Wednesday, July 02, 2003
Apple advances: Macintosh users, you've still never had it so good.
"Your site isn't so much about educating or helping people as it is about providing a digital standing ovation every time Apple releases a new product or gets good press."
Ouch. Nearly every morning, I awake to find an inbox full of pleasant electronic communication directed my way. In fact, regularly getting to hear from Mac users around the world makes doing this blog worthwhile all by itself. But finding the above quote addressed to me this morning was a little disturbing. I could write a whole column detailing every instance in which I've written columns whose sole purpose was to help people (for instance, my home networking column two days ago), recommended that people buy a product other than the Apple-branded one (CompUSA brand wireless router, in that same column), or criticized a particular Apple move with which I've disagreed (cutting off iChat AV below 600 Mhz, three days ago)...but I don't think anyone wants to read such a column.
So I'll let regular readers judge the validity of the above quote. Most of what I write about Apple and the Mac is indeed positive, but that's because most of what's going on with Apple and the Mac is positive. I don't feel the need, in the name of a 'balanced point of view', to end a positive Mac-related article with some randomized negativity such as "in other news, it's entirely possible that Steve Jobs has rabies".
In fact, since I'm being accused of being a full-time Apple cheerleader, I think I'll go ahead and grab the pom-poms for a moment. I've dusted off my original April 16th "Macintosh users, you've never had it so good" column and updated it for the major advances the platform has undertaken in just the short time since I wrote it. I'm going to keep the identity of this morning's detractor private, even though he didn't ask me to. But I will point out that he wrote to me from a mac.com address, which means that he is, astonishingly, a Mac user. In fact he's precisely the kind of lost-sight-of-how-fantastic-we-have-it Mac user that I started this blog for in the first place. So, here it is, and I hope my friend sticks around long enough to realize just how good he does have it:
(originally published 4/16/03, updated 7/2/03)
When a Mac user like me looks at the user experience that's available on the other side of the fence, I wonder how Windows users can even stand to use their computer. What possesses them to hang on to such a profoundly inferior experience? Most of it is because they just don't yet know what all they're missing. Another part is that they've wasted so many years learning the oddities of their platform that they hesitate to jump the fence, for fear that they'll have to spend several more years learning what they expect will amount to the same crap, only different. But when you break down the user experience feature by feature, app by app, the size of the disparity between platforms spells itself out all too clearly for anyone willing to listen. Every Mac user knows about goodness of this application, or the coolness of that one, but take a look at the full scope of what all is going on here:
Internet: Up until a year or two ago, the Internet advantage of the Mac was limited to the fact that you could get up and running on the net more quickly and easily than on a PC. But with the release of OS 9's Sherlock 2, which allowed you to perform certain Internet tasks without first having to hunt down a website that would let you do it, that all began to change. With the onset of Jaguar's Sherlock 3, a host of previously tedious Internet procedures had been reduced to a click or two. Planning a movie theater trip, for example, used to require visiting four or five different websites: one to find out what movies are available and find info on them, another to see the times that the movie was playing at your local theater, a third to watch the movie trailer, a fourth to check the times at an alternate theater, perhaps a fifth to buy tickets online, and so on. Now, thanks to Sherlock 3, all of the above information and more can be gathered with all the effort it takes to click on the Movies button in the toolbar. What gets me, though, is the fact that Windows users still have to do this the old tedious way! Consequently, many Windows users just don't do it at all. They grab a newspaper, call the theater, and wait in line to buy tickets because their user experience isn't sufficient enough to convince them to do things digitally.
Sherlock aside, standard web browsing was long one of the few areas in which the Mac had no clear advantage over the PC: you were stuck with mediocre browsers like Internet Explorer and Netscape, regardless your platform. But when MacOS X came along, nimble third-party browsers from small companies like OmniWeb, and developer communities like Chimera, started to spring up specifically for OS X. And if these small-time groups could produce browsers that in some ways outclassed Explorer, then it was surely only a matter of time before Apple released a browser that blew it away completely. When you show PC users some of Safari's innovations such as SnapBack, streamlined bookmark management, and now tabbed browsing, they begin to question why their platform has no such equivalent. The answer that they don't want to hear is that they're simply on the wrong platform. In the past six months, web browsing on the Mac has evolved so far beyond browsing on the PC that the gap between the two platforms makes for two entirely different user experiences. Internet Explorer had to reach version 5.0 before it finally passed up Netscape. Safari, at 1.0, has already blown IE away entirely. The fact that iTunes 4 has a 'unique' form of web browsing of its own built in, well that's another category entirely.
