I understand John Gruber's disdain of the term "Cult of Mac". It can be used to imply that nobody who buys a Macintosh computer, or any Apple product, does so for pragmatic or rational reasons. However, Apple has most successfully built and harnessed something that can be compared to a cult.

[Mark] Lindstrom, a marketing guru who advises everyone from fast-food companies to drugmakers, partnered with Oxford scientists to conduct a three-year, $7 million study scanning the brains of 2,000 people while they were shown various marketing strategies. What they found surprised them. In one of the most startling examples, the researchers scanned brains while the subjects were exposed to images of popular brands and religious icons.

Lindstrom wrote: "The room went dark and the images began to flicker past: A bottle of Coca-Cola. The Pope. An iPod. A can of Red Bull. Rosary beads. A Ferrari sports car. The eBay logo. Mother Teresa. An American Express card. The BP sign. A photograph of children playing. The Microsoft logo."

When Lindstrom and the researchers analyzed the results, they noted that strong brands fired up activity in parts of the brain controlling memory, emotion and decision-making. That was expected. But then they compared those results with what happened when the subjects looked at religious images. To their surprise, "their brains registered the exact same patterns of activity," Lindstrom wrote. "Bottom line, there was no discernible difference between the way the subjects' brains reacted to powerful brands and the way they reacted to religious icons and figures."

— How Marketing Tricks You, and How to Beat It.

Of course, at the article shows Apple isn't alone in doing it. They are just one of the most successful at it. In fact, that very Martin Lindstrom has distilled it into nine steps of successful myth making for Ad Age magazine. Looking at the list, Apple succeeds with every single bullet point!

• A Clear Vision: Summarized by Lindstrom's piece as such: "Man is the creator of change in this world. As such he should be above systems and structures, and not subordinate to them." If you're less a fan of haliography, then just say Steve Job's vision guides Apple in everything it does.
• A Sense of Belonging: Partly cultivated (The MacWorld Expo, helping launch various Mac User Groups, holding events at Apple Stores [see more on the stores below]), and partly organic (think of all of the Mac specific websites and publications that exist), enhanced very much by the crisis of the 90s (see below), Mac users have come to see themselves as belonging to a movement greater than themselves.
• An Enemy: Apple's most famous ad buy was the 1984 Superbowl commercial, where a rebel throws a hammer at the screen of a Big Brother figure. Then, the enemy was IBM. Since 1995, that enemy has been Microsoft whose Windows operating system is seen to have stolen the ease of use GUI concepts from Apple. That so-called theft been punished by an overwhelming marketshare in the computer desktop market. The rise of Windows nearly killed Apple, but it gave the Mac community its sense of embattlement and a enemy to hate.
• Sensory Appeal: This can mean one of several things here. If you think of an Apple Store, the interior is instantly recognisable to the point of being recently parodied by The Simpsons. Though I can extended it to the products itself. Steve Jobs famously described the interface of Mac OS X as lickable. Funny as that is, the point is Apple pays extraordinary amounts of attention to how their products look. You will not mistake an iMac for any other computer.When most people think of MP3 players, they now imagine an iPod. Jonathan Ive can be described as the second most important person at Apple.
• Storytelling: Folklore.org is the Old Testiment to the Apple story, but Apple is great at cultivating new myths for today's believer. Microsoft commentator Paul Thurrott expressed frustration over one particular story. The ad implies Microsoft is spending money on a marketing campaign rather than fixing its OS. Of course, that isn't true, given the release of "Service Pack 1" back in the spring, and continuing work on Service Pack 2. (And of course, bug fixes are released monthly from Microsoft.) And the real truth is that software development for everything but dead products (like WordPerfect) is continuous revision, refinement and repair, punctuated by release. The current version of OS X ("Leopard") is on its fifth revision since its release about 13 months ago. That version of OS X is itself the sixth since it was released in 2001. But, to most folks, Vista is irredeemably broken and is being abandoned in favor for Seven. Nobody describes Apple abandoning Leopard for Snow Leopard. In fact, both are moderate revisions on the current OS.
  
