Stromatolites and the Death of the Die Hard Mac Fan

If you ever make it to Australia, and you should, the first thing you should do is say "Hi" to Chris Howard. The second thing you should do is visit Shark Bay. There, in the overly salted waters you'll find stromatolites. They aren't good for eating or even interesting to watch (at best they look like a super slow mo Alka Seltzer that never dissolves) but they can tell you a lot about Mac fanatics.

Mac fanatics are a dying breed. 10 or even 5 years ago you could meet a fellow mac user and send semi secret signals back and forth. Ten years ago you could talk about what you had in your control strip. What? You don't remember the control strip? It was this little thing you had at the bottom of the Mac OS screen with... well never mind. You might also slip easily into a conversation about what to do while your Mac was burning a CD because Pre OS X the Mac could really only do one thing at a time. Five years ago you could talk about repairing permissions and complain about having to run programs in classic and wonder when Adobe was going to get Photoshop OS X native.To a PC user listening to the conversation it would all be so arcane as to be indecipherable, a secret language reserved for hard core Mac users.

All that has changed. Now it seems that there are two kinds of computer users, those that already have a Mac and those that are planning on getting one. That is a little overstated but the fact remains that more Macs are in use than ever before and the platform keeps on growing. The machines aren't strictly the purview of the die hards anymore, everyone has had at least a passing moment with a Mac and a huge chunk of Mac users aren't interested in the arcane goings on inside the Mac, they just want to use a computer.

This is where it gets interesting. The hardcore Mac users, the Mac evangelists were telling anyone who would listen that Macs have always been better. When Windows 98 came out, Macs were better. When Windows ME came out, Macs were better (which is kind of true, Macs were better than Windows ME but not better than 98). When XP came out they screamed Macs were better. The Mac faithful loudly opined Macs were better the whole time often without any basis in fact. When 10.1 became the default OS they said Macs were better. Sure Macs couldn't scan or reliably print but they passionately believed anything Apple did was better so they spouted spurious arguments (start up time) or purely manufactured reasons (anyone can use one) why the Mac was better and blasted those reasons at bullhorn volume across the internet. You could have dropped a load of pre composted cow manure in front of them, slapped an LCD on it and given the whole mess a keyboard with three keys and as long as one of the components had a rainbow Apple icon on it Mac fans would have come up with a reason why it was better. Likely along the lines of “The new ManureMac doesn't have that plasticky smell associated with PCs.”

In retrospect some of the arguments do seem ridiculous (I plead guilty to making a lot of the worst ones) but it is a mistake to just laugh at the fanatics. The Macolytes had a profoundly positive effect on the computing landscape. It kept the Mac going even when it wasn't better. Those who loved the Mac weren't numerous enough to improve the market share but they were loud enough to keep the Mac viable. There were versions of Flash for the Mac even when it didn't make sense. Versions of RealPlayer for the Mac even when it didn't make sense. The fact that the Mac survived had as much to do with how vehemently faithful protested against any perceived slight as it did with how good the Mac was. All that indignation, all that lobbying paid off. It allowed Apple to regain solvency and let Steve Jobs return to a company with a chance at success. It allowed the massive switch of the Classic OS to OS X to happen much more smoothly than anyone thought possible.

Then something unexpected happened. In the new environment Apple didn't need the lobbyists and the fanboys. Apple kept making OS X better, Apple released the iPod and the iTunes store, and finally Apple unleashed the iPhone. These things, which would have never been possible without the rabid loyalty of Mac users, took Apple from a niche player to a major tech giant. From a company that went against the grain to a company that set the standard. Don't believe it? Everyone is trying to make an iPhone killer, people are still trying to come up with an iPod killer and computer companies are trying desperately to match Apple's industrial design. Which bring us back to the stromatolites of Shark bay. The interesting thing about stromatolites is that they take in water molecules and excrete Oxygen.  They do this all the time, without thinking. It turns out, if you're big fan of stromatolites, that this is a pretty big mistake at least over the long run.

Billions of years ago these things were everywhere but the constant respirations of the stromatolites changed the atmosphere to a relatively oxygen rich environment. The abundance of oxygen paved the way for more complex organisms. The new organisms were hungry and when they felt a bit peckish they ate the stromatolites. Without ever realizing it, stromatolites have more in common with rocks than rocket scientists, they were paving the way for their own eventual doom. The only reason they are still around is that the extra salty waters of Shark Bay keep the predators away.

The same thing has happened to the Mac Faithful but it happened much faster. The environment they created, thinking or not, produced a landscape where Apple could innovate and thrive. A popular Apple renders the hard core Mac partisan irrelevant, when everyone wants a Mac those who refuse to use anything else become just another user. They might have been laughed at when Apple was 'beleaguered” but they had loud voices and a lot of people listened in between snickers and guffaws. Now the pure Mac partisan can talk but his voice is drowned in a sea of more rational Mac users. Which, in the online Macaverse, is the same as being extinct.