Does it come in black?

I’m struggling.

For years now I’ve been one of those small minority that chose a different path. It meant  investing financially and emotionally in an alternative to the mainstream, contenting my inner rebel with the knowledge that I was eschewing convention and embracing the fringe instead.

For years I walked this line, until recently something changed.

Apple got really popular.

Where once I would smile inwardly when chancing upon someone else who held my beliefs, possibly in a coffee shop where both of us would be working behind the cool glow of our machines, now I find the proliferation of Macbook Airs and Pros somewhat disconcerting. In fact it’s almost a curious fascination when I see someone using a PC – a refreshing splash of black in the otherwise unrelenting sea of brushed aluminium.

Shouldn’t this make me happy? After all it means that my choice of hardware is being vindicated. Well, possibly, but I have to admit that in a perverse way it actually makes me want to move away from the big fruit and find a new underdog to champion.

I know. I’m an idiot. You don’t have to tell me, deep inside…I accept this.

The problem is that with technology playing such a central role in my life I feel that the buying choices I make reflect my own set of values. Whereas in the past I saw Apple products as excellent tools to create with (which I still believe strongly), and a company which fought against the behemoth of Microsoft to offer a product that was better to me in many ways. Now the sheen has lost its lustre as I find the popularity of the brand making the machines they produce seem more and more based on looking good rather than being built to last. (Regular readers will know my recent disappointment with the new iMacs, as chronicled here)

Before you leap to the conclusion that this is some kind of superiority thing, I can assure you that buying something expensive to differentiate myself from others has never been an option. Journalism is fun, but it really isn’t a well paid gig when you’re freelance.

In fact one of my main reasons for switching to Macs in the first place wasn’t their premium brand status, rather it was the amount of keyboard shortcuts the OS employed (I was recovering from a bad RSI injury) and the fact that putting together a home video on my old PC felt like doing battle with an evil warlord whose magic was old and very deep.

I purchased a refurbished iBook and set sail on the goodship Cupertino, very happy with this brave new world of computing. After a couple of years I upgraded to a shiny new Macbook, which proved a mighty workhorse, until a few months ago when age finally began to catch up with it. Now I stand on an ethical precipice. Do I replace my faithful servant with a newer model or make the leap to another platform?

Why would I change?

As we’ve already established, it’s because I’m an idiot.

Macs are great. They’re stable, fast, very pleasurable to use, and the iLife suite really is worth buying the machines for alone. The problem I’m having is that whereas in the past I felt like I was part of some kind of counter-culture, mainly due to the tiny sales figures of Apple machines  compared with Windows machines, now Apple laptops almost seem the norm. I love my iPad, it’s a constant companion, yet in my heart I find myself yearning for a viable alternative. I bought an iPhone last year for the first time – it’s great. The battery life is amazing, the camera is incredible, and the damn thing just works.

So is it some kind of perverse logic, or subconscious desire to bring pain upon myself, that I am even considering a leap into the unknown? Yes, that’s probably it. Well, some of it.

The thing is, to me, Apple products are still the best that (lots) of money can buy, but when you don’t have lots of money washing around your bank account the need for value becomes a more sharpened sword. I don’t want to buy a product that has a built in redundancy due to the low RAM allocation or curiously under powered hard drive. I don’t want to have to pay all my upgrade costs up front, rather than spread them across the years of ownership due to devices that can’t be opened by customers. At the heart of it though, if I’m honest, I just don’t want to buy something sensible.

When Apple released the original iMac one of the things that immediately caught my eye was the range of colours. Previously I had bemoaned the lack of spark that the relentless procession of beige boxed PCs had wrought upon the computer landscape. Now there was this spectrum of hope that put the fun back into using devices that, I believe, are still the greatest creative tools ever invented. Skip forward twenty odd years and this visual splendour has been replaced with the cold, stark silver of brushed aluminium. What happened? Did Steve Jobs get offered a job-lot of the stuff cheap from the digital community’s equivalent of Derek Trotter?