  Apologies. I allowed myself to get sidetracked on a specific detail rather than looking at the overall point. Apple is excellent at storytelling. It's the innovative company that revolutionize markets. It's a story that the company will repeat at every opportunity. (Along with the implication that all other companies are vultures that will steal its innovations.) And they use the standard PR game of granting access to friendly organizations and freezing out others. The judicious use of press releases (like "Thoughts on Music" or the "Open iPhone Letter") have soothed consumer anger. This allows Apple to do things like sell DRM protected media but be seen as being against DRM.
• Grandeur: Apple holds press events for revisions to its product lines. They invite reporters to a hall, where Steve Jobs will appear on stage, recall for the audience how the history of Apple innovation, and then introduce with great fanfare the newest products. The largest such event is "Macworld", where the Steve Jobs keynote serves as the State of the Apple Address. The press eats this up. The community eats this up (see "Sense of Belonging"). Very few companies can get away with this, but Steve Jobs is a rock star in this arena.
  
• Evangelism: Guy Kawasaski! However, much of that evangelism today comes from fellow Mac users. Success in this helps create an even stronger sense of belonging.
• Symbols: From the Lindstrom's article: "Examine an iPod, and you'll have problems finding the Apple logo." I don't know what iPod he uses, but on every one I've seen, the logo is large, right on the back. That said, he is right enough that the iPod itself has become a symbol just as strong as the Apple logo.
• Rituals: "Rituals build brands," he say. This one seems more likely to come from the grassroots than from above. I do not think "Box opening celebrations" came from above, but Apple does its best to make it feel special.

Originally posted on sterlingnorth.vox.com

In a massive change of subject, this is hilarious. If you haven't noticed, Apple is again advertising their computers. Like all advertising of the sort, they stretch the truth in the service of oonvincing the viewer that they have solved all what ails the computing experience. However, much like the Switch campaign, there's a condescending tone to the commercials -- the Macintosh is like the straight A kid in the class who couldn't go a day without reminding everyone else about how smart he is.

"Macs don't crash."

Now, this is funny! Here's a picture of one such Mac as it attempts to load video of the commercial.

While it was evil for DrunkenBlog to post the image inline here and on the front page of his website, thus killing Safari (the default webbrowser on Macintoshes), or in fact anything that uses webkit, webcore and/or ImageIO, which as I gather is a heck of a lot of Macintosh software...both system supplied and third-party, I kinda wish that this bug was found back last December, as certain Macintosh sites and their visitors were almost gleeful about the discovery of an image processing flaw within Windows.

Reading the comments at the link, and playing around with the image in Linux seems to confirm that the EXIF data in the image is corrupted. EXIF is additional metadata that is appended to the image that describe things like the camera used to take the picture and such. This image, for example would crash numerous Linux image viewers, and would cause an error when being viewed with the Preview application from OS X versions 1.3.x and earlier (Although it wouldn't outright crash it, like DB's car graphic).

...I went to a developer conference hosted by Microsoft. When asked about it half an hour after its conclusion by a friend who works at a nearby consumer electronics store, I could not remember what it was about. Only as I was boarding a bus to return home did I remember that it was about making programs for mobile -- excuse me, smart phones.

I can't blame the presenter, as he seemed well versed in the subject of cell phone programming, and knew enough to not bore us with Powerpoint slides. But he did manage to bore one of us with code. (It wasn't me, honest. But a guy a couple of seats to my side startled the upper level of the theatre with a sudden snore.)

I probably would have fallen asleep if I wasn't struck by some incongruities inherent in the presentation. During the presentation we were taught to conserve memory use, and to bring home the point, he showed us that the demo phone (or actually the emulation of the phone on his laptop) had only 18MB of RAM. Our very next demonstration showed us how to pull a picture of a house off of a database upstream into this memory-limited device (though the hypothetical situation of this being a real estate agent's phone would explain the potential use this would have).

