Smug Indifference
January 31, 2007Vista is out in the wild, and the commentators keep coming back to the Aero interface and how it supposedly lessens the gap between Windows and OSX.
Er… No.
In an interview, Guy Kawasaki was explaining what it was like to evangelize the first Macintosh. He said that he’d take it out of the case and start to demo it, and within 30 seconds he could tell whether they “Got It.”
He said, “If they didn’t get it in that first 30 seconds, they were never going to get it.”
So, what is “It?”
Life is complicated. So sit on a beach, admire a sunset, listen to some music — do such things to get away from the complication. Ironically, I find that sitting at my Mac is my escape from complication. Who would have thought that a box of technology would be so smooth and restful and flowing? Certainly not me when using a Windows PC. Taking the “Technology” out of technology: That’s good design. That’s “It.”
For some, there’s no difference between the showroom experience and their day-to-day experience of that system. For others there’s a world of difference; they tweak and finesse the look and feel of their machines to their liking. That’s me, one of the others. Re-arranging the furniture, adjusting the lighting until it’s… Just so.
This is easy on the Mac; not only because I’m starting from such a classy baseline, but because the geniuses who develop the tweaking tools have such good fundamentals on which to base their work — such as Core Image. You literally can’t make it ugly. What’s more, the OS is intelligent enough to never forget what you’ve done; it never randomly stumbles back to some default mode. Position a window just so, and it will always look that way.
I can’t easily adjust the hardware, but what am I looking at now? A white bezel of perfectly formed plastic, with a subtle Apple logo; no badges, grills, flashing lights, wires, chrome bits, labels… Nothing, and perfect as it is.
Sometimes I wish I could bring my Mac over to your place, just to show you how gorgeous it looks, and how smoothly everything works together. Not to gloat — just to say, “Look what you can do.”
You’ll either get it, or you won’t.