Instant Messaging: Chatting used to be a simple proposition: you either had America Online or you didn't. But somewhere along the line, AOL decided to give Instant Messaging away to everyone, and as a result we all became familiar with the lingo of "BRB" and "LOL". It didn't matter whether you were on a Mac or a PC, chatting was the same experience, although many PC users were convinced that we Mac users were on some kind of alternative ghetto network which only allowed us to chat with each other (this was never, ever true). Along came messaging systems from Yahoo and MSN, and again, it didn't matter what kind of computer you were using. But last year, Apple, who back in the early nineties gave America Online its startup money (believe it or not), decided to partner with its old chum and create an enhanced version of Instant Messenger, called iChat, just for Jaguar users. You only have to use iChat once to realize how much you like it, and yes, you can still talk to everyone on the Instant Messenger network on both platforms, because iChat is Instant Messenger, just a cooler, more intuitive version -- with a few tricks up its sleeve you couldn't have expected.
If you're on a closed network, at work for example, iChat allows you to use something called Rendezvous to chat with directly with other iChatters on your network simply by signing on; you don't even have to be on the Internet. You don't configure anything, you just sign on. It's weird. It's cool. It's easy. It expands the possibilities of workplace communication. But merely having the best instant text messaging app on the planet isn't enough to satisfy Mac users for long. So the new iChat AV brings audio and even video chats to the table with literally zero setup. Sure, it's only Mac-to-Mac right now, but as Steve Jobs said, "We've used open standards, so as others copy what we do..."
But for those Jaguar users who prefer the standard version of Instant Messenger, it's still around and still being developed. In other words, you can do things the way PC users do it, or you can use enhanced stuff that's just for Mac users, or both. You have the best of both worlds, which means you've got twice the user experience that your neighbor on the PC does. And if you still prefer to use America Online as your overall internet provider, there exists what one of my former students tells me is an "awesome" version of AOL specifically for Jaguar. For what it's worth, I don't ever intend to find out first-hand. But the option is there for those who want it.
Word processing: This involves typing words, seeing them appear on-screen, and letting a printer put them on paper. It should be the simplest, most straight-forward task you can do on a computer. Unfortunately, Microsoft Word is one of the most cumbersome, difficult, complex, annoying, self-righteous, arrogant, foolish, and pointless applications ever created, leaving users scratching their heads and wondering how it all can be so painful. More unfortunately, Microsoft used a variety of shady tactics to wipe out nearly every other word processor in existence, except for one: AppleWorks. So unlike their PC brethren, Mac users don't have to suffer through World War III when all they want to do is type up a document. Launch AppleWorks 6, type, print, smile. Several advanced features are there behind the scenes if you need them, but often many of us don't, and AppleWorks doesn't throw nineteen toolbars worth of confusing features at you unless you really want it to.
However, if you're a Mac user and you prefer to suffer along with Windows users and brave the morass that is Microsoft Word, you'll have no trouble doing so at all. Microsoft makes versions of Word native to both OS 9 and OS X, and often brags of features that the OS X version has and the Windows version doesn't. There's nothing more humorous than listening to a speech by a Microsoft General Manager in which he shows off feature after feature that he claims makes Microsoft Word a better product on the Mac than on the PC, while he nervously jokes that he's not very popular with his co-workers in Microsoft's Windows division. So, if you're a Mac user, you can either choose to take advantage of the ease of AppleWorks, or you can use what Microsoft says is a better version of Word. Again, it's the best of both worlds. The Windows user isn't nearly so fortunate.
Slide Show Presentations: This was always about PowerPoint and nothing else until Apple decided to release Keynote for Jaguar users. PowerPoint is already better on the Mac than on the PC (just take a look at those Mac-only QuickTime transitions), so Mac users had the advantage even before Apple released the breathtaking Keynote software, which embarrasses PowerPoint in ease of use, interface, and graphical quality. PowerPoint still trumps Keynote on some features, so Mac users have their choice of tools, depending on what type of presentation they wish to make. In addition, Mac users can create photo-only slide shows by literally only clicking one button in iPhoto, eliminating the need to move their photos into Keynote or PowerPoint just to show them off in a slide show. And for those who prefer to make a quick and easy presentation, AppleWorks even has a simple slide show tool built-in for good measure. So Mac users can have at least four viable slide show tools at their fingertips, all with different strengths, if they want to. Windows users have PowerPoint and, well, PowerPoint. So much for the notion that the Windows platform has all the software.