He also reminded us that we should make good user interfaces. However, this phone emulation uses a version of Windows Mobile for its OS that, for one, chooses to place status messages at the top of the screen (where the Start menu resides). This is unfortunate because this relatively space-constrained area, with the Windows logo to the left and various status and mode icons to the right, is too small to display most status messages in full. Every time our demo phone had to sync and download a new Windows Mobile component for his coding demonstrations, the status message would read "Installing Mi..."

As a note, many cell phones have UI problems even before you turn them on. In fact, the UI problems prevent most of us from figuring out how to turn them on. If you want to read Joe's article at the previous link, you can figure out that one of the reasons is that the electronics industry mistakenly believe that their icon for power switch means enough to override the color red which means "DANGER, DO NOT TOUGH UNDER THREAT OF DEATH!!" I know of no one who sees that stabbed circle and thinks "on-off switch".

Also, it doesn't help that the current trend of consumer devices where the time it takes for it to power on is enough for you to ask "Why is it taking so long to power on?". I have a new HD ready TV (it likely needs a converter box, but it will be hooked to a HD cable box, so it doesn't matter), which takes 30 seconds to power on. Even though it has circuits and microchips, I can't figure out why it needs what is essentially a boot process to power up. There's no operating system loaded on storage that needs to be loaded into RAM, as is needed for computers or apparently cell phones. It seems remarkable that in this Faster world, people aren't driven mad by the ever lengthening start-up times on such devices.

That, in part, is what impresses me about the Intel iMacs from Apple computer. This past week, while I was at the store (see second link) I turned off their computer and turned it back on, timing the startup with my watch. From the Apple "bong" to the point where the menubar clock appears (the last element loaded by OS X), it took the Mac only 27 seconds to start. Actually there was a stall when the dock tried to rise up from below (thus rather than being a smooth animation, it rises only 1/3 way from below the screen, and then *pops* into place). If there was nothing to freeze OS X right there, it could have loaded completely in under 20 seconds. I have seen no computer since MS-DOS boot that rapidly. In fact, the nearby PowerMac -- their more expensive and more powerful machine -- took around two minutes to start up.

Now, back to the the friend who I talked to there, though I couldn't remember what I learned at the MSDN seminar, I did show him the two DVDs of beta software we got for going (it was the reason I went and watched how-tos on mobile phone programming). This lead to talk of Microsoft Word and the sorta-new interface they're introducing in Office 12 (or Vista or 2006/2007 or whatever they plan on calling it). I say sorta new, as it really is only an expansion of UI concepts introduced in drawing and image programs like Adobe Photoshop and CorelDRAW. The big story as passed by everyone is that Microsoft Office will ditch the menubar for a set of context-sensitive changable toolbars. This actually scares and confuses people, as the menu bar has been central to the graphical user interface since it was first popularized by Apple. (I don't know what the Xerox PARC's UI looked like, though I suspect they had menubars on that as well.) Still, the idea of a palette that changes depending on the tool selected is something that's been in programs like Photoshop and DRAW for the better part of a decade. Those programs have far more tools and options than can be shown at once. Which actually pretty much explains Microsoft Office as well. In fact, since Corel's purchase of WordPerfect, the only major feature that has been added was the context sensitive property bar.

The conversation continued to the sad, sad neglect of WordPerfect by the Corel Corporation. I can't say much but to suggest that too much of the code in there is a black box to Corel's programmers. They haven't changed the file format since version 6, which is becoming a liability since it leaves WordPerfect the last major word processor to not support Unicode. They seem to struggle to fix long standing bugs in the program, even though they just released a new version a few days ago. I'm continuing to hope someone will buy Corel or WordPerfect. The guy at the Apple store wishes that company would pick it up. Pages is a good page layout program, but it isn't a heavy duty word processor. Plus Apple's suite is missing a spreadsheet. However, the last version of WordPerfect for the Mac died about 10 years ago, and such a move by Apple could rankle its relationship with Microsoft.

