Man With A Mac

After 20 years as a DOS fearing, Microsoft serving, computer acolyte I had a crisis of faith. In a fit of midlife experimentation I crossed the digital river Styx and purchased an iBook. Yes, that’s right. I bought a Mac. I’ve now joined the roughly ten percent of Americans who believe there is life after Windows. For the sake of context this is approximately the same percentage of the population that is gay -- or alcoholic.

So, you may ask, what brought on this lifestyle change? I’m not sure. It could be the company I keep. I work in the media. On its good days this is a stimulating environment filled with creative people. Recording studios, radio stations, and publishing houses are staffed with right-brained, left-leaning, angst-ridden Apple users. Showing up with my Windows based laptop to these places felt uncomfortably like discovering you are the only person in your yoga class who eats red meat.

Booting up my Windows XP with its trumpet call to arms would provoke sidelong glances of suspicion. People quietly turned off their wireless ports. Nobody ever asked to see what I was working on. So, I thought to myself – these are all intelligent, well-educated and successful individuals who I respect very much. They are independent and nonconforming like me. I want to be just like them. So I got the iBook.

It was awkward at first. Even scary. I woke up in a sweat one night after groping around in the dark for the right click on my mouse. Then I found out they fixed that and you can get right clicker mice – mouses? – for Macs too. Well, that fixed just about every second problem I had with Apple operating systems. Which is almost half of them. The other half is totally about style.

Windows icons, graphics and error messages are somewhat conservative, even Soviet, in their scope and tone. Error messages are blunt and mildly intimidating – when not incomprehensible. You can still enter that C-prompted, screen dark, antiquated world of DOS where commands like “pathping” and “scandisk” still work like secret handshakes from the Masons. Bill Gates has tried to fun things up in recent years with graphic devices such as that annoying little character who pesters you with helpful pop-up options in the Microsoft Word program. But it’s obvious his heart wasn’t in it because you can get rid of the thing with one click.

On the iBook you cannot get rid of the gimmicks and you can never get a peak behind the curtain. If there is a portal to the OS X operating system it is probably cleverly disguised as a houseplant. The whole art direction and psychology of the system seems targeted at teenage girls. Fluffly little icons bounce merrily with questions and some of them appear only slightly more mature than the pictures on my toddler’s Speak n’ Spell. Sometimes I feel like I’m driving my daughter’s VW Beetle with the stuffed white kitty in the back window while my truck is in the shop.

Okay, I don’t have a daughter with a Beetle. But I do have an iBook. At least for now. I’m thinking of switching again. But not back to Windows. No way. I have tasted the fountain of youth and I will not go back.

My Mac is not only more playful. It is more vigorous, more reliable, and easier to operate than any computer I’ve owned in the twenty years I’ve owned computers. Everything is easier on this thing – from writing these remarks to sorting Christmas photos. I made a movie about my son’s new shoes -- with a soundtrack -- and never even had to open a manual. I feel smarter on my Mac. And younger.

Yes, I’m done making Bill Gates richer. From now on I’m going to make Steve Jobs richer. That’s just the kind of radicals we Mac people are. Next stop, the PowerBook G4. I might have fluffy icons in the tool bar, but I’ve got titanium on the case and mega-gigs under the hood. Whip that silver beauty open in the studio and it says, Now there’s a man. With a Mac. And that says it all.

As heard on The Bob Edwards Show on XM/Sirius Radio February 6, 2006