drinking the apple kool-aid

PC vs. Mac commercials aside (those ones are just too easy to make fun of), I constantly find myself shaking my head at some of the things that come out of the mouth of the Apple marketing machine. Now, a lot of this comes free courtesy of fanboi sites like TheAppleBlog (check out this pathetic piece of ass-kissery), but most of it comes, of course, from the horse's mouth.

Now, I'm not a Windows apologist by any stretch - I have an early-2008 MacBook Pro and I love it. It's become my primary computer, relegating my old Windows PC to the position of glorified file and media server for my PS3. It's safe to say that my experiences with Windows at a consumer level have come to an end. I do, however, come from a Windows background and have extensive expertise with it, so when I see things like "Restore Deleted Items to Original Folders" being marketed as a refinement and enhancement in Snow Leopard, I have to shake my head. This is coming from a company whose operating system lives or dies by it's comparison to Windows, so where has this "feature" been for the last decade? It's been a part of Windows since 1998 at least. If I were Apple, I wouldn't be bragging to anyone about adding this feature like it's the second coming of Christ - I would have just added it and moved on.

I saw Apple's keynote speech that opened WWDC last night. I thought it was rather lackluster and boring. A lot of the stuff that they spent time going over had already been announced with a lot of detail in earlier broadcasts, or were made available on tech blogs like Engadget or Gizmodo through reports from beta testers, so I was underwhelmed. The one thing that really stuck out in my mind, however, wasn't an announcement about a new product, or a new feature of a coming-soon product, or even live demos of Snow Leopard or iPhone 3.0. No, when Bertrand Serlet, Senior VP of Software Engineering at Apple, got on stage and to talk about Snow Leopard, he started by taking shots at Microsoft for their dropping the ball with Vista. Now, I'm not one to stand up and defend Vista - it's a shitty product, no question. Even Bill Gates thought it was a bad OS, and said as much - but when Bertrand says things like Windows is built on "old technology" (ironic, considering what NT stands for - you nerds know what I mean), I just shake my head.

You see, by doing basic math, I can count the number of years that the NT codebase (which all consumer and business versions of Windows have been based on since Windows 2000), has been around - if you use the from-the-ground-up rebuild of Windows 2000 in 1999 as a starting point, the code base has been around for a little less than a decade. If you count the original Windows NT 3.1 release, then it's only another seven years. So, in less than 17 years, we've gone from New Technology to "old technology." That's a long time in computer world, isn't it?

I know, I know - for anyone who can do a side-by-side comparison, it's easy to tell that the original NT 3.1 has little in common with Vista, but bear with me, because it's actually a relevant point.

You see, what Bertrand is not telling you, all in an effort to get off a cheap shot that anyone with half a brain in the industry will remember more for being wrong than funny, is that the codebase that Mac OS X is built on is even older. In fact, it's decades older. OS X is built on Berkley Unix, or BSD, which has has been around since the mid-70's, and has it's roots in the original AT&T Unix operating system from the 1960's. So...which is the one based on old technology?

And yes, I know that the original BSD project looks nothing like OS X, but the reality of it all kinda ruins the joke, doesn't it? How ironic is it that he tries to pull this one off in a room full of software developers? These are the very kind of people that have to know the underpinnings of how OS's work more than anyone else in the world. I guess the room had it's share of sheep though, as the joke actually got a laugh.

But this is exactly what I'm talking about when I talk about drinking the Kool-Aid - Apple is conveniently glossing over some very critical points when they try and market their product as an alternative to Windows. There is almost always something critically wrong with their Mac vs. PC commercials. The joke I talked about above fell flat. In short, every time they try to talk about all the ways that OS X is better than Windows, they look like idiots.