I meant to make today's post be part of "Apple Bug Report Friday", and while I may get around to that (probably on Saturday, or January sometime), I just found a funny elsewhere.

Of the few weblogs to become my favorite, DrunkenBlog is probably the most interesting, eclectic and in its own way bizarre. Over at that site today, the author "drunkenbatman", managed to anger two groups of zealots with a post tangentially related to Apple Computer and with a quick aside to Creationist doctrine ("Intelligent Design"). This is ironic in not only that his website is probably one of the most highly regarded Macintosh journals out there, but in an interview, he said that he was a bible salesman.

Largely the piece is one where he revisits several things he posted on before: A prediction he made about Instant Messaging, the iTunes "TV Show and Music Video" Store (DB wonders why the the store has the selection of videos it does. I'm sure the answer has something to do with the little animation company Steve Jobs owns and how important it is to a certain big animation company. This big animation company happens to own one broadcast network and several cable networks, which produces several popular shows -- and this cancelled one. ).

Anyway, there's something interesting, and disturbing sometimes about how deep the loyalties to this one company some people have developed. The clearest example of this overly blind loyalty is in this example of cognitive dissonance in an editorial by MacDailyNews:

"We should blame Microsoft and Apple? Well, one out of two ain't bad. Apple has the de facto standard for online legal music DRM, FairPlay or protected AAC, with over 700 million (estimated) songs sold to date and a firm grip on 80% of the market. Why does Microsoft insist on trying and failing to propagate their proprietary DRM (as proprietary as Apple, granted, but without being the de facto standard) scheme on the world? It is Microsoft that's responsible for the incompatibilities. Remember that Apple's iTunes is free and works for both Mac and Windows, unlike all of Microsoft-based online music stores which are incompatible with Macs."

It's best we overlook the fact that "FairPlay" is incompatible with everything but the iPod, and that Apple is leveraging those monopolies to lock customers into the iTunes/iPod/Quicktime circle, not unlike Microsoft leverages Windows to gain ground in places it wants to compete.

Now, the funnier thing is that a single sentence has driven some people mad...

These types of issues play out on a sliding scale, and like Intelligent Design proponents, even having them at the table runs the danger of skewing things to the point where what might be tolerable will eventually encroach into territory most people don't want to end up in.

That little line drove two or three ID believers to complain in the comments and pretty much derail the thread (well, derailed from its first derailment where the Apple-fanboys complained about DB's latest dis against them). I made my thoughts known there about Intelligent Design. (November 25th 2005, 7:50pm)

Now, I have to get on my Friday Apple Bug Report so I can have it written up before Sunday. Oh yeah, I guess I should mention I was sent a Macintosh. I'll talk about it later. I'm obviously behind on everything related to writing journals. Someone won some election I was talking about here in Virginia. Someone else found old animation posts I made, and complimented me. I had forgotten that I used to write about that. (OK, I haven't... the girls madly in love with Danny Phantom never let me forget that.)

If you were foolish enough to be using this journal as breaking news, you spent last Tuesday, August 9th nearly alone, shocked to discover that a computer fire-sale had been postponed for a week, and limited to local residents. However, you would not have been trampled, attacked, or otherwise injured.

Yesterday, Henrico County, Virginia opened up the doors to the Richmond Raceway to sell 4 year old iBooks for $50. And it was every man for himself... Old men and mothers were run over! A woman peeing on herself to get a computer. Some guy tried to break through with his car!

Sorry, you lunatics... I don't need a computer that badly...