Digital music: While iTunes deals with perhaps the simplest of the multimedia aspects, it stays ahead of the competition with innovations such as smart playlists, and a rating system. But you couldn't expect Apple to allow iTunes to stay only slightly ahead of the competition for very long. Recently, Apple merely undertook the task of getting all five major record labels and nearly all the artists signed to those labels to allow Apple to sell their songs for a dollar apiece. Nevermind that these same labels had been, up until that point, and still are, carrying out a holy war against anyone who even tried to exchange music over the Internet. So Mac users are currently the only people in the nation who can legally purchase their music digitally. Sure, Apple will bring out iTunes for Windows by the end of this year, so Mac users won't have the sole advantage anymore. But look at it this way: if Apple is the only company who can bring this functionality to Windows users, it shows that no one in the Windows world is capable of making this happen for its own users. Same goes for digital music players: PC users lacked the opportunity to own a realistic hard-drive-based mp3 player until Apple brought the iPod to them. Why would anyone want to use a platform that lags so far behind, that the maker of the other platform has to throw them a breadcrumb every now and them just to keep them from falling off the map entirely?
Multimedia: Here's where we Mac users really get to show off how smart we were for choosing the Mac platform. We've already had iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, and iDVD for awhile, and now they're all rolled into one interactive suite called iLife. There's nothing even close on the Windows side -- it even took copycats a year or more just to bring bad imitations to market. By the time Adobe PS Album and Picassa were released for Windows, both of which are lousy imitations of iPhoto 1.1, Apple had already released iPhoto 2.0, which put version 1.1 to shame. iPhoto is so intuitive, so empowering, it can turn even the most novice Mac user into a photo-editing maven. My mother taught me how to use it, after she taught herself.
iMovie has gotten so good that Ken Burns, the premier documentary maker in America, was even willing to put his name on one of its innovations. iMovie's "Ken Burns Effect" allows you to not only grab your pictures from iPhoto (without even launching iPhoto) and drop them into your movie, but employ a pan-and-scan feature that lets you do in one click what poor old Ken probably had to have his professionals spend hours working on for his Civil War documentary. iMovie has become so recognized as the consumer tool for video editing, that it was recently the answer, er question, on Jeopardy. And it doesn't stop there: if you want one of your songs stored in iTunes as background music, it's also one click, also without launching iTunes. The same goes for using your music with your iPhoto slide shows.
iDVD is so off-the-handle that I try to avoid using it at all costs on other people's Macs, because I'm so afraid it's going to cause me to go out and buy a new DVD-burning Mac just so I can make my own creations. If you create a DVD of your iMovies with iDVD, your Windows-using friends will scold you for stealing it from Blockbuster, because they will outright refuse to believe that you made it yourself. What's the learning curve for iDVD? From my one experience of creating my own DVD, I'd say there is none. It's fitting that the most potentially complex iLife task is the one that you can perhaps learn how to do the quickest. The more potentially complicated a task, the more Apple manages to simplify it.
So what do Windows users do when they see iLife? At first, they dismiss it as probably being too difficult to learn, until they see it in action. Then they proclaim that they're not interested in multimedia anyway, they just want to use their computer for the basics. But then they see a good deal on a digital camera and buy it on a whim, only to soon realize that they're clearly on the wrong platform. Find a Windows user with a digital camera, force them to plug their camera into your Mac, force them to upload, organize, and edit their pictures using iPhoto, and you've either got an instant Mac convert or one ticked-off Windows user, mad at the world for having unknowingly dropped a thousand dollars or more on a computer that won't let them do anything even close to what they just did on yours.
