Macs are for creative folks

I'm always intrigued by the notion that somehow Macs are for creative people, but PCs are for serious people. Maybe that was true back in the days when desktop publishing was new, but nowadays, pretty much anything you can do on OS X can be done on Windows, and vice versa. Here's why I love my 3-year old MacBook Pro.

1. Magsafe power plug. Very little chance of destroying a computer, as I once did to a Dell Latitude laptop where the power cable ended up inextricably tied around my foot just I stood up abruptly. Those little tiny touches do make a difference.

2. It's real Unix, so I can run computer science-y software that was written for Unix.

3. It really is plug-and-go. I have a Dell laptop with Ubuntu on it, and while it's a nice system, I had to do a lot of work to get everything working properly on it.

4. My antivirus software for that machine consumes zero bytes, takes 0% of the cpu cycles, and cost me $0.

5. Apple includes their development software at no cost with every system.

6. Apple's development software does not suggest that I become super-user in order to compile, test, and debug software. Visual Studio did exactly that on Vista, maybe it won't on Windows 7.

Not one of these is something that Apple's competitors couldn't duplicate (they'd have to license the magsafe patents, I guess, but they could apply the same attention to detail about other aspects of how people actually use machines).

Windows systems fail on all six of these criteria. Unix/Linux systems pass on 2, 4, 5, and 6, but fail on 1 and 3. (Incidentally, I know my way around Unix, having started in 1975 on a Unix V7 system. Even so, when I want to send email, or write software, the last thing I want to be doing is to fiddle with system parameters to make everything work, and yes, I have had to do that with every system I have ever installed Linux on).

So my point is, Microsoft, the hardware vendors, and the Unix/Linux community COULD be competing with Apple. The criteria I listed here happen to be mine; other folks have their own, though `it just works' should be on everyone's. Where people miss the boat is to say `Oh, we aren't Apple, we do it our way'. Apple definitely has their failures, but their successes come from building things that satisfy needs (not just status) in people's lives. Other companies could do the same.

By the way, let me put in a plug for Mark Shuttleworth's goal of making Ubuntu compete with OS X. I don't know if they'll be successful, but they are definitely thinking the right way.

@Sean Baggaley

1. The Open Source Definition is not the work of Richard Stallman or the FSF, who overall does not like the phrase.

2. The non-discrimination clauses I quoted come from the Open Source Definition, which is published by the Open Source Initiative.

3. When Microsoft developed licenses that they considered to be open-source (note lower case), they submitted them to the OSI for approval.

4. The Wikipedia article on open source cites a reference ([6]) from 1990 that shows the term to be used to signify `materials open to the public and freely available' [my wording] and opposed implicitly to `controlled'.

5. I hope Sean would not consider a library to be public if it refused admittance to meat eaters, vegetarians, or any other group.

For the record, I have been using open-source software since about 1970, back when user groups such as SHARE (IBM) and DECUS (DEC) used to distribute it. The GNU Manifesto clearly says that RMS wanted to re-create the environment he'd experienced at the MIT AI Lab, so he can hardly have claimed to invented the concept.