Slashdot Mirror
The Cult of Mac
The form and structure of the book is a cross between a Wired magazine (for which Kahney has long written on Apple) and a coffee table book. There are great pictures of people, machines and art to appeal to the eye. Some pages are all pictures, while others are primarily text -- most are a combination of the two. The layout is always attractive. If this were a book from Apple, the style would be cleaner and there would be less emphasis on the past; this book is from and for the fans, though, so the style is more edgy and chaotic.
The book is divided into five large sections. The first covers the Macintosh itself, its users, its evangelists, and a little of its history. Including, to my amusement, but not surprise, its connection with pot, which occupies three pages. Wozniak is covered lovingly, and Jobs is painted with the same awe, love and hate brush that the community uses. Leander even covers the TV and movie Macintosh spotting, where the good guys always use Macs and the bad guys always use PCs.
Section two takes us into the MacWorld phenomenon. The secrecy, the crazy crowds, the keynote -- the whole shebang. We also get a look into the Mac phenomenon in Japan.
The final three sections are the most interesting to the hardware lovers. Section four covers modifying the Macintosh, futuristic designs, and the variety of things that have been built from dead Macs. The fourth section is about collecting Macintoshes; there is an excellent image here of a reception desk built entirely of old Mac Classics. Some attention is also paid to the devotees of Apple tsotchkes -- the shirts, the pins, the shoes, and other logo-branded novelties.
The final section is all about what comes next. Here Leander covers the iPod and its subculture, as well as the ongoing cultural battle between Microsoft users and the Mac world. The author even goes so far as to associate the construction of the swivel head iMac to that of a newborn baby to justify our attachment to it. And that makes my Powerbook a what?
There is a lot of great material in this book just to flip through, or to sit down for an enjoyable read. For the technically minded, there is nothing here to help you write better code or get more out of the operating system. This is a book about a culture, its icons, its people, and its ideology.
I can't recommend this book for a PC person, Unless he's interested in learning about the phenomenon or becoming part of it, I doubt there is much he'd interesting in this book. A PC user uses his machine to perform a task and thinks little of the machine itself. A Mac, on the other hand, is a key component of an integrated lifestyle. If you don't live the lifestyle and you care to know more about it, then check out the book. Otherwise, you might as well skip it.
As a Mac enthusiast myself I really enjoy this book. I started programming on the Macintosh with the first 128K machine, took a hiatus on Windows for a couple of years, and switched back with OS X. I've been to a MacWorld and seen some of the phenomenon first-hand. But it's nice to see it catalogued here in such an attractive, nicely constructed, well-written book.
In the early days of Apple versus Microsoft we had a real culture war, command line versus GUI. Windows won. Which is bad because Mac is, IMHO, better. But the Windows victory does allow us in the Mac camp to revel in our own individuality. This book is a fun way for new and old Mac fans alike to share in the common insanity which is our somewhat unrealistic love for this computer and it's company.
I'm certainly glad this book came out before Christmas. Now I know what I am going to give a couple of my fellow Macaddicts.
Reviewer Jack Herrington authored Code Generation in Action, and edits the Code Generation Network. You can purchase The Cult of Mac from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
A PC user uses his machine to perform a task and thinks little of the machine itself. A Mac, on the other hand, is a key component of an integrated lifestyle. If you don't live the lifestyle and you care to know more about it, then check out the book. Otherwise, you might as well skip it.
Being someone who spends equal time all day on a PC and Mac (G4 and G5), I can tell you that a Mac in no way is a "key component of an integrated lifestyle". It's a computer that happens to run an alternate OS and have a good marketing department, which is nice if you don't like windows or you are a drone consumer who cares about what is 'cool'.
WTF? Certainly PC users don't care about the machine.
Fucking Mac snobs.
It doesn't get much more main stream as far as Apple products go.
Let's not forget the Apple Newton fan club.
This is where the culture comes in bringing in a sense of loyalty to the product you use. I don't feel like PC users have that same phenomenon and maybe if they understood it they wouldn't rant and piss and flame on here about price differences and single mouse buttons.
