An album by Heaven 17, and now a semi-lengthy diatribe about some recent cogitations about my next computer, the Apple experience and other nerdly subjects. If you’re not geeky, a friend, morbidly curious or terminally bored, you might find this entire exercise tedious. Hell, you might might find it tedious anyway. But here goes.
I have been a Mac user for many years. I started with Macs in the late 80s, and stuck with them until the realization in the mid 1990s that cooperative multitasking and other Mac shortcomings were just that, serious shortcomings. I jumped off the platform and landed on WindowsNT.
For about 12 minutes. While work with NT4 paid my bills, the entire user experience of Windows left me flat. For the server closet, Unix(-like) OSes did a far, far better job for me, and always had. For the desktop, NT and its registry and vulnerabilities and random executable firing (will Redmond ever understand that nothing should run in userspace without user authorization?) made me not only uneasy, but downright nauseous. Let’s get this out of the way right here. Windows of any flavor is a disaster. Period. “But, it’s compatible!” With what? The spyware, adware, trojans and virii that companies have made fortunes cleaning? “It’s the industry standard!” I pity you if you lived in 1930s Germany and just followed the herd. “All the good software is made for Windows.” This is such an outrageous a claim I won’t even deign to fire a retort.
Years ago Neal Stephenson wrote an essay called In The Beginning Was The Command Line, which every serious computer user should still read. Still valid to this day. Of Windows he said:
Eventually the big dealership (Microsoft) came out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success. A little later, they also came out with a hulking off-road vehicle intended for industrial users (Windows NT) which was no more beautiful than the station wagon, and only a little more reliable.
Amen. That’s exactly how Windows struck me. A cobbled-together half-attempt at a GUI OS designed not to provide a pleasant and secure user experience, but to sell licenses. I think time has proved me correct. It has, at least, in my mind. And you Windows defenders (read “apologists”) aren’t going to change my mind in this regard, so do us both a favor and don’t try.
In this same article Stephenson describes BeOS as a “Batmobile.”
One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market – and yet cheaper than the others.
At the time I read it, in the depths of my OS pilgrimage, that analogy intrigued me. And he was right. In 1998, nothing out-performed BeOS. I became a user, developer, evangelist and support guru for BeOS, and still count those days as among the most giddy of my life. Unfortunately, like a giddy teenager with a crush, my infatuation was not cemented in reality. BeOS was a commercial OS aimed at Windows users on the x86 platform. Can you spell “doomed?” And indeed, in 2002 when I left Gobe Software, the writing was no longer on the wall, it was tattooed to my forehead. Fighting Windows as a commercial desktop venture is best left to fools or the extremely wealthy.
But by that time Mac OS X had begun to gain serious momentum. Jobs had returned to Apple, dumped OS Nein like the steaming pile of outdated trash it was and was ushering in a new world based on Mach, BSD and the other Unix-y goodness I had always enjoyed in my server space. While Linux and *BSD had matured to the point of being fairly functional desktop OSes for a nerd like myself at that stage, I was an old-time Apple geek. And hey, Mac OS X has as much (or more) right to call itself “Unix-like” as Linux or *BSD.
I have been an OSX user ever since. And happy, relatively. OSX is, hands-down, the best OS for the non-nerdly computer user that wants a functional, fun, secure OS. I want to make that clear. If you are not a geek, OSX is the best OS you can use.
But … I’m a geek.
I recently sold my PowerMac G4 Cube for a variety of reasons that I need not discuss here. I have been living and working on the girlfriend’s iBook G3 500. And you know what? I’m not as impressed as I once was. A 500Mhz PowerPC processor with 384MB of RAM to play in should NOT slow to a crawl when running a Terminal, an e-mail app, a web browser and an mp3 player. Period. BeOS did better 6 years ago on older hardware. Whether you agree with me or no, it has become apparent that I need a new computer. (And if anyone starts the “OSX is bloated, OS 9 was the best!” nonsense, save your breath for someone with fewer brain cells).
Recently I had the fun experience of installing Fedora Core Test 3 on some friends’ machines. I am absolutely astounded at the progress Linux has made as a desktop OS. It’s not that Linux wasn’t on my radar all these years. I used Linux in server closets, had access to friends’ Linux boxes etc etc. I’m not a Unix newbie (heck, this page you’re reading is served up by OpenBSD, installed and maintained by yours truly). It’s just that in the past when I mucked with Linux thinking I might switch to using it as a desktop OS, I was left thinking something along the lines of, “very nice, but not quite.” It’s not that I didn’t understand what I was looking at, it’s that as a daily use machine for desktop tasks, it seemed to be like using a teaspoon to move a lake when a pumping station was sitting next to you. No offense to desktop Linux users, but be realistic. Would you have sat Mom down in front of Red Hat 6 and expected her to be productive? No, I’m not as technically illiterate as Mom, but I AM lazy. 🙂
But, wow. Fedora, Suse, Debian and a lot of the distros have made great strides to allowing me to be a user and not an admin 24/7. Which leads me to the point of all this …
I’m thinking about a new machine. Let’s examine my options.
