Mac

My father used a Mac Plus back in the eighties. I still remember the excitement of opening the box when it arrived (and distinctly recall the sound of angels singing in the background as we did so) and seeing that little machine, nestled in a bed of styrofoam, smiling up at us. Apple’s packaging skills (both physical and propagandistic) are legendary, and everything about this computer — from unpacking it, to setting it up, to using it — was designed to be simple, fun, and nonthreatening. First do this. Then unwrap that. Plug this in. You’re done.

And we were done. Besides being uber-cool, it was functional and reliable, and we stopped using it long before it was ready to stop being used.

I went to the dark side when I left for college — which is to say, I bought a PC, and followed in the footsteps of Microsoft’s rise to monopoly: MS-DOS, then Windows 3.1, then Windows 95. It wasn’t an entirely terrible decision, as it turned out. Apple was mired for years in an old operating system that was so far behind its times that it became something of a joke among the intechligensia. OS9, their latest (and, thankfully, last) incarnation of that monster still couldn’t multitask in any meaningful way, didn’t have protected memory, and crashed often. And it was apparently a nightmare to develop for. Windows stole all its best ideas from Apple (and, by extension, from Xerox) but it implemented them better.

That all changed with the introduction of OS X, an operating system that uses a Unix core as its basis and builds a lovely graphical user interface on top of it. It’s stable, it’s smart, and it’s so much better than its predecessor in so many ways that it qualifies as an actual revolution. For Apple, anyway: the core of this “new” technology is over twenty years old. But it’s still wonderful.

So I’m back. I’ve adopted the Mac as my primary platform, and — despite the fact that there are some things that are hard to do on my new machine (run the latest Linux distributions; play the latest games, etc) — I’m loving it. Even better, I recently came upon a news item by Dan Gillmor that further bolsters my convinction that Apple is the best game in town. To wit: in an age where most of the top-dog companies out there (Intel, AMD, Microsoft) seem to be selling out to the entertainment conglomerates by creating hardware and software that controls and restricts access to our own machines (a movement that is being newspeak-marketed as Digital Rights Management and Trusted Computing), Apple is holding fast to its assertion that the customer’s rights are what matter, first and foremost:

Unlike Intel and AMD, the big chip makers for Windows-based computers, Apple hasn’t announced plans to put technology into hardware that could end up restricting what customers do with the products they buy. Unlike Microsoft, Apple hasn’t asserted the right to remote control over users’ operating systems.
The era of Digital Rights Management, commonly called DRM, is swiftly moving closer, thanks to the Intels and AMDs and Microsofts. They’re busy selling and creating the tools that give copyright holders the ability to tell users of copyrighted material — customers, scholars, libraries, etc. — precisely how they may use it. DRM, in the most typical use of the expression, is about owners’ rights. It would be more accurate to call DRM, in that context, “Digital Restrictions Management.”
But Apple has taken a different tack in its rhetoric and its technology. As I said in an introduction to a panel I moderated Tuesday at a conference in Santa Clara, Mac OS X, Apple’s modern operating system, is becoming, whether by design or by accident, a Digital Rights Management operating system where the rights in question are the user’s rights — and they are expansive.

Amen to that. Apple is fighting the good fight, for whatever reason, and I’m happy to support them in this. America’s large computer conglomerates are trying to assert de-facto totalitarian control over the mindspace of the world’s consumers. They’re all claiming to have our best interests at heart, and promise never to abuse the power they’re granting themselves, but this is the slipperiest of slippery slopes.

The thing to keep in mind, here, is that they’re building their empire on very unstable ground: for now, at least, the success of this new wave of intrusive computing is based entirely on our willingness to pay for the privilege of having it shoved down our throats.

So don’t.