As a mac user, btw, I'd like to say that there are so many stereotypes that are simply not true about many Mac users.
I'm constantly amazed by how many stereotypes there are of Macintosh users, and it's actually quite offensive sometimes. "Oh, you're a MAC GUY, I see....our PCs aren't GOOD ENOUGH for you" is what invariably follows. Most of the time, I politely side-step platform-preference questions now, because of the assumptions and image people place on me when they learn I'm a mac user are just so goddamn tiresome.
Please help metamoderate.
(Arguments that its Xerox's GUI, some people use a command-line, There's a command-line in Mac OS X now aside.)
"I'm a Genius!"*
*Not an actual Genius
But these things will make you into a trend-humping fashion lemming.
Apple's core product isn't computers or electronics. It's elitism.
Ah, the classic "get a life" business. What kind of life do you have in mind? Passions are what make life interesting. Some people obsess over sports, some over Macs, some over Star Trek, some over toy trains-- they have lives. People who obsess over other people have lives too. People who go around criticizing any show of exuberance as juvenile...well, I'm not sure about them.
Planning on making a trip to Boston this weekend, to tell everyone here how they should "get a damn life, it's only a baseball team, they're not a church or anything"?
I think the term you are looking for isn't "User" but rather Bigot . I use a Mac at work. I even like it. I even didn't mind adding Mac troubleshooting skills to my Windows and Linux skills-- it wasn't that different. I would even go so far as to say that I prefer doing 90% of my Real Work at a Mac. (Games are another story.) But I while I think the iPod is kinda cool, I'm not planning on replacing my Archos Jukebox 20 until it keels over dead... which, incidentally, won't be due to the batteries. I have better ways to waste my money than donating to the Church of Steve.
I'd also disagree slightly with the assessment of the review. Based on what's said, there may be some interest in the material to anthropologists (amateur and professional) who study computer nerds. If I see the book at Barnes & Noble, I might sit down and leaf through it for an hour or two. I might check it out if it hits the local library. I wouldn't spend real money on it, though.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I built my PC myself. While I don't have skill as a sculptor I still strive to make a unique machine that has as much power as I need while fashioning my desktop to meet my individual needs. I don't rely on a coporation to provide me this, I create it myself. Along the way I pick up more skills that are relevant to my craft, and I help build community by assisting others with learning how they, too, can shape their tools to meet their individual and unique needs.
The difference between the mac and linux is the difference between owning your culture and purchasing it. No matter how "cool" a mac might be, it's ultimately just more commercial art - another piece of your "culture" you choose to license - to borrow at fee - from a corporation rather than own and shape yourself.
How is this, in any way, "revolutionary?"
Seems to me the revolution was televised, only none of you owned a "TV" because it wasn't fashionable.
Not all of us think a computer is some life-changing gee-golly piece of technology. It's my computer. I do stuff on it. That's it. Buying a mac doesn't change your life, or more accurately, it -shouldn't- change your life.
What level of change though? Aren't computers supposed to be able to help you do things you couldn't otherwise - is that not a example of change?
I'm pretty happy using a Mac desktop at home because I don't have to constantly clean the system or upgrade things all the time like I used to with the Windows system. That is a change, and it's damn positive.
Another change that's possibly even better is having family members (like my mom) have Macs. That means almost no support work at all. That too is a lifestyle change, as it frees me to spend more times with them as family and less as tech-support guy.
All computers change your life. Not earth-shattering changes to be sure - but change nonetheless. A computer allows you access to the internet, to play more games, or what have you and those are all examples of things that do change your life in subtle ways.
I'm not Mac or nothing either. I use LINUX and Sun servers. I use a PC at work. I am in agreemnet that Mac users are far too typically sterotyped, even though I probably fall closer to that sterotype than most.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No PC user on this earth is more rabid than the devoted PC gamer. Rabid in many good ways, to be sure. But part of that then is probably the huge expense they sink into systems, like $600 video cards.
Paying a little bit more for a Mac over a PC does not look nearly so extreme compared to that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I personally think there is a far deeper cult around people who hate Apple, and hate Apple users. These are people that seem unable to acknowledge very real benefits from the Apple systems like ease of access, good ergonomic design, and thoughtful OS design.