And that's part of the problem. In order to bail out of their PC and switch to the Mac, the Windows user often feels he or she must first admit to some degree of having made a mistake in buying the PC in the first place. Some would relate this to becoming Miami Dolphins fan suddenly becoming a Tampa Bay Buccaneers fan just because Tampa went and won the Superbowl this year. But what Windows users will want to consider is that the gap between platforms wasn't always this wide; the PC wasn't always this ridiculously far behind the Mac. I made the right choice when I first bought my iMac in 1998 because the Mac indeed offered the better user experience, but not by nearly so much back then. Personal computing hadn't yet expanded to the point where all these new functions were even imaginable on a consumer level. You could still get away with a PC for most computing tasks, if less productively or enjoyably. But just as sure as former San Diego Charger Junior Seau put on a Miami Dolphins uniform this spring, things inevitably change, and as a result you have to make your own changes to make sure you're still in the position you want to be in. Junior says he came to Miami because he's tired of putting out his best effort in a losing cause. Windows users should consider the wisdom of his words.
To Windows users, I can only say this: there's never been a better time to upgrade to the Mac platform. Everything you can do on a PC, you can do it just as well on a Mac, usually better. And there are things you can do on a Mac that are either impossible on a PC or just not worth the aggravation. Switching to a Mac will turn you into a more authoritative and comfortable computer user, complete with more talents, skills, ambition, and bravery. You'll end up using your computer more, and enjoying it more, because you'll get more out of it. You'll realize that despite what you always thought, you really are a "computer person" after all -- you just didn't know it because you were stuck a self-sabotaging platform all this time.
To Mac users, I'll say this: you've never had it so good. The Mac platform gets better seemingly every day, whether it's the recent release of Safari 1.0 that boosts web surfing to a whole new level, the announcement of the numbingly-fast G5 Power Macintosh, or the preview of Panther that shows that Apple has no intention of slowing down on MacOS X innovation any time soon. Next week or next month, Apple will release yet another innovative product that you never saw coming, but you will immediately know that you must have, because it just might change your life...again. Each and every time this happens, pinch yourself. Remind yourself that there's no question you're on the right platform -- and that you've never had it so good.
Recent switcher? Prospective one? Forgot how good you have it as a Mac user? Can't wait to see how it gets even better? Having way too much fun showing off the superiority of the Mac platform to your friends, in the hopes of bringing them on board, or perhaps just to taunt them? Are you wondering, as I am, what a 'digital standing ovation' looks like? There's never been a better time to write me.
"Your site isn't so much about educating or helping people as it is about providing a digital standing ovation every time Apple releases a new product or gets good press."
Ouch. Nearly every morning, I awake to find an inbox full of pleasant electronic communication directed my way. In fact, regularly getting to hear from Mac users around the world makes doing this blog worthwhile all by itself. But finding the above quote addressed to me this morning was a little disturbing. I could write a whole column detailing every instance in which I've written columns whose sole purpose was to help people (for instance, my home networking column two days ago), recommended that people buy a product other than the Apple-branded one (CompUSA brand wireless router, in that same column), or criticized a particular Apple move with which I've disagreed (cutting off iChat AV below 600 Mhz, three days ago)...but I don't think anyone wants to read such a column.
So I'll let regular readers judge the validity of the above quote. Most of what I write about Apple and the Mac is indeed positive, but that's because most of what's going on with Apple and the Mac is positive. I don't feel the need, in the name of a 'balanced point of view', to end a positive Mac-related article with some randomized negativity such as "in other news, it's entirely possible that Steve Jobs has rabies".
