What happened to the exclusive Club Mac?

Is Jobs' new Internet strategy turning Apple into a playground for newbies?

By Donna Ladd

Jan 21, 2000 | The purchase of my first Mac back in the '80s was a de facto pledge of allegiance to the anti-PC club. I loved being inside Apple's velvet ropes, while lots of clueless PC geeks stood around outside. But with Apple's recent success, the Mac club is becoming like a New York hot spot that welcomes the bridge-and-tunnel crowd. When anybody with $999 for an iMac can get in, who will be left for us to "Think Different" from?

This month's Macworld Expo in San Francisco really brought it home: Steve Jobs is grafting little stoplights onto our operating system (stay tuned for OS X). Apple now has an "Internet strategy," for Chrissake. Its Web site has been transformed into a portal, at least to everything Apple wants you to find. You can have your own Mac.com e-mail address, send iCards, build a boilerplate home page and store documents on Apple's server, as part of Apple's new iTools Internet services. Apple will even pre-screen your kids' Web travels and provide you with site reviews to help you answer the question -- no! -- where do you want to go today?

And it's all free -- if you own a Mac and pay the $99 dues to upgrade to Mac OS 9. Of course, you must have a box (PowerPC or better) that will support the power-hungry OS 9. Then, later this year you're expected to upgrade to the new, Windowish -- read: cheesier -- OS X. (Code word "Aqua," in case they ask you at the door.)

What's next? "You've got QuickTime"?

In his bid to pump up market share, Jobs is turning Apple into a playground for newbies. Perhaps this is good for business -- on Wednesday Apple reported a $183 million profit for the first quarter of 2000, posting revenues 37 percent higher than the same quarter last year. Or, as Jobs put it in his keynote: Apple sold an iMac every six seconds in the fourth quarter of 1999. The question for the Mac faithful, though, those of us who stuck around through all the red ink, is more pressing. Yes, Apple is succeeding. But what about our chic little club? Does Apple have to dumb itself down into an America Online to keep growing its numbers? And does Jobs really have to take us down the road of proprietary features again?

Macworld columnist David Pogue isn't worried in the slightest about Apple's new Internet strategy. "It looks like a win-win to me, because Mac customers get a number of terrific new features at no charge, get to feel proud they're Mac users, have some additional features to call their own - and Apple gets to build up one hell of a terrific mailing list," says Pogue, who is also the creator of the Missing Manual book series for O'Reilly Books.

Other long-time Mac users, however, think requiring an OS 9 hand stamp to enter Apple's Internet universe is going too far.

"I'm concerned about increasing proprietization of the Internet," says Charles Moore, a Nova Scotia-based columnist for Applelinks. "This already reared its ugly head with Microsoft Web sites that require Internet Explorer for access and others that demand Intel's Pentium III chip."

Moore says such "gated communities" in cyberspace could be a disturbing precursor to more slamming doors: "Will the new AOL Time Warner conglomerate, for instance, continue to offer Microsoft's MSN.com subscribers, or for that matter Apple's Earthlink subscribers, full and unfettered access to AOL Time Internet content?"

Next Page: "It's just not smart to be exclusionary"

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