But while I may have lost a birthday, I gained the experience of a lifetime – or perhaps I should say, of a geek’s lifetime – from a trip to Macworld Expo 2006 in San Francisco, the realization of a dream I’ve nourished in my heart with more fervor and longing than a mountaineer might show at the foothills of Everest or a famished convict might display towards a leg of salted ham.
I know, I know, it’s a pretty strange way to explain my most recent encounter with the lords of Macintosh and their lethal (well, to PCs) weapons. But as a Manila-based American PR man – himself a recent, initially reluctant, and finally hapless convert to the iBook – observed, "I’ve seen well-educated, normally articulate, sensible human beings just lose it when it comes to explaining why they love their Macs. They’ll mumble mantras like ‘ease of use’ or ‘It’s, just, so, beautiful’ without really telling you anything, except that, well, they love their Macs."
Let me try to put that mystique to words – or words to that mystique. If you’ve been a longtime PC user and you put your hands on a Mac – say, a PowerBook or an iMac – you’ll immediately notice that it feels different, it acts different, and – heck – it might even think different, as the famous Apple ad campaign goes. Steven Levy (author of Hackers and the modestly-titled Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, The Computer That Changed Everything – now you know what I’ve been up reading late nights) recalls what turning on a Mac was like when it first came out more than a quarter of a century ago:
"The sedateness and elegance of the Macintosh gestalt could be punctuated by exciting events. The beep when the machine is turned on. The sudden appearance of a drop-down menu. The darkening of an icon when the file or application it represents is not available at that moment. The zooming animation as the windows open and close."
"Gestalt" (look it up in the dictionary, folks – that’s the Mac user’s way) seems hardly the word to use with little plastic or metal boxes with blinking lights, and it’s hard to imagine anyone these days getting all spoony over startup chimes and drop-down menus. But you know what? Twenty years after using my first Mac, I still get a thrill out of hearing that comforting, polyphonic "Chungggg!" every time I fire up my PowerBook, which some sensors in my brain instantaneously translate into "And now the fun begins."
Okay, I’ve made my point: I love Macs (aren’t they just beautiful and so easy to use?). Now, multiply me by 35,000; bring us all to San Francisco for one week in January; collect as many of us as you can under one roof; bewitch, bother, and bewilder us with as many new baubles and booties as you can conjure for Macs and their musical siblings, the iPods; stoke that frenzy to an even higher pitch by calling out the great geek guru himself, Steve Jobs, and having him announce the release of new Macs promising to be up to four to five times as fast as their present versions, for the same price; and tell us that we can now more easily convert our mothers, cousins, pusoy buddies, and Friendster soulmates to the Mac by giving them the power to produce and publish their own music, their own movies and photo albums, their own greeting cards and calendars, even their own blogs!
That, friends, is Macworld, the year’s biggest gathering of the Macintosh faithful, the people around the planet who have used and stood by this "platform" that Apple Computers designed in the 1970s and – against all odds – have nurtured to a booming enterprise today. To the business suits, it’s a trade show; but you’ll be hard put to see anyone in a suit among the hundreds of people milling about the exhibition hall at any given moment in San Francisco’s Moscone Center.
Nor, for that matter, will you see any nerds in lab coats and inch-thick glasses. T-shirts and jeans – perhaps with a jacket thrown on in casual cognizance of the chill outside – are the fashion order of the day; kids dressed up as iPods trail after their mom, who’s looking over a perky lime-green sleeve for her iBook. On behalf of his absent son, a dad in a chambray shirt asks how his teenager might join the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, co-sponsored by Apple and to be judged by, among others, the Black Eyed Peas, Pat Metheny, and Mos Def. A new section in a corner displays cars decked out with various iPod setups; not surprisingly, accessories for the iPod – of which Apple sold a phenomenal 32 million worldwide in 2005 (two of them to me) – are the show’s most ubiquitous items, ranging from skins and cases to connectors and chargers. In Apple’s own booth, hordes of people who look like they just walked in off the street – as many probably did – line up to try out the new Intel-powered iMacs and MacBook Pros and the new iLife and iWork software suites which can help even the most inartistic klutz express the broadest or subtlest emotion.
In other words, and in keeping with the culture that’s built up around the Mac and its adherents, Macworld isn’t so much about technology itself as about using that technology for work and fun – not just for the benefit of geeks and devotees like me, but people like PC user and photographer Bob Razon – someone we like to call a "switcher" – who wrote me recently to say that "My new 12-inch PowerBook is humming along nicely, and I think the best thing I can say is that my feeling about it has nothing to do with the technical speak and comparisons between Windows and the PC, but more of the fact that this machine has not drawn any special or specific attention to itself except for how it’s just functioned as simply as it has promised. Mind you I’ll still be attracted and engaged to the geeky, subterranean world of Windows when I tinker with programs and hardware and configurations, but when I need to edit my pictures and be in communication with people, I think the Mac will be all I’ll ever use and need."
Macworlds and geeky gushings aside, I can’t think of a better endorsement than that. When Bob said that his Mac allowed him to focus on his work and to forget about the machine. I agreed; those of us whose jobs depend on our computers and the "creativity suites" that come with them – word processing, image manipulation, music recording, not to mention old-fashioned numbers crunching – work best when, in a sense, you forget you’re working, because the environment recedes into the background and creative decisions take over.
I should admit, however, that with Macs that’s only partially true, because I, at least, never quite forget the visible and tactile beauty of the machine; to me the machine is an end-product in itself, someone else’s work of art and labor of engineering. Try typing on a G4 PowerBook’s satiny aluminum keyboard – better yet, with iTunes playing subtly in the background through high-end earphones plugged into the audio port – and you’ll understand why.
By controlling both the software and the hardware end of things, Apple may have lost billions in foregone royalties (Microsoft, on the other hand, was happy selling software licenses), but it retained a fundamental integrity of design. The shift to Intel processors may forebode a new generation of Apple clones (legal or otherwise), but it’ll be a long time before anyone says that the Mac OS – bright, perky, easy to navigate – runs better on a piece of hardware other than a Mac.
I had plenty of opportunity this week to reconfirm this at Macworld, an annual ritual that has Steve Jobs coming out onstage and using his keynote address to reveal – with a master showman’s understated flair – Apple’s new offerings for the year.
The keynote was open only to Apple VIPs and guests, media representatives, and exhibitors, but the crush of people in the queue was enough to banish the wintry chill outside Moscone. Having woken up at 5 a.m. and been in line since 7:45, I pressed my way forward when we got the green light close to 9, and landed a seat close to the front – about 30 feet away from where Steve Jobs worked off a desk with two iMacs (the new Intel-powered version, as it turned out).
Of course there was a part of me that was starstruck – although, thankfully, reading up these past few weeks on the often acrimonious history of Apple and the occasionally spotty character of Jobs helped me keep enough of a journalistic distance. But today I saw why, for all his engineering genius, the other Steve (Wozniak, who actually designed the early Apples that Jobs sold) couldn’t have gone very far without Jobs’ amazing marketing savvy. (Ironically and rather poignantly, a picture of the two Steves from 1976 came onscreen at the end of the keynote, in anticipation of Apple’s 30th anniversary on April 1, 2006 – yes, April Fools’ Day.)
So what wonders did Steve Jobs and his new engineers pull out of the hat this time? I’ll talk about those at greater length next issue – and why I came home with the best birthday gift anyone like me could have wished for: an Apple T-shirt proclaiming "I visited the Mothership." I did, and I’m here to snatch your bodies.