In fact, since I'm being accused of being a full-time Apple cheerleader, I think I'll go ahead and grab the pom-poms for a moment. I've dusted off my original April 16th "Macintosh users, you've never had it so good" column and updated it for the major advances the platform has undertaken in just the short time since I wrote it. I'm going to keep the identity of this morning's detractor private, even though he didn't ask me to. But I will point out that he wrote to me from a mac.com address, which means that he is, astonishingly, a Mac user. In fact he's precisely the kind of lost-sight-of-how-fantastic-we-have-it Mac user that I started this blog for in the first place. So, here it is, and I hope my friend sticks around long enough to realize just how good he does have it:
(originally published 4/16/03, updated 7/2/03)
When a Mac user like me looks at the user experience that's available on the other side of the fence, I wonder how Windows users can even stand to use their computer. What possesses them to hang on to such a profoundly inferior experience? Most of it is because they just don't yet know what all they're missing. Another part is that they've wasted so many years learning the oddities of their platform that they hesitate to jump the fence, for fear that they'll have to spend several more years learning what they expect will amount to the same crap, only different. But when you break down the user experience feature by feature, app by app, the size of the disparity between platforms spells itself out all too clearly for anyone willing to listen. Every Mac user knows about goodness of this application, or the coolness of that one, but take a look at the full scope of what all is going on here:
Internet: Up until a year or two ago, the Internet advantage of the Mac was limited to the fact that you could get up and running on the net more quickly and easily than on a PC. But with the release of OS 9's Sherlock 2, which allowed you to perform certain Internet tasks without first having to hunt down a website that would let you do it, that all began to change. With the onset of Jaguar's Sherlock 3, a host of previously tedious Internet procedures had been reduced to a click or two. Planning a movie theater trip, for example, used to require visiting four or five different websites: one to find out what movies are available and find info on them, another to see the times that the movie was playing at your local theater, a third to watch the movie trailer, a fourth to check the times at an alternate theater, perhaps a fifth to buy tickets online, and so on. Now, thanks to Sherlock 3, all of the above information and more can be gathered with all the effort it takes to click on the Movies button in the toolbar. What gets me, though, is the fact that Windows users still have to do this the old tedious way! Consequently, many Windows users just don't do it at all. They grab a newspaper, call the theater, and wait in line to buy tickets because their user experience isn't sufficient enough to convince them to do things digitally.
Sherlock aside, standard web browsing was long one of the few areas in which the Mac had no clear advantage over the PC: you were stuck with mediocre browsers like Internet Explorer and Netscape, regardless your platform. But when MacOS X came along, nimble third-party browsers from small companies like OmniWeb, and developer communities like Chimera, started to spring up specifically for OS X. And if these small-time groups could produce browsers that in some ways outclassed Explorer, then it was surely only a matter of time before Apple released a browser that blew it away completely. When you show PC users some of Safari's innovations such as SnapBack, streamlined bookmark management, and now tabbed browsing, they begin to question why their platform has no such equivalent. The answer that they don't want to hear is that they're simply on the wrong platform. In the past six months, web browsing on the Mac has evolved so far beyond browsing on the PC that the gap between the two platforms makes for two entirely different user experiences. Internet Explorer had to reach version 5.0 before it finally passed up Netscape. Safari, at 1.0, has already blown IE away entirely. The fact that iTunes 4 has a 'unique' form of web browsing of its own built in, well that's another category entirely.
Instant Messaging: Chatting used to be a simple proposition: you either had America Online or you didn't. But somewhere along the line, AOL decided to give Instant Messaging away to everyone, and as a result we all became familiar with the lingo of "BRB" and "LOL". It didn't matter whether you were on a Mac or a PC, chatting was the same experience, although many PC users were convinced that we Mac users were on some kind of alternative ghetto network which only allowed us to chat with each other (this was never, ever true). Along came messaging systems from Yahoo and MSN, and again, it didn't matter what kind of computer you were using. But last year, Apple, who back in the early nineties gave America Online its startup money (believe it or not), decided to partner with its old chum and create an enhanced version of Instant Messenger, called iChat, just for Jaguar users. You only have to use iChat once to realize how much you like it, and yes, you can still talk to everyone on the Instant Messenger network on both platforms, because iChat is Instant Messenger, just a cooler, more intuitive version -- with a few tricks up its sleeve you couldn't have expected.
If you're on a closed network, at work for example, iChat allows you to use something called Rendezvous to chat with directly with other iChatters on your network simply by signing on; you don't even have to be on the Internet. You don't configure anything, you just sign on. It's weird. It's cool. It's easy. It expands the possibilities of workplace communication. But merely having the best instant text messaging app on the planet isn't enough to satisfy Mac users for long. So the new iChat AV brings audio and even video chats to the table with literally zero setup. Sure, it's only Mac-to-Mac right now, but as Steve Jobs said, "We've used open standards, so as others copy what we do..."
But for those Jaguar users who prefer the standard version of Instant Messenger, it's still around and still being developed. In other words, you can do things the way PC users do it, or you can use enhanced stuff that's just for Mac users, or both. You have the best of both worlds, which means you've got twice the user experience that your neighbor on the PC does. And if you still prefer to use America Online as your overall internet provider, there exists what one of my former students tells me is an "awesome" version of AOL specifically for Jaguar. For what it's worth, I don't ever intend to find out first-hand. But the option is there for those who want it.