I want something fast that I won’t have to replace next year because of lackluster performance. I want something reliable and secure. I could buy a low-end G5 for US$1,499. Let’s examine the specs:
- 1.8GHz PowerPC G5
- 600MHz frontside bus
- 512K L2 cache
- 256MB DDR400 SDRAM
- Expandable to 4GB SDRAM
- 80GB Serial ATA hard drive
- 8x SuperDrive
- Three PCI Slots
- NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
- 64MB DDR video memory
- 56K internal modem
Pretty kick-booty, for sure. But let’s say I’m ready to use Linux as my day-to-day desktop. Let’s look at the machine I spec’ed out.
- AMD Athlon64 3200+ 2.0Ghz (939-pin, Winchester core)
- Gigabyte GA-K8NSNXP-939 motherboard
- 5 PCI slots
- integrated 6 channel sound, USB2.0 and IEEE1394 (Firewire)
- 400Mhz frontside bus
- Crucial 512MB(x2) PC3200 DDR RAM
- expandable to 4GB RAM
- Antec SLK-3700-BQE ATX case
- Western Digital 250MB Serial ATA hard drive
- Plextor 12/4/16 DVD-RW
- nVidia FX5700LE 8xAGP video
- 128MB DDR video memory
And the total price for this rig? US$965.97. That’s right. One third less for four times the drive space and memory. Better video card. More PCI expandability. And I can upgrade the processor in a year. And when the next version of Fedora (Suse/Gentoo/Debian/whatever) is released, I pay nothing (unlike the yearly OS Upgrade Tax I pay with OSX). I can choose a filesystem that’s superior to the steaming hulk of boilerplate that is HFS+. In fact, only the frontside bus of the Mac is superior to this machine.
This is nothing new. People have complained that Apple is more expensive for years. Stephenson (in his car dealership analogy) said:
There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles – expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.
Apple has always charged a premium to come to the Macintosh. That having been said, even to this day, Macs are not tremendously more expensive than equivalent Dells or HPs. And if you’re going to use Windows, then the value of your time trying to keep your machine free of infections and compromises is worth something. But Macs do cost a bit more. Especially if you can build your own machine. So what’s my point?
Linux is gaining ground on the usability front. Many people that wouldn’t have looked at Linux sideways in the past will now do so. More and more of the computer-buying public is comfortable building a machine themselves. And the people to whom I’m referring in both sentences above tend to be the trend-setters. If they use Linux, so will their siblings and parents and friends, as they look to the geeks for direction.
Apple, the luxury gap is going to fail you, long-term. The boutique experience you offer at premium prices can only last to keep you in business for so long. I know it’s been said before, and it’s kind of a “Chicken Little” diatribe. But now you’re going to face competition from a free OS on cheaper hardware that is well within the grasp of the average user. And, perhaps most importantly, an OS whose roadmap is determined by geeks, and not by Steve Jobs.
Steve can’t demo a filesystem during a keynote, so it doesn’t get fixed the right way. When he wants to have database-like functionality in the OS, instead of using Dom Giampolo who designed the most-excellent Be Filesystem (and who works at Apple) to build it the right way, Apple boilerplates it onto HFS+. Steve doesn’t use a word processor, so years after we get the PowerPoint competitor Keynote, we still don’t have an Apple-branded word processing solution.
Apple, it’s time to think about how you’re going to keep the geeky users that act as tractors for the others. You have probably lost me. Again. The first time was because your OS technology was so far behind the curve it made the platform a pain to use. This time, the price/performance gap is too wide, which is a much more tricky situation to address than fixing your OS. You need those hardware profit margins. Your hardware looks sexy as hell, but all that design comes at a price you must recoup.
Now, unlike some self-important pundits (ahem … Dvorak) I’m not going to preach to Apple about what they should do. I’m not experienced enough in business marketing to do it. But you don’t need to be a doctor to know someone’s sick. And you don’t need an MBA to know that the boutique approach to computing is not a great long-term strategy in our increasingly tech-savvy world.
I say again, at this juncture, for the non-geek, Macs are the best choice, hands-down. But I think that’s changing. Linux is getting better and better; easier and easier for the average user. Soon the “We’re not Microsoft, and our stuff is really easy to use,” argument is going to belong to Linux as well as Apple. And Linux gets to claim significantly cheaper hardware. It must make some people at Apple uneasy.
Me, I don’t need to run Microsoft Orifice or Adobe apps and I’m a tech-savvy geek. I’m not 100% sure yet that I’m moving to Linux/x86-64, but it’s seeming more and more likely. Why should I pay an extra US$500 for a more anemic machine, Apple? If your best answer is, “Because the G5 looks cool and we have a U2 iPod,” be afraid. Be very afraid.