Confessions of a Mac addict

If you hate computers, skip this column and have a nice day. If manic behavior intrigues you, read on.

You’d think that, with my many jobs as a university professor, department chairman, newspaper columnist, magazine editor, weekend novelist and scriptwriter, and PR handyman, I’d have no time and energy left for anything more, especially something truly silly and truly fun. But think again.

I’ve just taken on an unpaid job as moderator of an on-line discussion thread devoted to Apple Macintosh laptop computers – check out "Portable Pleasures" on the Philippine Macintosh Users Group forums (www.philmug.org/forums) – and I am having the time of my life.

But first things first: "Apple" is a computer company; "Macintosh" is the line of computers it produces (and, unknown to many, also a variety of apple); "PowerBooks" and "iBooks" are Mac laptops, also known as the toys (er, work machines) of choice for choosy boys (and, OK, girls). In this context, "I" am a completely addled, totally biased, hopelessly fanatic Macintosh addict – and have been so since I first learned word processing on a Macintosh in 1987.

Why a 49-year-old boy should be so addicted to Macs that they now fill every nook and cranny of the house has been a constant mystery to my housemates and the source of not a few, uhm, budgetary discussions. In my defense, most of my Macs (OK, the couple of dozen of them) are old ones bought as junk for next to nothing, experiments in progress I can excuse by adverting to my aborted career as an engineer coming out of the Philippine Science High School.

(But really, seriously, why? Does a new laptop guarantee improved productivity? Heck, no, of course not – if anything, setting up my iTunes jukebox and my iPhoto picture album is just too much fun to be left for another day. But I always think of new technology as a way of cheating time, of living 10 years in most everyone else’s future; and in these war-threatened days, I think of Macs as a reminder of how human creativity can be put to better use than killing people.)

At a business meeting the other week, as I was setting up my new laptop – a 12-inch, anodized-aluminum PowerBook G4, if you must know (and yes, you must) – on the conference table, a telecoms executive made the mistake of asking me, "What is it you like so much about Macs?"

I had a 30-page answer to that, but I bit my tongue, stomped on my other foot, sat on both hands, and – in the most restrained tone of voice I could muster – croaked, "Industrial design. Superior software. Ease of use." I was beginning to get that light-headed, dry-throated feeling that some psychos probably get when they feel like they’re being provoked into doing something dastardly: "Don’t make me do it, please don’t make me do it!" But my tablemate couldn’t read the warning signals – the glazed-over eyes, the shortness of breath, the twitch in the cheek – and asked me again: "But aren’t they more expensive than PCs?"

That did it. Like a torrent unleashed, like a mystic’s murmurs in some foreign tongue, the words leapt out of my mouth before I could catch them: "That’s a popular misconception. Pound for pound, and feature for feature, Macs and especially PowerBooks or Mac laptops can more than match, say, Compaq or Toshiba or IBM, and are actually often cheaper in price. And Apple’s not going away anytime soon, despite what the doomsayers say. Let’s look at it this way: Apple may have only 3.8 to 5 percent of the global computer market, but in a multibillion-dollar business, that’s more than enough for a good small company to survive. And why not buy a cheap, generic PC instead? You might as well ask me, why buy a BMW, when you can have a Daewoo – or, better yet, a stainless-steel jeep?" And so on, and so on.

My host looked stunned, rendered speechless by my spiel. I felt like I had to give her an explanation: "I was a former chairman of the Philippine Macintosh Users Group. I’m just a little more, uhm, obsessed than your usual Mac addict."

"Your usual Mac addict" is typically a guy in his late 20s or 30s employed in advertising, publishing, photography and video, music, literature, or journalism; creative, kind-hearted, and generally cheerful, except when you challenge the supremacy of the Mac; and then he turns into a double-sword-wielding, flame-breathing warrior, ready to do battle against the Loathsome Lords of Wintel. As I said, I’m just a little touchier than that.

