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I was part of, and agree that the 90s Mac fanaticism was far, far over the top. Then came the iPhone.

by smm11 6y ago

lukifer 6y ago
It's easy to forget the historical context, in an era when the web and cross-platform toolchains have made computing platform choices a function of taste and preference. Bleeding-edge PC gaming and niche applications notwithstanding, we take for granted that any computer can do any task, be it Mac or Windows or Linux. But in the 90's, desktop Linux and the web were still in their infancy, and Windows held a quasi-hegemony over computing. Mac was the only alternative, constantly fighting for survival, both of Apple itself, and of the legitimacy of the platform ("why should we double our development budget to chase a market with 3% share?" went the refrain). The prominent black Mac blogger Rodney Lain went so far as to compare the "second-class citizen" feeling of being a Mac user to his African-American experience [0]. So yeah, it went over the top, and I got caught up in it too. To some extent, selection pressures were at work: the pragmatically-minded shrugged and bought PCs, and the religious ideologues were the only ones left clinging to their Macs (and each other) for dear life. It's ironic that Apple has become a far greater hegemon/monopolist than Microsoft in its hey-day. ("You die a hero or live to become the villain.") Nonetheless, for all our struggles with walled gardens and data silos, in some ways the modern computing ecosystem enjoys much greater platform fluidity and interoperability than 25 years ago. Everything speaks web; everything speaks *-nix; and there are a plethora of tools that make it feasible to target a dozen different platforms with the same codebase. [0] https://www.macobserver.com/columns/ibrotha/2001/20010928.shtml https://www.macobserver.com/columns/ibrotha/2001/20010928.sh...
Scuds 6y ago
It's the same as Amiga fanaticism. Hardware is more expensive, software is a lot more arcane. People put a lot of work into getting their computers to work the way they wanted to. iOS is a utility to me, I already have my set patterns of working with it, and some new feature that changes that only happens once in a few years.

I was part of, and agree that the 90s Mac fanaticism was far, far over the top. Then came the iPhone.

by smm11 6y ago

I was part of, and agree that the 90s Mac fanaticism was far, far over the top. Then came the iPhone.

It's easy to forget the historical context, in an era when the web and cross-platform toolchains have made computing platform choices a function of taste and preference. Bleeding-edge PC gaming and niche applications notwithstanding, we take for granted that any computer can do any task, be it Mac or Windows or Linux. But in the 90's, desktop Linux and the web were still in their infancy, and Windows held a quasi-hegemony over computing. Mac was the only alternative, constantly fighting for survival, both of Apple itself, and of the legitimacy of the platform ("why should we double our development budget to chase a market with 3% share?" went the refrain). The prominent black Mac blogger Rodney Lain went so far as to compare the "second-class citizen" feeling of being a Mac user to his African-American experience [0]. So yeah, it went over the top, and I got caught up in it too. To some extent, selection pressures were at work: the pragmatically-minded shrugged and bought PCs, and the religious ideologues were the only ones left clinging to their Macs (and each other) for dear life. It's ironic that Apple has become a far greater hegemon/monopolist than Microsoft in its hey-day. ("You die a hero or live to become the villain.") Nonetheless, for all our struggles with walled gardens and data silos, in some ways the modern computing ecosystem enjoys much greater platform fluidity and interoperability than 25 years ago. Everything speaks web; everything speaks *-nix; and there are a plethora of tools that make it feasible to target a dozen different platforms with the same codebase. [0] https://www.macobserver.com/columns/ibrotha/2001/20010928.shtml https://www.macobserver.com/columns/ibrotha/2001/20010928.sh...

Scuds 6y ago

It's the same as Amiga fanaticism. Hardware is more expensive, software is a lot more arcane. People put a lot of work into getting their computers to work the way they wanted to. iOS is a utility to me, I already have my set patterns of working with it, and some new feature that changes that only happens once in a few years.