WWBT Richmond

CNN

To those in and near Richmond in need of a cheap notebook computer, Henrico County schools announced that they're going to sell off their surplus Apple iBooks on Tuesday August 9th to the public for $50. They have just 1000, so it will be first come, first serve, and they're only selling one to a person, so you can't go hoarding off a couple of dozen to try to make hand-over-fist profit.

The machines are 4 year old iBooks G3s with 320MB of RAM and Appleworks.

Henrico County opted to start using Dell machines this year, as Dell offered a better deal (particularly by providing Microsoft Office rather than Appleworks).

Of course as this is a sell of Apple computers, you're going to have to fight the loonies, and the fanboys who will probably be waiting in line starting Sunday night.

Yeah, that's a good enough reason for me to not bother with this sale.

Henrico County is selling off its Apple iBook computers for $50.

I'll give y'all $100 for one of your $50 laptops.

(Ugh, I'm going to hate this "tag" feature if I can't hide the tags from each post.)

I feel somewhat sorry for the lass who sent me the Toshiba I posted about below, which served me well until the demise. She bought a new 12" iBook two months ago. Shortly before technology evangelist Paul Thurrott made an idle comment on April 26th. That day he complained that the Windows Longhorn project looked like a train-wreck. That comment, plus one by another describing Longhorn as "looking like ass" got the major play that day. However, another comment was noted by the Mac enthusaist community: "Apple is unhappy with the PowerPC production at IBM and will be switching to Intel-compatible chips this very year. Yeah, seriously."

That earned him a lot of derison from the Mac enthusiasts. Though probably not as much as John Dvorak has everytime he brings it up.

Last Friday, C|Net posted that come 1pm today (EDT), Steve Jobs will announce that Apple is switching to Intel made processors. The Wall Street Journal, and other papers began reporting such as well. Now, whether this will happen, or numerous respected publications get socked in the eye remains to be seen. We'll find out in about 30 minutes to an hour whether or not this is true.

Well, you will. I probably won't find out until 6pm or later when I return to my PC to read the day's news. But if this turns out to be true, and true in the way that Apple switches to the x86 architecture (Intel could just be making PPC chips), I will feel sorry for my friend who had just bought a new iBook. If Apple does something like this, sales of PPC hardware will pretty much drop off a cliff. I doubt people will be buying technology that Apple is going to abandon shortly, no matter how well emulation goes. (And emulation has proven to be difficult, as x86 can't mimic PPC very well.)

Reasons for Apple to make this switch seem to be unclear. There's nothing much beyond frustration with IBM's ability to make enough chips for the company. Because of this old partnership, Apple had actually run out of computers to sell numerous times. But from what little I know, this doesn't seem enough to jump through all the difficulty of changing horses for the third time.

That said, I know nothing. It's best I shut up now. You'll probably know all the details come 2pm eastern time. I'll probably learn of them after sunset.

Imagine this.

You're using your computer, browsing the web. You land on a website, and it asks you to install some cool enhancement to your computer. You say "OK!", why not? Then you run it.

OOPS!

It now occasionally pops up some advertisement, commandeers your toolbars, and you can't figure out how to uninstall it.

Another day in the life of Windows?

Almost. This is a vulnerability in Apple's OS X 10.4 "Tiger". Particularly, the Dashboard feature.

Here's the funny thing: This is the exact same mistake Microsoft made when they integrated Windows into the web browser through ActiveX in 1997, making ActiveX the preferred way of installing spyware and trojans in Windows since 1998. Provide an incredibly easy way to install dangerous programs from the net, allow it too much access to the system, and make it exceedingly difficult to uninstall it.

As of right now, you cannot easily uninstall Apple widgets. It takes a trip to the ~/Library/Widgets/ folder and then rebooting Windows...I mean OS X to get the dread out.

You see, most spyware and adware gets installed by users clicking "YES" to something innocent-sounding, not by buffer-overflows or secret autoinstall flaws in IE. Users blindingly clicking OK. Now, widgets can't run unless told to by the user, but then all it is needed is to make the widget look like an innocent thing to run.