Where once there was colour and rebellion, instead we find uniformity and stock dividends.

So my quandary is such – I love OSX, have always found Apple laptops to be perfect for me, and over the years I’ve invested in various pieces of software that only run on the fruit flavour of machines. But the excitement of being part the alternative has slowly ebbed away as success has transformed the perception (and choices) of Apple. Strangely I feel more of a corporate customer than I ever thought possible.

When Steve Jobs famously gave his ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish’ speech at Stanford I wonder if it ever occurred to him that his own company would have need of this wisdom in the coming years?

They’re still the best in terms of user experience and hardware manufacture in my eyes, but what I wouldn’t give for Apple to have some hungry fools in their design and decision making departments right now.

Free, free at last!

I have a confession to make.

Give me a minute to compose myself.

*deep intake of breath*

Ok, I’m ready now.

Due to work requirements I recently found myself in the position of having to load Windows onto one of my home machines. It’s been 7 years since I escaped the driver incessant, pop-up window collage that was XP, and hopes weren’t high when the first two attempts to install it ended in failure. Like a dark cloud floating in front of the sun the ominous feeling of doom that had followed me for so much of my early computer life returned.

Weary of spirit, but stout of resolve I soldiered on and eventually, via the kindness of a friend and the privileged position of being a tech journalist once more, I installed Windows 7 Home Premium and braced myself for impact.

Then it happened….

This Windows…it’s different. It’s…….nice.

 

Where were the demands for answers that Microsoft previously made on me every time I wanted to accomplish even the simplest tasks? What’s this Dock-like area at the bottom of the screen where I can helpfully pin my favourite apps? Could it be true that the paperclip of interminable cheeriness had  finally been put down?

This indeed was a different country.

The visuals were smart, but tasteful. The system was snappy and efficient. Even the built in security features seemed unobtrusive. What sorcery was this?

Briefly the amazement held, then I tried to play a DVD. Ah, there they are. Error messages aplenty. DRM, drivers, codex, all those old birds coming home to roost. Several downloads, updates, and restarts later left me no better off. My short lived euphoria was shattered. Windows, you cruel temptress.

But before I could safely consign Microsoft to the backwaters of my mind a thought occurred. In the past year I have dabbled heavily in Linux. If nothing else it’s taught me that open source software can often fix the ills of the technological world. And so it proved. After ditching Windows Media Player in favour of VLC the DVD played first time. Then I downloaded Chrome, giving me access to all the apps I tend to use now (Google Docs, Tweetdeck, Google+, etc.) and installed Thunderbird for my emails.

 

It all worked brilliantly, and behaved in many ways like my Mac and Linux machines had. In addition I now had access to Steam, with it’s plethora of cheap games, and was able to complete the work tasks that began the process in the first place. All within an environment that I actually found pleasurable to use.

So, Windows…we’re friends again. Which is nice, as I don’t like to harbor grudges or miss out on cheaper hardware.

As I considered this strange turn of events it had made me realise that since I moved from PC to Mac I’d pretty much thought that was the end of it. But thanks to open source software the world is available to me again.  Now I can do anything I need on almost any platform. Could it be that I’ve become OS neutral?

I can choose whichever machine serves my purposes and budget without the need to conform to the tribe to whom I’ve swore my allegiance. Surely these are the dreams of fools and madmen? But no…

I never thought that I’d make a profound discovery while musing on the Windows OS, but it seems that fate is tricksy and not devoid of a sense of irony.

The digital landscape is wider for me today, and I like what lays ahead. It’s…liberating.

Just as technology should be.

 

How do you use computers today? Are you dedicated to one platform or do you wander like a harlot? Let me know by leaving a comment below.

When the Faith Falters

I’m in trouble.

It’s been seven years since I committed myself to the cause. In that time I have been transformed, seen incredible new things, and brought others to an understanding of the true way while rejoicing at their accepting this wonderful rebirth.

But now, it seems, my walk is faltering…inside are doubts I can’t suppress or ignore…my faith is beginning to fade.

