Thursday, May 15, 2008
Weary of spyware, tired of virus attacks, a nation turns its lonely eyes to ... Apple?
Jan 31, 2005 | Twenty-one years ago this month, Steve Jobs, Apple Computer's theatrical co-founder, launched the company's annual shareholder meeting in Cupertino, Calif., by quoting Dylan: "For the wheel's still in spin/ And there's no tellin' who that it's namin'/ For the loser now/ Will be later to win/ For the times they are a-changin'." Then, after a brief diatribe on the stupidity and villainy of IBM, Apple's main rival at the time, Jobs cast himself as the hero in a near-epic, if ultra-geeky, battle between good and evil: "It is now 1984," he said. "It appears that IBM wants it all ... IBM wants it all, and is aiming its guns at its last obstacle to industry control, Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right?"
Jobs is hammier than an Easter feast, and it's easy to discount his perpetually revolutionary air, but that 1984 shareholder meeting -- at which the company, besieged by IBM, unveiled its radically different Macintosh home computer -- was nevertheless magical. You can read this account by Andy Hertzfeld, a Mac co-creator, to get a sense of the tension and the mania in the auditorium that day, the feeling that this was a moment for the history books. Or watch a video of the event that's recently been making the rounds online: "Chariots of Fire" rises in the background as the Mac is switched on, and the audience gasps as the machine before them actually speaks its name in greeting. And why shouldn't they gasp? Outside of Kubrick films, whoever had seen such an amazing machine before?
If you're into this sort of thing, the clip can give you goose bumps. Isn't it a shame, you say, that Apple hasn't been this cool in decades? And then: Isn't it wonderful that the magic is back?
After all, we've been living, for the past couple years, in Apple's world, a time and place in which the normal rules of commerce no longer seem to apply to the once much-beaten-down firm. The company has seen an extraordinary string of hits recently. The iPod is bigger than Jesus. Apple is literally selling these things faster than it can make them. Now, for the first time in almost two decades, there's a good -- great -- feeling attached to the Apple brand, a haze of optimism that is unlike the sensation we feel for all but the most cherished of consumer tech products. (There's Google, there's TiVo, and there's Apple: Can you think of any other company that has recently changed your life as you know it?)
So, perchance to dream: After iPod, can Apple make a comeback in the world of personal computers? On Jan. 22, the company began shipping the Mac Mini, a diminutive entry-level machine aimed at Windows people. The computer is tiny, beautiful and, at $499, cheap; already, it's receiving generally positive praise from reviewers.
What happens now? The entire effort could fizzle, certainly. Apple releases nice Macs all the time that never spark in the Windows world. There is a theory, though, that this go-round might be different, that the moment may be ripe for the Mac Mini to take off. The landscape of the personal computer market has altered. In recent years, the home computer has increasingly become a digital entertainment center; people use it for the Web, they use it for e-mail, and they use it for photos, movies and music.
The Mac is not just good at these few tasks: It's the best there is. There's simply no arguing that Apple's built-in software and operating system make for the single most powerful photo, music and movie system you can buy.
But the things that the Mac is good at make up just one part of the story. There's a flip side -- the increasingly obvious failings of PCs running Microsoft Windows. Among Windows users, there's a rising feeling -- accounted for mostly by anecdotes and not all that well-measured, but nevertheless important -- that the system is becoming too hard to maintain. Talk to experts at computer security firms and they'll give you some pretty scary straight talk about how spyware, adware and viruses are just killing the user experience on an ordinary Windows PC.
It's not unusual for people to throw out their year-old Windows computers because they've become just too clogged with bad junk, says Richard Stiennon, vice president of threat research at the anti-spyware firm Webroot. The Mac, in contrast, simply doesn't suffer such afflictions.
David Gelernter, a computer scientist and tech visionary at Yale, likens today's PC market to the American automobile market of the early 1970s. At the time, Americans were buying American-made junk -- and because they didn't know any better, they were putting up with the junk. "So what happened?" Gelernter asks. "What happened was that Japan started exporting huge numbers of Hondas and Toyotas, and people saw that for a reasonable price they could buy a car that didn't fall apart in two weeks. When you picked it up at the dealer all the parts were in it, the whole thing worked. Until that happened, people were satisfied with the garbage they were getting from Detroit."
Forget the iPod. What if the iPod's just a gateway drug? What if Apple's future is much grander: What if Apple could become the Toyota of the computer business?
Get Salon in your mailbox!