This is Apple making the exact same mistake Microsoft made, a mistake some Mac users gloat over when they say Windows is inherently insecure.

You can easily disable the automatic installation of bad widgets by turning off the "Open 'safe' files after download" feature in Safari, but now Mac users are going to have to be very careful with what they open. Much like us on the inferior OSes.

The proof of concept is at http://stephan.com

I've read somewhere that, not unlike in politics, the idea in advertising is to lie without getting caught. "Take the most unfortunate truth, turn it upside down ('lie'), and drill that lie home." I was thinking about this when I was reading that Apple has added "over 200 features" into the OS that is being sent to people now (though it's not due for its public unveiling until Friday). If you read closely, there's a lot of repeating and double-counting in this list. For example, not only is the "Dashboard" listed as a feature, each individual preinstalled Dashboard element (widget) is counted as individual features, separate from Dashboard itself. Another example: not only is the Spotlight search feature is counted as a feature, but each individual action Spotlight does gets listed as its own feature, and each application that supports Spotlight gets thrown one of the over 200 bullet points. In some cases, Apple comes close to begging for a cookie for doing stuff they're supposed to do. For example, they've listed the "Spotlight Menu" as a feature. Yes America, they've provided access to the search capability through the user interface. "What do you want, a cookie?! This ain't Linux!"

But still, stuff like that won't show up in Windows for two more Christmases.

Well, nobody loves Dell.

Anyway, first thing I noticed in my past Apple story is that I used the phrase "put the hurt on". I have never used that phrase before in my life, though I see a bunch of people on the internet putting the hurt on that phrase. I'm guessing someone at SportsCenter listened to some Otis Redding one night, and decided to make that lyric his new catchphrase. Thus it spread like a virus. It must have infected me after visiting DrunkenBlog, run by a fellow who calls himself Drunkenbatman. I can only thank him for what little I know about the Macintosh, OS X, and what is going on in Apple. Up until recently, he published on roughly the same schedule as I did: once every epoch. He's been the one who has soured me somewhat on the Mac Mini, though. (I'd be a kick-ass machine should Apple quit insisting that OS X can be run with 256MB of RAM, or Apple had chosen a larger or speedier hard disk, or had added more than 2 USB ports.)

"Switching is Hard to Do" was inspired by comments in these two posts --Microsoft Opens Office XML Format and Rumble Young Man -- in addition to Jason Snell's comments to Salon, yesterday. To quote the relevant part of "XML Format":

Let's assume for a moment that Apple, or someone else, basically had a feature-complete alternative solution for everything you get in Microsoft Office Professional on Windows. No technical or format issues whatsoever. The fact would remain that it still wasn't Office.

The temptation here is to say "It has everything you need", but that's only part of the story when it comes to really making headway. . . Moving to something else, even if it has everything you need, can be a maddening experience because the interface isn't the same, and you know the interface. Or rather, you know the app.

Let me reiterate: it doesn't matter if the new interface is better, it just matters that it's different. . .They've gone to classes. They've bought books. They've built up a knowledge base, and muscle memory, over years if not a decade. This is something a lot of Mac users never got when they saw a switcher come over from Windows and just decide they weren't Mac people. It wasn't that the Mac interface wasn't better when you sat down and tested someone who was fresh with a computer. It was just that the other person knew Windows, and the Mac was different.

But going on to this, look at an extreme Avon salesman from "Rumble Young Man"

Awhile ago I was privy to an interesting interchange between two people, where one was in the market for a new computer, preferably a laptop he could depend on, and the other was trying to convince him to get an iBook.