How did it come to this? Oh Apple, why have thou forsaken me?

I think it began with the iPad.

The future, today!

Thanks to a generous birthday gift I was able to experience the new technology sensation shortly after it launched here in the UK back in 2010. I was immediately in love. The elegant dance of information beneath my fingers beguiled my skeptical mind and left me with the profound sensation that I was engaging with the future. It seemed a million miles from the Sinclair Research ZX Spectrum that had initially filled me with wonder all those years ago.

All was well until the release of it’s younger sibling twelve months later. I saw no need to upgrade as the addition of a camera was of no interest and the speed of my original iPad was more than satisfactory.  Then I tried to download the newly released iMovie and discovered that it was not available for my tablet. Surely there was some mistake? I was on the cutting edge – probably for the first time in my life – how could my hardware already be redundant? Then other non-iPad 1 apps started to appear…it had begun.

I comforted myself with the thoughts that I probably wouldn’t have used them anyway, and my iPad was still the brilliant machine that it always had been. The pain subsided, I learned to live within my reduced but still rich digital environment and the hurt passed into memory.

Then Apple did it again.

The future, once more...

iOS 5 sounded wonderful. The ability to have my documents synced between the iPad and my MacBook without any kind of fiddling around with importing or exporting was the kind of seamless thing I expected from the Cupertino boffins. And now here it was, all for the princely sum of nothing at all!

Only things weren’t quite how they seemed.

Within a short time of upgrading I noticed that my once very stable tablet was now crashing…a lot. Once it even locked up and required a reboot – something I’d hardly ever experienced in my time among the fruit people. The cause? iOS 5. Forums were alive with similar stories and the only fix it seemed was to wipe the disk and start again, then disable the iCloud settings. I duly did this and, in a fashion, it worked although my machine does still crash more than it used to – plus I can’t use the syncing feature for fear of the whole thing breaking again. I wasn’t even given the option of returning to the previous version of the iOS that worked perfectly with the iPad 1 because Apple don’t look back, only forward.

Then I discovered that upgrading my Macbook to the newly released OSX Lion would be problematic because its limited 2gb of internal memory means it will struggle to cope, plus the trackpad only supports two finger gestures which means it will miss most of the benefits that Lion offers.

So instead of a brave new world I was given a slightly more broken one. Not quite what I had hoped for.

Now I find myself in that awkward time when my main machine (the aforementioned old white Macbook) is beginning to show signs of age and will possibly need upgrading within the next year. But for the first time in a long, long time I’m actually finding myself question whether I want to pay premium prices for something that might be reduced to second-class citizenship a damn sight faster than I’d like. I’ve never regretted buying anything from Apple. Since my conversion I’ve bought and used heavily an iBook, Macbook, iPod touch Gen1, iPod  Gen5, iPod Shuffle, iPad, and Apple TV. All of which have been brilliant. But as times get tougher my eyes are starting to wander.

The problem I’m faced with (and I realise that in the grand scheme of things it’s a trifling one) is that buying something new from Apple these days has the strange effect of making you feel obsolete so very quickly. I fully accept that the thing that makes them great is that they push forward all the time, but if you’re like me and only earn a modest income that precludes you from buying a new model every two years then it can get strangely depressing. Has it always been like this? I don’t remember it as such.

The thing is I can’t go back to Windows. I just can’t. So where does that leave me?

The fabled 'Third' way...

In recent months I’ve started exploring the idea of Linux….and it’s quite interesting. Sure it doesn’t have the simplicity of OSX, nor the beauty. But it does actually work, is free, and because of it’s home-brew nature doesn’t leave you in the dust only months after you’ve paid a fortune for something. I don’t know if I’ll be able to withstand the constant fixing that it will no doubt require, but I’m finding the fresh environment, the surprising fun of reconnecting with the workings of a system, and the frontier attitude genuinely refreshing. How long this will last I don’t know. Those MacBook Airs are mighty tempting. But at least here I can enjoy the idea of salvaging old machines rather than saving for new ones…

What do you think?