Word processing: This involves typing words, seeing them appear on-screen, and letting a printer put them on paper. It should be the simplest, most straight-forward task you can do on a computer. Unfortunately, Microsoft Word is one of the most cumbersome, difficult, complex, annoying, self-righteous, arrogant, foolish, and pointless applications ever created, leaving users scratching their heads and wondering how it all can be so painful. More unfortunately, Microsoft used a variety of shady tactics to wipe out nearly every other word processor in existence, except for one: AppleWorks. So unlike their PC brethren, Mac users don't have to suffer through World War III when all they want to do is type up a document. Launch AppleWorks 6, type, print, smile. Several advanced features are there behind the scenes if you need them, but often many of us don't, and AppleWorks doesn't throw nineteen toolbars worth of confusing features at you unless you really want it to.
However, if you're a Mac user and you prefer to suffer along with Windows users and brave the morass that is Microsoft Word, you'll have no trouble doing so at all. Microsoft makes versions of Word native to both OS 9 and OS X, and often brags of features that the OS X version has and the Windows version doesn't. There's nothing more humorous than listening to a speech by a Microsoft General Manager in which he shows off feature after feature that he claims makes Microsoft Word a better product on the Mac than on the PC, while he nervously jokes that he's not very popular with his co-workers in Microsoft's Windows division. So, if you're a Mac user, you can either choose to take advantage of the ease of AppleWorks, or you can use what Microsoft says is a better version of Word. Again, it's the best of both worlds. The Windows user isn't nearly so fortunate.
Slide Show Presentations: This was always about PowerPoint and nothing else until Apple decided to release Keynote for Jaguar users. PowerPoint is already better on the Mac than on the PC (just take a look at those Mac-only QuickTime transitions), so Mac users had the advantage even before Apple released the breathtaking Keynote software, which embarrasses PowerPoint in ease of use, interface, and graphical quality. PowerPoint still trumps Keynote on some features, so Mac users have their choice of tools, depending on what type of presentation they wish to make. In addition, Mac users can create photo-only slide shows by literally only clicking one button in iPhoto, eliminating the need to move their photos into Keynote or PowerPoint just to show them off in a slide show. And for those who prefer to make a quick and easy presentation, AppleWorks even has a simple slide show tool built-in for good measure. So Mac users can have at least four viable slide show tools at their fingertips, all with different strengths, if they want to. Windows users have PowerPoint and, well, PowerPoint. So much for the notion that the Windows platform has all the software.
Digital music: While iTunes deals with perhaps the simplest of the multimedia aspects, it stays ahead of the competition with innovations such as smart playlists, and a rating system. But you couldn't expect Apple to allow iTunes to stay only slightly ahead of the competition for very long. Recently, Apple merely undertook the task of getting all five major record labels and nearly all the artists signed to those labels to allow Apple to sell their songs for a dollar apiece. Nevermind that these same labels had been, up until that point, and still are, carrying out a holy war against anyone who even tried to exchange music over the Internet. So Mac users are currently the only people in the nation who can legally purchase their music digitally. Sure, Apple will bring out iTunes for Windows by the end of this year, so Mac users won't have the sole advantage anymore. But look at it this way: if Apple is the only company who can bring this functionality to Windows users, it shows that no one in the Windows world is capable of making this happen for its own users. Same goes for digital music players: PC users lacked the opportunity to own a realistic hard-drive-based mp3 player until Apple brought the iPod to them. Why would anyone want to use a platform that lags so far behind, that the maker of the other platform has to throw them a breadcrumb every now and them just to keep them from falling off the map entirely?
Multimedia: Here's where we Mac users really get to show off how smart we were for choosing the Mac platform. We've already had iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, and iDVD for awhile, and now they're all rolled into one interactive suite called iLife. There's nothing even close on the Windows side -- it even took copycats a year or more just to bring bad imitations to market. By the time Adobe PS Album and Picassa were released for Windows, both of which are lousy imitations of iPhoto 1.1, Apple had already released iPhoto 2.0, which put version 1.1 to shame. iPhoto is so intuitive, so empowering, it can turn even the most novice Mac user into a photo-editing maven. My mother taught me how to use it, after she taught herself.