His selling point was the great quality of the Mac hardware, among other things. Since I knew this guy peripherally, I knew his iBook had been sent in for repairs no less than five times, and from memory went something like this:

• Screen problem, where the hinge was chewing through the cable. Was sent in and repaired.
• Logic board problem, which was sent in and fixed.
• CD-ROM stopped working, was sent in for repair.
• Trackpad stopped working, along with the firewire port... was sent in for repair.
• Logic Board again, which was sent in and returned without being fixed because the 'problem could not be reproduced'.
• Logic Board failed in a spectacular way, and was sent in for repair and repaired.
• The machine is currently having display issues, and trackpad issues, which sounds like a logic board problem... when he called Apple, the support person asked if the symptoms were actually happening right then. Since they were intermittent, and weren't, the person couldn't issue an RMA number until the person called and they were happening right then (I'm seriously not making this up), so he knows this machine is going to have to go in again.

Since I was there, I couldn't help but ask "Didn't you have to send yours..." which caused him to promptly downshift into a newer mode for Mac users, that of "Well yes, but all computers are going to have problems, but Apple fixed mine... how they are taken care of is what matters...", which meant he's now focusing on the service, not the hardware itself.

Now here we have a person who has first hand knowledge that this is one fucked up model in terms of quality, yet he wasn't going to mention the problems he'd personally experienced, and he's recommending it to a new user while trying to sell it with the reliability card. That's bizarro-world logic.

There's two related things here that seem to work in tandem to create a cultural and psychological barrier to folks wishing to considering a Macintosh just another computer. Of course, Apple has very good reason to sell their machines as more than just another computer. But the slight undercurrent, the feeling that using an Apple is akin to freeing yourselves from some sort of slavers shackles, an undercurrent that is magnified by some very zealous fans, does manage to turn off and/or scare people away. This is not a new psychology played by Apple advertising. This is the no-so subtle message that was in the very first advertisement for the Macintosh: The ad with the female runner throwing a hammer at the screen of the image of "Big Brother," the stand in for Big Blue.

This is the psychology that I believe has backfired spectacularly in Apple's face of late. Today, I do not think there is anyone in America who has not used a computer at some point. Even if they do not have one at home, they work with them through the day in school, or at work. A vast majority of these are Windows-based PCs, though a number of places have special needs which requires a specialty computer. Thinking of it like this, every single person who is looking is in the market for a second-computer. If that's the case, you want your second computer to be like your first one. Unfortunately for Apple, because of some things they have little choice in  (building on top of a different processor architecture), some things they do to themselves (being gratuitously different, like pushing one button mice on everyone), and some things done by their well meaning fans, the thought of purchasing an Apple becomes akin to learning French.

Rather than mitigating the concerns, Apple tried turning a weakness into a strength by hyperemphasis on Switch. Sure, the differences between Apple and PC are its strengths. Viruses designed for Windows, using flaws in Windows will not work on Macs. With less chance for a craptastic device from nowhere Taiwan killing the hardware, Macs will be more stable and reliable. However, it also helped heighten fears that the difference between a Mac and a PC is closer to being the difference between a Ford and a Cessna, as opposed to the difference between a Ford and a BMW. And with a very visible and cultivated cult that has taken the "switch" badge and made it mean something akin to a religious conversion, aiming to lead PC users to salvation, Macintoshes are scary.

Returning to "The Mac is Back", the author of that piece responded favorably to my response to the article. If I had half of a brain, I would have sent it out to Salon's letters to the editor and have had thousands of people read it, as opposed to the dozens -- the few who don't automatically think LiveJournal.com as the moody teen girl salon. Though if I had sent it out, it would have been mixed in with the letters from both Mac fanatics, and a group I never would have thought existed -- Windows fanatics.

Frankly, I didn't think such people existed. Nobody loves Microsoft. Though I remember the concert-length lines of people waiting for a chance to purchase Windows 95, Microsoft has lost all such coolness cred. Most people tolerate Microsoft, not much more. Microsoft is pretty much the phone company. If there are people praising Microsoft in all that they do, I will have to admit I just don't understand.