Once every two or three years, around the ides of March, I go out of my mind and throw half a year’s salary as a professor into the purchase of a new Apple Macintosh PowerBook. Since I don’t keep half a year’s salary stashed around the house – nor in the bank, I can’t tell you how quickly half a year’s UP salary can vaporize – this means that I have to sell something truly valuable (like the previous PowerBook), or go into serious credit-card debt to feed my technolust. Of course, if it’s an Apple Macintosh machine, it’s always more than lust; call it "love," or some such tender thing.

January might be the wedding month of choice for most of the world’s couples, but for the certified Mac addict, it can mean only one thing – a new Macworld, a week-long geekfest in San Francisco devoted to the cult of the Mac and to the mass renewal of marriage vows with Apple, the company that two guys named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded more than 20 years ago to make a better personal computer and a better personal computing experience.

Last Jan. 7, like thousands of other Mac devotees around the planet, I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning, my eyes and ears plastered to my Titanium PowerBook (big-screen laptop to you) to listen to Steve Jobs, now Apple CEO, deliver his famous Macworld keynote message – the Mac equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount, the Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King’s "I Have a Dream" speech all rolled into one. Of course, I managed to witness this performance live over the Web courtesy of Apple’s own QuickTime 6.0 software, but that’s another (long, and spouse- or mate-deadening) story.

Macworld Expos are where thousands of Mac fans huddle around hundreds of booths put up by hardware and software vendors like Formac and Macromedia. (Get the idea?) The highlight of every expo is the founder’s speech – which industry professionals and the most hardcore Mac addicts actually pay a lot of money to listen to – because, aside from personally witnessing Steve Jobs’s trademark black turtleneck and denims (gotta get me one of those outfits, soon), this is where he lets you in on Apple’s newest offerings – New programs! New machines! – the mere whisper of which has been known to send the faithful into fits of fainting. And ever the master showman, Jobs has also been known to make casual announcements like "Oh, and one more thing – if you look under your seats, you’ll find a free copy of the new iThis and iThat software suite!"

I’ve dreamt of going to a Macworld for ages – something like dying and going to heaven, then coming back to earth after five or six days. The closest I ever got to one (they hold two in the US every year, and one in Japan) was on a plane a few years ago, where I read in the newspaper that a Macworld was opening that very same minute in Tokyo a few miles beneath my feet; unfortunately, our plane was flying out of Tokyo, not flying in. I quickly banished any suggestion of a hijacking from my mind, but since then I’ve sworn to keep myself abreast of every little hiccup on the Mac front, so as never to be caught again sleeping in the pansitan, as my poker buddies used to say.

And so it was that I had "Jan. 7" tattooed on my forehead a week before the actual date, and calculated 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time (2 a.m., Barangay Central Time). I plied myself full of espresso-strength coffee and fired up my machines (I always work with two computers open – one for hopefully serious work, the other for mindless surfing), fiddling with the settings to make sure that I wasn’t going to miss a word of the keynote. And I didn’t; I heard Steve Jobs – all two and a half hours of him – rallying the troops and unveiling one new marvel after another (a suite of upgraded applications for music, movies, and photography; a new Powerpoint killer, what else but "Keynote"). Even Mac zealots get sleepy, and I was about to fall off the edge of my chair when Jobs pulled not one but two rabbits out of his hat – a new 12-inch (screen) PowerBook, the dream machine I had been envisaging for ages (I’ll spare you the gory technical details), and a new 17" PowerBook, the world’s largest laptop. Instantly I was awake, gasping for air, pondering the import of what I had just heard: Lots of pluses for Apple’s bank account, one huge negative for mine.

Many weeks later – after hemming and hawing for a week, taking the plunge and placing the order on-line, the quick sale of my current machine (at a substantial loss, of course), and a long wait while my machine was built to order in Taiwan and shipped to my sister Elaine in Virginia – capped by a heroic dash to Johnny Air Cargo in Manhattan by my brother-in-law, Eddie Sudeikis, to deliver the PowerBook just before a crippling blizzard shut down the East Coast, my dream machine and I finally met. We’re still on our honeymoon, and I expect nothing but pure anodized-aluminum bliss – well, at least until the next Macworld.

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.