iMovie has gotten so good that Ken Burns, the premier documentary maker in America, was even willing to put his name on one of its innovations. iMovie's "Ken Burns Effect" allows you to not only grab your pictures from iPhoto (without even launching iPhoto) and drop them into your movie, but employ a pan-and-scan feature that lets you do in one click what poor old Ken probably had to have his professionals spend hours working on for his Civil War documentary. iMovie has become so recognized as the consumer tool for video editing, that it was recently the answer, er question, on Jeopardy. And it doesn't stop there: if you want one of your songs stored in iTunes as background music, it's also one click, also without launching iTunes. The same goes for using your music with your iPhoto slide shows.
iDVD is so off-the-handle that I try to avoid using it at all costs on other people's Macs, because I'm so afraid it's going to cause me to go out and buy a new DVD-burning Mac just so I can make my own creations. If you create a DVD of your iMovies with iDVD, your Windows-using friends will scold you for stealing it from Blockbuster, because they will outright refuse to believe that you made it yourself. What's the learning curve for iDVD? From my one experience of creating my own DVD, I'd say there is none. It's fitting that the most potentially complex iLife task is the one that you can perhaps learn how to do the quickest. The more potentially complicated a task, the more Apple manages to simplify it.
So what do Windows users do when they see iLife? At first, they dismiss it as probably being too difficult to learn, until they see it in action. Then they proclaim that they're not interested in multimedia anyway, they just want to use their computer for the basics. But then they see a good deal on a digital camera and buy it on a whim, only to soon realize that they're clearly on the wrong platform. Find a Windows user with a digital camera, force them to plug their camera into your Mac, force them to upload, organize, and edit their pictures using iPhoto, and you've either got an instant Mac convert or one ticked-off Windows user, mad at the world for having unknowingly dropped a thousand dollars or more on a computer that won't let them do anything even close to what they just did on yours.
And that's part of the problem. In order to bail out of their PC and switch to the Mac, the Windows user often feels he or she must first admit to some degree of having made a mistake in buying the PC in the first place. Some would relate this to becoming Miami Dolphins fan suddenly becoming a Tampa Bay Buccaneers fan just because Tampa went and won the Superbowl this year. But what Windows users will want to consider is that the gap between platforms wasn't always this wide; the PC wasn't always this ridiculously far behind the Mac. I made the right choice when I first bought my iMac in 1998 because the Mac indeed offered the better user experience, but not by nearly so much back then. Personal computing hadn't yet expanded to the point where all these new functions were even imaginable on a consumer level. You could still get away with a PC for most computing tasks, if less productively or enjoyably. But just as sure as former San Diego Charger Junior Seau put on a Miami Dolphins uniform this spring, things inevitably change, and as a result you have to make your own changes to make sure you're still in the position you want to be in. Junior says he came to Miami because he's tired of putting out his best effort in a losing cause. Windows users should consider the wisdom of his words.
To Windows users, I can only say this: there's never been a better time to upgrade to the Mac platform. Everything you can do on a PC, you can do it just as well on a Mac, usually better. And there are things you can do on a Mac that are either impossible on a PC or just not worth the aggravation. Switching to a Mac will turn you into a more authoritative and comfortable computer user, complete with more talents, skills, ambition, and bravery. You'll end up using your computer more, and enjoying it more, because you'll get more out of it. You'll realize that despite what you always thought, you really are a "computer person" after all -- you just didn't know it because you were stuck a self-sabotaging platform all this time.
To Mac users, I'll say this: you've never had it so good. The Mac platform gets better seemingly every day, whether it's the recent release of Safari 1.0 that boosts web surfing to a whole new level, the announcement of the numbingly-fast G5 Power Macintosh, or the preview of Panther that shows that Apple has no intention of slowing down on MacOS X innovation any time soon. Next week or next month, Apple will release yet another innovative product that you never saw coming, but you will immediately know that you must have, because it just might change your life...again. Each and every time this happens, pinch yourself. Remind yourself that there's no question you're on the right platform -- and that you've never had it so good.
Recent switcher? Prospective one? Forgot how good you have it as a Mac user? Can't wait to see how it gets even better? Having way too much fun showing off the superiority of the Mac platform to your friends, in the hopes of bringing them on board, or perhaps just to taunt them? Are you wondering, as I am, what a 'digital standing ovation' looks like? There's never been a better time to write me.
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