In Salon magazine, there is a piece on the new Mac Mini. It follows on many, many, many others. In short form, the article says, "Yay, Apple may actually gain marketshare and put the hurt on Microsoft." However, a section within the article is very revealing. In it, article author Farhad Manjoo interviews Jason Snell, editor of MacWorld (and also of the fine TeeVee website, which despite better judgment, accepted a piece I've written).

An experience he witnessed:

"'I was visiting some friends this weekend,' Snell says, 'and they're PC people, they don't own Macs. But one of them was describing going to a friend's house to use iPhoto so she could make a photo book for their daughter's birthday. They loved the Mac, and they were seriously talking about buying a Mac Mini.' What's interesting, Snell points out, is that these people didn't want the Mini for its intrinsic computer power; they were going to keep their PC up and running. They wanted the Mini as a household digital hub, as an appliance, rather than a computer, that made it easier to play with their photos."

Manjoo continues...

Windows users often think about the buying of a Mac as a terminal decision. Indeed, you don't just "buy" a Macintosh; in jargon that Apple has popularized, you "switch" to the Mac, you make a change to your life in order to reorient yourself to a whole new platform. Put that way, buying a Mac is a huge decision; it involves learning a new operating system, transferring files, and buying new, expensive software to replace the software on your Windows machine. But if you think of the Mac Mini as an appliance, as a device for photos and making movies, you can conceive of using the Mac without "switching," Snell notes.

And Houston, I think you see the problem Apple has always had. The switch campaign was a brilliant marketing campaign. There are thousands of homages and parodies of the campaign out there. It reminded the world that Apple is still actually in business, and still makes computers. And yes, the ads were cool. But the ads sabotaged the effort to get people to consider that Apple Computers can coexist with PCs, and your knowledge of PCs. "Switch" failed Apple's goal. (Otherwise, they wouldn't be piddling with just a one to three percent market share.)

Think of the connotations of "switching". It means dumping all previously learned knowledge and starting over. Let's switch to metric! "NO! I don't know how many liters it is from here to New York!" Let's switch to High Definition Television! "NO! I can't afford buying all new VCRs and TVs and cable boxes, and stereo systems, and kitchen appliances!" Look at the questions Apple has posted to its website about "switching".

"Can I send e-mail?"
"Can I use my digital camera?"

And my favorite one, as it shows Apple shooting itself in the foot in multiple ways, "Can I use a two-button mouse?"! (Bruce Tognazzini correctly notes that while Apple persists in believing they only have a one button mouse, in reality OS X mice have five buttons.) The ironic thing is that using OS X, and by extension Apple's computers are not as hard as the myth maintains. But this myth is perpetuated not only by a number of PC users, but by many Mac users who equate using their computers to a holy communion, and by Apple itself.

Imagine all of the people who were considering second computers immediately not think of a Mac as it will conflict with years of experience with computers they already own. Imagine all the people who have PCs at work, who then get PCs at home because when they thought Apple they thought "switch" and then thought, "It's not worth it to relearn everything."

Switching is hard to do.

On Friday nights, since the main target demographic for Cartoon Network is allowed to stay up a little later and can hold off on doing homework for a few days, Cartoon Network airs a special branded block of programs called Fridays. However, it doesn't stop older fans from watching, and even doing some things inspired by the cartoons to entertain themselves and others.

A fellow from the Philippines who calls himself Bleedman has decided to reimage the stars of Cartoon Network shows (as well as a few assorted shows from Nickelodeon and other networks) in general manga style. The results are a fan generated webcomic, nominally centered around the Powerpuff Girls. I say nominally because any character from any show from CN is likely to show up.

Unfortunately for me, the images are remarkably large. Two thousand pixels wide. That probably means he has a far better computer/monitor set up than I do. Maybe even one of those $1000 plus Cinema Displays Apple is attempting to sell with their $500 computer. Anyway, there is probably a more reasonably sized version of the panels at either Toonzone or at DeviantArt.