The Macintosh Love It or Hate It, It's Here to Stay

Author: Claire Bourne

Last August, I fell in love.
This wasn't a passing crush. No, this was the real thing.
It all began one Sunday morning, a few days before I was due to depart for my long-anticipated semester in Paris. I was scouring the Short Hills Mall for some last-minute items, my head aching from the high-pitched squeal of the fluorescent lights that retailers insist on installing in their establishments, when a calming, translucent glow caught the corner of my eye. I suppose you could say that I had seen the light.
I turned and walked over the bleached wooden floor and past the well-groomed, black-clad salespeople. There, in the middle of the modish, spacious Apple store, I beheld Macintosh's sleek titanium PowerBook for the first time.
Yes, I had seen the television advertisements. And yes, they were successfully convincing me that I didn't need "the blue screen of death" in my life anymore. So, with my two-and-a-half-year-old Sony Viao on its deathbed, I decided to take the plunge and welcome a Mac into my world.
I was not alone. Although the number of Middlebury College students who own Macintosh computers has remained steady over the past few years, the dynamic image of Apple's new models has made them stand out in the sea of generic-looking PC's. Between 13 to 15 percent of the student body uses Macs, while over 100 faculty members own Apples.
Those who have been loyal Apple fans for the majority of their computer-using days say they would never switch to Windows-operated machines. Those who have listened to CEO of Apple Steve Jobs and company's advice and taken "the leap of faith" are equally convinced of Macs' virtues.
College Computing Support Specialist Mack Roark is a self-proclaimed convert. He used PC's throughout the 80s but began working on Macs in the early 90s when he attended graphic art school. Before this turning point, he says he thought Macs were "toys."
The newest line of Apple computers boasts Mac OS X (pronounced oh-ess-ten), an operating system that "makes previous consumer systems, like Mac OS 9 and Windows Me, look like hand-cranked antiques," according to New York Times reporter David Pogue. The difference between Apple's 17-year-old OS 9 system and the newer, user-friendly system is, simply put, Unix - an wholly dependable operating system that renders the latest Macs virtually crashproof.
Veiling the hard-to-use Unix system was all part of the plan. Instead of being confronted with a complicated interface (Pogue described using it as "about as much fun as eating sand"), clients are instead pleasantly greeted with a richly lucid, gently animated and accessible software overlay.
Macs boast "something for everyone," according to Roark. "Computers are as individual as the people that use them," and Mac users, he maintains, "tend to be more loyal to their computers" and "see them as more than just tools to access things."
Computer science major Christopher Shubert '05 cites his PowerMac's reliability and power as reasons for sticking with the Apple brand ever since he began using computers. "It's more comfortable," he says.
Despite new Macs' modernized features - protected memory and multitasking, among them - some PC users will never consider replacing their IBM-compatible machines with Apples. Crampus Editor Gregory Eriksen '04 says there is "no way" he would ever switch. When he stepped up to the humor magazine's top post, he was upset to learn that The Middlebury Campus, whose office The Crampus uses to produce its publication, had recently acquired a number of new PowerMac G4s. Although the machines have been "a source of major frustration," Eriksen admits that he is getting better at navigating the machines' idiosyncrasies. "We're on a speaking basis," he affirms.
Eriksen took his opinion of Apple's recent advertising campaign all the way to the pages of The Crampus' latest issue, a spoof on Time Magazine entitled Slime. The one-page ad parody depicts McMurphy, the mischievous protagonist of the film adaptation of Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," as one of the "everyday people" Apple employed to describe to the television-watching world the merits of crossing over from PC's to Macs. "The ads were basically saying that you had to be really dumb not to be able to use a PC," Eriksen explains, "but Macs are a pain to use in their own right."
Despite the existing "cold war" - Eriksen's tongue-in-cheek description of the conflict between Mac and PC users - few can dispute the aesthetic appeal of the chic titanium PowerBooks, the compact white iMacs and the curvaceous PowerMacs. "They look sexy," says Roark. "When the titanium model came out, people went nuts." There is just something undeniably satisfying about owning a "snazzy, cool, hot-looking" laptop (to borrow Roark's terminology).
I will confess that I judged the book by its cover on that fateful day in late August. But I am generally a good judge of character and I don't plan of falling out of love any time soon.