For many Apple users the computer is not aboult style, but about ability. Apple haters cannot see beyond this however, and have an overly simplified equation for life where functionality decreasing in direct proportion to looks. So which is more cultish, the group of people that like well designed products or the people that fanatically dismiss anything that is produced by the company as "Trendy" and "Elitist"?
Look past the glitz and take another look.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No shit. There are several products (Macs, Toyotas, Badger Blades) that inspire in me a strong degree of brand loyalty, but I simply cannot envision being so devoted to any product that I'd get a tattoo representing it. My brand loyalty is based on experience -- I prize products that do the job, consistently and well, and hold up under hard use -- rather than any sense of mystical connection.
...
Then again, I can't imagine getting a tattoo representing a sports team, a band, a movie, a drink, or a drug, either, and I've seen all of them. [shrug] Seems to me that anything you're going to put on your body forever should represent a core part of your identity -- if someone else's manufacture product has that kind of significance to you, I guess that's your problem
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
all the mac zelots are just conformists, and people who either wanted to be in the "in crowd" in high school or were in the in crowd and want to follow the herd now.
personally I started on apple machines, and even was a "mac" guy but when i started building my own machines and apple eliminated the power computing knock offs i said "fuck em", and went total pc. I still have to use mac's at work, and find them just as a pain in the ass as i do a pc that is built so i can't "fudge" with it from compaq or another corp entity.
Fact of the matter is, tattoing anying thing on your body that is a corp symbol is fucking stupid. fucking cheerleaders..........
Most of the comments seem to center around the Question wheter Macs are good at all, wheter the community is acceptable/credible or even if it is good to be a fan.
Well, of course I have an oppinion on those questions too, but I'd like to make a comment about the book. About a month ago I browsed through some pages of a book with the same subject, at first I thought it might be this one, but I cant remember enough details to really make sure.
The book I was browsing seemed rather unsatisfactory to me. The author was seemingly fascinated about some of the Mac-users he interviewed. Unfortunately the way they are presented distorts to a carricature.
While it is true that Mac-users love to talk about Macs and their benefits (maybe due to the ignorance of their peers), they are not funny in general.
The book I was browsing didn't care about that and It didn't provide too much background about the company.
There is no "Cult of Mac". There is a community, much like the Linux-community or the C# enthusiasts. Of course the image is different. It's a strange topic to write a book about, but if you enjoyed a book about bikers and Harley-Davidson-clubs, you may like it, no matter if you hack DOS or push rectangles all the time.
This is one of those slashdot posts that gets crazy people from MAC vs Windows (NOT PC) camps out of bed and all wet.
As one of the posters said, hardware is the same. This is a neverending battle between people who like one thing and people who like another. You can't argue about peoples tastes adn choices, they are always going to be different. What is better for one is bad for another, some Mac users don't like pcs cause they don't look as good as macs. PC users don't like Macs cause the advertising is too annoying or they don't run new game.
I think you use what you like and what you need. I like to think that most people use a certain type of machine/software because that is what suits their needs and not because it looks cool.
"is this thing on?"
Most of the "techies" (Tech savvy people that aren't programmers or engineers or anything) I've met admit that Macs are much better. Even hardcore Windows users I know admit that Macs are OK. Maybe a little better than Windows. Only one person I know absolutely hates macs, and he thinks satan worships him, and that he is a better programmer than ME (Yeah right).
That last part is completely true.
"Not our fault, we tried to work with Apple to get them to raise their standards in some specific areas, but they're not interested right now."
First off, take a look at a book called "The Macintosh Way" by Guy Kawasaki. He has some commentary about "dealing with the mothership."
By the tone, though, I'm not amazingly surprised that Apple "wasn't interested right now." When someone comes to your company and tries to get you "raise your standards in some specific area" because, obviously, your "standards" are too low, you'd probably tell them that you weren't interested.
