Apple's True Genius

The world's a better place now that everyone has swallowed for themselves a good quart of the Steve Job's Kool-Aid. Macs are everywhere. Can't miss them. From departure lounges to the most corporate of corporate settings, the little glowing apple of temptation proudly stands out. Where it used to be a badge of rebelliousness, of honour, of, well, thinking different, Apple's success over the past ten years or so has seen it move profitably into the mainstream. This is good.  Don't think for a moment that I don't think this is a good thing. Grandparents are syncing ipods, comparing playlists. Diehard PC fanatics (you know who you are) have collectively fallen on their config/sys/bat/swords, are raising their sun-deprived hands in surrender and admitting that yes, all this time they were wrong. Macintosh is a better platform. It just work better. Macs have the best OS, the best engineering, the best music player, the best smartphone. Win, win, win, and about time too.

Except, obviously, I'm not happy about it. All these (snorts of derision) fanboys have had nothing more dramatic happen to them than maybe a corrupted iTunes database. Flinging files wirelessly across the world without a moment's pause, life is just too damn easy in Macland. Idyllic holiday snaps, remixes out of GarageBand,  constant creative uptime and artiness. The ubiquity of the Apple - and I really, really hate to say this - has lost all its currency when every sad sack muppet with some spare dinarri can be editing their rap video while Skyping  supermodels and remixing the James Brown drum loops in Garageband.

Is this unfair? Of course it is. How wonderful that duelling iPod playlists can spark furious arguments late at night on a makeshift dancefloor.  Who misses vinyl? Not I. The Mac has always been a key tool for creativity , and a key component of good times - through video, audio, graphics, whatever floats your boat. That's now in the hands of everyone.  That sharing, that community, that ease of communication - is everywhere, rather than being bogged down in the dullness and slowness of Windows. These are all good things.

I just,want it recognised that I, along with a few thousand hardy, privileged  others, have been in this for the long term. We were there back in the day. We've done the hard yards, and I'd like that recognised, perhaps with a medal or some sort of certificate. I loved a recent banner in the Richmond crowd which declared that 'I was there when we were crap.' Well, guess what. I've been there with Apple from the start. Even before the Mac itself. Thrilling to paddle-based games in the mysterious C4 room at school, that was the glowingly futuristic Apple II that really got my attention. Then an SE30 - that's thirty magabytes of hard disk space, newbie fan boys from hell - in what must have been 1985, ad agency in Dublin.  Willie Van had a Mac II, with a colour screen and all sorts of expansion ports. Two megs of memory. Impossibly advanced, very cool and very moreish.

I worked in New York for a couple of years, being the go-to-Mac guy, and I'll tell you right here right now that RAMDoubler - which doubled the RAM (the clue was in the name) in the IIfx from 2MB to 4 MB - was quite the most astonishing and useful technical leap I had ever experienced.  The days of Font/DA Mover, the best and most useful program ever. Early Quark, Word 4  - small, functional, quick, still never equalled -  Aldus Freehand, the original Photoshop. Not only was I a Mac nerd, I wrote some ads for Apple back when we were on System 7 in the mid-nineties. (This was pre-internet, if you can comprehend that.) I was a fan, an evanglelist, an acolyte. A true believer. Hell, I was a Genius, back when that used to mean something.  And the other thing we had in common was  how we looked down on those lame ass, don't-know-what-you're-missing PC users. And now it's those very PC users who are swanning around with Macs,  listening to AOR on their iPods and looking for all the world like they own the place. And you know what? None of them - not one -  have taken the time to say thank you.  Thank you for sticking up for the little guy during the dark years pre-iMac, pre iPod, pre ubiquity.  Thanks for hanging in there. Thanks for waiting for me.

To them all, I say you're welcome. But I maintain if you don't know what a dogcow is, or what noise it makes,* then you're no Mac Genius.

* Moof, of course!