Apple_Switch_Parody_DivX.avi (visited September 15, 2003). This video clip is a beautiful example of individual art on the Web.
[2] See http://daringfireball.net/2003/07/market_share.html (visited September 15, 2003).