ResearchThe Mac Mystique
What is it about Apple? The MacIntosh desktop PC has always lurked on the fringes of computing, always with a smaller share of the market even when they practically were the market themselves. They're cooler and weirder. In stark contrast to the IBM-compatible PC line, which is basically a series of loosely affiliated parts bolted together with an erector set, Mac hardware is sleek and stylish like a Porche. You do not take apart and fix your own Mac hardware, period. Good luck finding support, either.
Apple has always done things firmly Their Way. Their systems run a modified version of Unix licensed exclusively to them which they have modified into OS X, and that's it. There was the brief open source system Darwin, but it dies off mainly due to lack of interest. When you run a Mac, you do things Apple's way and love it, or you don't do it at all.
To see the computer scene in the late 1980's and early 1990's, you'd think Apple owned the future of computing. The Mac PCs at work put the bulky and clunky IBM PCs to shame. Anybody who worked with computers at this time, the golden age before Windows on the PC, can relate that Macs seemed like little miracles. Even though the interface was black-and-white, it sported what appeared to be cutting edge desktop technology; actually this was bought from Xerox Parc, which will go down in history as the computer company which invented the computer as we know it and then ignored it.
The Mac had every desktop metaphor we now take for granted, all the way back in 1984. The taskbar and menu, the mouse-driven interface, the drag-and-drop files and folder icons, the little trash can icon sitting in the corner of the desktop, and draggable windows. In the late 1980's, the heyday of MacIntosh, the IBM PCs, at this time barely running DOS, were black monochrome screens with a C:>_ prompt blinking at you expecting you to type something. What little software existing on the IBM PC that had a graphical nature looked no better than the Commodore 64 graphics of years before. The Mac System 7 and 8, in particular, seemed at the time to be all you could ever want.
Yet somehow, the IBM PC running Microsoft took over. The first time Windows 3.0 hit the market (versions 1.0 and 2.0 were virtually unknown), the public reaction was basically "what did you do to that Mac?" Apple even sued for the interface rip-off, in a case which lost, in what was to be virtually the only victory Microsoft would see in a courtroom. Apple slipped back into the fringes, a hardy player in the market seemingly biding it's time.
But every time you glance at the MacIntosh line, it seems to have evolved a new skin. The machine keeps getting what can only be described as sexier. The desktop is nothing short of amazing. Dripping with theatrical eye-candy and amazing video output, the Mac line stands today as the platform of choice for artists and elitists.
Meanwhile, Apple seems to be paying more attention to other markets with its iPod line, and now, right on time, Microsoft is dogging their heels with the Zune player. One can't help rooting for Apple to rise to its past glory. Perhaps they will get luckier with iPod vs Zune than they were with Mac vs PC. And even more hopefully, their Mac computer line will at least regain the market share it so richly deserves.