After all the hoo-ha about the resignation of Steve Jobs (someone on Twitter remarked that "anyone would think he was dead") and having read recently about the new store that Apple wants to open at 100 Cheapside in the city of London, I'm once again wondering at the appeal of Apple.
In about 1998 I was working at adidas in the US and the cool people on the design team were real Apple heads. They tried to persuade me that a Mac was way more desirable than a PC. Hey, I came close to switching - I quite fancied one of those blueberry iBooks when they came out... but they were hellish expensive, so I stuck with PCs for another few years. Until about 2008 that is, when I finally succumbed to the peer pressure (or marketing?) and bought a 24" iMac with its beautiful glass screen.
Was it a revelation? Not really. Learning how to use a Mac took some weeks, just to master the basics, and being more or less self taught I'm aware that I probably only know about 10% of what I could usefully know. But everyone used to say it was so intuitive! That I'd never want to go back! In reality I was struck by how rigid everything was, how inflexible, how it was impossible to get 'under the hood' of a Mac, how you have to do things a certain way, usually unguessable and random. For some reason I then went and bought an iPhone, and realised how totally on the Steve Jobs path to 'computer says no' hell I was.
I went from being reasonably interested in computers and tolerant of their shortcomings, to just another frustrated user moaning about her machine/gadgets. The irony is of course that by the time I switched over to Macs, PCs had come on apace, the dreaded Windows XP was on its way out and PCs were even starting to look like Macs.
I would love to be free of Apple, but it's hard - it feels like I'm in a relationship and it's not a healthy one. And yet so many people still really love Apple. I'm in awe of how it styled itself into the 'good guy' opposite the 'evil' Bill Gates and Microsoft. I used to think it was about the products, but it has to be way, way more than that. Doesn't it?