• Saying that Macs are immune to virus' is simply not true, and only serves to highlight the sad fact that their market share is so pathetic that it's simply not worth anyone's time to write virus' for the platform. Besides, everytime I hear someone say that, I'm reminded of how the Bush administration would say that America is safe from terrorists because no one has succeeded in hitting them again after 9/11 - just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean you're safe. It just means it hasn't happened yet.
• OS X isn't any more secure from hackers than Windows is for the very same reason.
• Contrary to popular belief, Windows actually doesn't crash any more than OS X does, at least in my experience. Putting aside Vista for a sec because, let's face it, it's a hack and a failure (which hasn't actually BSOD'd on me, for the record), and look at XP, which was Microsoft's latest and most successful operating system for the better part of this decade. In all my years of using XP, on many different hardware configurations, even at it's worst, I have had it BSOD on me for something other than a hardware component failure - and I'm not talking about bad drivers, I'm talking about a physical failure - maybe twice.
• Mac's crash. Don't tell me they're uncrashable, because it's a lie, and it shows me that a) you don't know the first thing about software development, and b) that you're talking out of your ass. Besides, why would they build this into the OS if it didn't crash?

I will admit to being excited about a lot of the under-the-hood enhancements they're talking about in Snow Leopard though. Proper multi-threaded computing, if it works like they want it to, is a total game-changer. Combining it with their OpenCL platform of GPGPU computing makes me hot. You think working with two cores is fast? Or four? Eight? That's nothing - if OpenCL works like I think it does, then general purpose computing calculations (stuff normally done by the CPU) will be offloaded to the graphics processor when it's idle. Can you imagine the possibilities? I'll give you a hint - NVIDIA's top-end video card has 480 cores spread across two GPUs!! These are the kinds of graphics cards that are capable of calculations that were only possible in computers the size of a room just a decade ago.

The other big thing to come into Snow Leopard though, Exchange support, is unnecessary, cumbersome and a bit two-faced, if you ask me. It's unnecessary because, as was Bertrand's number one reason for plugging it in his speech, a lot of Mac users like to take their computers to the office and look at their mail there. I'm sorry, but as someone who's spent his time on the IT support side of the fence, if I found any of my users plugging their unsecured, unauthorized computers into MY corporate network, they'd be shut down faster than they can enter their username and password in the oh-so-easy Exchange setup screen. Unapproved personal computers present a MAJOR security risk to a company's network. Besides, what kind of sucker would want to use their personal computer at work? Strike one, Bertrand.

I think that having three separate apps (Mail, iCal and Address Book) using the service is a bit cumbersome too, considering that Outlook does it all, and very well, in one app. Yes, I know it's an extra expense for a Windows user, but come on - who but a business user is going to use the business features of Exchange? And if you're using it for work, when are you ever going to pay for it out of your own pocket?

And what about two-faced? Follow the line of reasoning with me here - Exchange is a Microsoft product. Always has been. It only runs on a Windows Server operating system. Microsoft's server OS is built on the same codebase as their consumer OS's, like Vista. Mac OS X is, according to the product literature, superior to Windows in every way. So the only logical thing to do is...incorporate a critical piece of business infrastructure into the core OS?

No, I'm not saying that it's wrong to include Exchange support - it's a good thing. It opens the door for Mac's to be start being adopted by businesses on a larger scale, although I personally think that won't really happen until Microsoft makes a proper Mac version of Outlook (and no, Entourage doesn't count), but it also shows that they're only too willing to countermand the logic of their marketing plan. If they're willing to do that, then their marketing plan is wrong. That's it, folks. It's wrong.

I love my Mac. I think it's great. The number one reason I love it though, is not because of the operating system, whose interface really isn't that different than Windows. It's not because everything "just works," which, for the most part, it does, though not always the way I want it too. This, incidentally, is the number one reason why Windows has such a bad reputation - they build so much user-friendliness and ability for the user to do almost any task with so many different permutations and combinations that the margin for error grows almost exponentially. No, the number one reason I love my Mac so much is because Apple did the smart thing and took over direct control of the hardware design and manufacturing to build true quality into their product, and then they filled it with custom-designed software that takes direct advantage of that build quality. Out of the box, I can take my laptop and create studio-quality, multi-track music, whether it's recorded or created using samples. I can design a webpage that actually looks cool and is easy to edit. I can import raw video footage in high-definition and create near-professional-quality movies, and then author those movies onto a DVD. This is the kind of software package that would cost thousands of dollars anywhere else, and it's essentially free to anyone who buys a Mac. I love it, and if Apple spent less time telling us what it's product can do compared to Windows and more time telling us what it's product can do for itself, I think it would be even more successful.