Mac users are known for being a bit, well, fanatical. I’ll admit that back in the day, I bashed Macs for a hideous OS, but those were the days before OS X. I never really gave much thought to Macs until fairly recently.
In March of 2004 I got a new Sony Vaio notebook computer, and I was thrilled with it. True, it was a bit heavy (7.3 lb.*), and battery life was nothing to write home about, but it had a 15.4″ screen and a reasonably powerful desktop processor (2.8 GHz P4). Back in those days, I was living at home with my parents and going to UT Tyler. We still couldn’t get DSL at home (the dreaded “last mile” problem, which in our case was like 5 miles), so I would occasionally bring my Vaio with me to school and use the freely available wifi, especially when I wanted to download anything big.
Seduced by broadband, I downloaded iTunes and bought my first song, Britney Spears’s “Toxic.” But what does iTunes desperately want to sync with? An iPod of course, and so that fall, I bought a 4 GB silver iPod mini. Oh glory be! Using iTunes was a breeze, and a huge improvement over Windows Media Player. Indeed, everything “just worked.” But you know what iTunes and an iPod really want? That’s right, a Mac. Sure, a Vaio looks inestimably cooler than before with an iPod plugged into one of its USB ports, but when you plug an iPod into a Mac, you get the synergy of sexiness.
I had long admired Apple’s website, a marvel of clean and thoughtful design. I began to spend a little more time there.
I think the breaking point was the introduction of the iPod nano. No, I didn’t buy one, and am still using my two year old mini, but I did watch Steve Jobs introduce it in his keynote address. The man is a marketing genius. When he pulled that “impossibly small” nano out of his coin pocket! I had already read about it and seen it on Apple’s site, but the showmanship was just incredible. I started watching the other keynotes available on Apple’s site.
But the Apple bug still hadn’t truly bitten me yet. Perhaps I had ventured a little further into the forest than planned, but I could still see the forest edge, and world of Windows in which I had been raised. Then I watched the introduction of the new Intel iMac, with the built in iSight cam, FrontRow, and the remote control. That was pretty sweet, but I’m a notebook kind of guy. I want to take my computer with me, even if it’s just to my living room.
Then came the announcement of the MacBook Pro. Hmm. Notebooks just don’t get sexier than that. I think it was at this point that I decided my next computer would be a Mac. I figured that day was still safely off in the future. I certainly couldn’t afford (or justify) a computer that starts at $1,999. And besides, I still had a quite capable computer. Sure it was two years old, and maybe it had a bit of a heft, but the specs were still quite acceptable.
Regardless, I started to research OS X more in depth. I spent hours at a time on Apple’s site. I read and re-read about features. I watched video clips and demonstrations. Every time I discovered a cool new feature I excitedly told my brother about it, who showed no interest. In the first few months of this year I subjected him to hours and hours of Mac trivia, tips, and features.
Suddenly the rumor sites were discussing the successor to the iBook, presumably called simply “MacBook.” The speculation still pointed to something a little out of my reach, financially. Apple surely wouldn’t want to cannibalize sales of the MacBook Pro, and there’s no way I’m ever going to buy a bottom-of-the-line machine, even if it is on a higher level. But then, quietly, in a press release of all things, Apple introduced the MacBook, on a Tuesday. The prices were about what I expected but the specs were much higher. On the same day, they also bumped up the specs on the MacBook Pro. Still, the MacBook represented an amazing value.
On that Thursday, I finally talked myself into buying one (with a little cajoling by my brother, who knew I wouldn’t shut up until I had one). And now I’m the proud owner of a 2 GHz Core Duo MacBook with 1 GB RAM and an 80 GB hard drive.
But where’s the zealotry? At work. My brother wasn’t the only one to hear me raving incessantly. Poor coworkers heard about (almost) every feature and rumor too. I talked at length about Macs, and that was before I had one. When I finally ordered mine, I made sure everybody knew. Then was the glorious day that it came! I had even more to talk about.
All Macs come with Apple stickers. I’ve now got their logo plastered on my car’s back glass. I still, months later, talk about my Mac all the time. Today I decided to contribute to our break room’s aged supply of magazines. What did I bring? MacWorld of course (in addition to a Nintendo Power among others). While eating my lunch today at the break room table, I evangelized faithfully: “Vista? Tiger’s already better than Vista will be, whenever it finally comes out, by which time Leopard will be out, which is even more advanced than Tiger.” That sentence then required a couple of minutes of explanation. It seems not everybody knows the big cat nomenclature of OS X like I do.
* In the second paragraph of this post I said my Vaio weighed 7.3 lb. On my MacBook, I have a PDF of the spec sheet for my Vaio (don’t ask why). Using Spotlight, I was able to immediately pull up that spec sheet to find the exact weight.