In many ways, we’re living in a golden age for Apple. The entire product line is rock-solid, and the only complaint any of us can muster is that Apple hasn’t released whatever top-secret products it has in the wings yet. Market share is way up in Macs, dominant in iPods, and rapidly growing for iPhones. The current crop of software for the Mac is better than at any time in the history of Apple (sorry, Framemaker-lovers), and the iPhone development community shows tremendous promise (a few apps are already the best to ever appear on a phone).
So why are so many long-time Apple fanatics, myself included, feel a bit bummed out by the current state of affairs? Is it because we hate the thought of outsiders getting in on our little secret or that we really miss CyberDog and QuickDraw GX? It’s worse — we’ve all become de facto Apple spokespeople. I don’t draw a salary from Apple, but I am a full-time Mac genius in my social circle. If you share my pain, click through.
Did you know that it’s your fault that the hard drive died in my PowerBook G4 about a year ago? I’m aware you didn’t mean it, but you’re a big fan of that Apple company, and you give them money, and they shipped a computer with a hard drive that only had four years of life. If I hadn’t backed up, I would have lost my life’s work. What do you have to say for yourself? Or did you know that it’s your fault that my wife’s iPod keeps failing? Sorry, that’s the responsibility you take when you appreciate an Apple product. The face sensor on my co-worker’s iPhone is faulty, so she keeps hanging up on people unintentionally. And it’s all my fault.
This is the legacy of Apple in the 1990s. The state of the Mac future was so dire in, say, 1996, that all of us became evangelists, following the example of Guy Kawasaki. We had talking points for mocking Windows. We went to school board meetings to argue in favor of keeping Macs in education, even as Dell started dramatically under-cutting Apple’s prices. We argued for Mac superiority, even as the rest of the world ran away. No one listened to us, so our rhetoric was as sharp as we needed it to be. On the rare occasions we could convince someone to give a Mac a shot for the first time (I can only think of one example, and it was a couple that my parents are friends with who traded in their Apple //e for an iMac. Yeah. I know.), we understood that we would be their tech support buddies and occasionally defrag their hard drives and increase the memory allocation for ClarisWorks. But it was easy, and it was a movement.
Fast forward ten years. All those people we told to give Macs (or, at least, Apple) a shot? They’ve taken that shot. And while they’re mostly happy with their investments, they still feel the need to tell us every. Single. TIME. that something goes wrong. Seriously, the day after the iPhone 2.0 update was released, no less than three co-workers wanted to show me what it had done to their original iPhones. Did they want to show me cool new apps? Of course not. They wanted to make it crash in front of me, as though I could call Apple up and get it fixed.
The same thing happens at home. My wife’s MacBook Pro that was supplied to her through work is a touch wonky (something going on with a sound card, occasional spinning rainbow wheel), but nothing that out of the ordinary. But it does have the rather bizarre characteristic of fully hibernating whenever the power gets low. And then it won’t start back up until it’s been plugged in for 15 seconds or so. “Why did they design it that way?” she asks. And I have no answer. It does suck. If I were Apple, I would have made it work the way it already did on older Macs. Somewhere over the last five years, we’ve been forced to change from Apple evangelists into Apple apologists.
This, then, is the challenge of a new era of Mac fandom: Enough people are using Apple products for their flaws to become more prominent. Apple’s current line-up of software and hardware is better than it has ever been. But today, it’s so easy to see how much better it could and should be. Back when Apple was a scrappy player fighting for survival against a predatory Microsoft, the company could be forgiven for small missteps. Survival mattered. Today, Apple should be more capable than ever before, and instead, it’s struggling with growing pains like Mobile Me, iPhone 2.0 instability, and needing to delay Leopard to accommodate the original iPhone.
Apple is amazing today. But every request I get to explain an unpleasant Apple quirk reminds me of how much better the company is capable of being.
Pete Mortensen is a design strategist for consulting firm Jump Associates and the co-author of Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, a book and blog that are significantly more interesting than you might initially think. Pete’s particular Apple avocations are both around design–interface and industrial. Follow him on Twitter!