Many software companies come to Apple with the attitude that, by developing software for the Mac, they are somehow doing Apple a huge favor and Apple should bend over backwards to help them. Try that tack with Microsoft and see how far it gets you. Heck, go to Sun and try to get them to "raise their standards" with Solaris. Same thing--they'll be nice, they'll be polite, they'll take your suggestions and incorporate them into some database that will get looked at someday when someone is sitting around with time on their hands. But, needless to say, helping you write your software is not frontmost in their mind.
" Since Mac users can't use our stuff, we don't want them hounding our sales people about it, so we don't let them on our website."
Now, to me, this is just plain stupid.
Does your software support Windows 95? Do you ding the Windows 95 users from your website? I assume you also ding anyone using Linux, right?
"(various rude Mac users' quotes...)"
While I'll agree about the childishness of these comments, I'd also have to ask who's also being childish. Again, the tone you're giving sounds like a calm and collected version of "We'll take our ball and go home."
Suppose the users' comments had been "Would you please support the Mac?" Would that have changed your mind? Heck, if you're not supporting the Mac, give the reasons. Be specific--not a general "Apple needs to raise their standards"--but what standards in particular. "We cannot develop our product for Mac OS X until it allows network kernel extensions access to raw sockets." Boom. Heck, if nothing else, you might turn all those rabid Mac people on Apple saying, "Hey! Someone needs this!"
I buy windows products, and a lot of them. But I use a Mac to surf the web. So let me get this straight: I'm a potential customer of yours, but you've decided to lock me out of your website based on my choice of web browser?
Total moron. You deserve the idiots pinging you like that.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I didn't buy a Powerbook to be cool. Believe me, using a Mac you have to develop a thick skin very quickly, as everyone who sees you using one will accuse you of being a crazy evangelist or snobby elitist. (Case in point.)
If mac users tend to congretate it's for the protection that a herd offers. There are two factors at work here. First is the need to enforce conformity that so many humans feel. The kids who beat the shit out of the kid with glasses because he has glasses. When they see a Mac user they feel the need to berate him for being different.
Second is the insecurity that many PC users feel. At some level they know that Windows 95+ is a Mac rip-off that's been historically crash-prone and reboot-happy and if they're paying attention they've heard that their Windows systems are insecure and Macs aren't. Some of them also know they're supporting a convicted monopolist. So, they have to excuse this irrational/unwise behavior. The easy answer is that Mac users are weird, cultists, and like ethnic food. They feel justified in not being that way so they therefore justify their continuing use of Windows.
Then there are the introspective, enlightened lot. We call them "switchers".
Interestingly enough, I don't see these behaviors from people who use their computers for an essential Windows-only app. They tend to treat their computer as an appliance and not get emotionally entangled with it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Some of us just don't like Windows much -- though I personally use Mac and Windows both...as well as Linux, though due to reliability issues and the presence of a good version of Word I use the Mac for all my school stuff.
;)
Though I will confess that I do tell others to get a Mac -- though mainly when they complain about their Windows PCs. Then they'll shut up about Windows, I have enough trouble with Windows on my Windows boxes at home, but also have a geek reputation and therefore have to take up some of the aspects of the Rabid Mac Zealot (but not the tattoos!) in order to sort of get people not wanting me to fix their Windows machines. I'll still help them to the best of my ability, just mention the Mac while I do it -- and that position may change if and when Longhorn starts turning up, because I'm probably not going to be getting too familiar with it. Plus, I like my friends to not have as many computer problems -- the actual emotion at the heart of the much-touted "evangelism." Yeah, you heard it here; plain old altruism for your friends' nerves, spouses, and pocketbooks, of the sort that has existed since time immemorial, is the reason some people tell others to get a Macintosh.
The actual Mac lifestyle, if there is one, is actually the lifestyle of there not being a Mac lifestyle, but rather just a state of not having to worry so much about whether the computer will work (unless it's particularly old, of course). As has been said in this thread, there's actually a bigger problem with the need for a Windows lifestyle...and has been recounted, the Windows zealots who will treat those who choose to use a Mac as pariah.
There are those who go to conferences to see Steve Jobs and stuff, and if it were convenient for me to see Jobs I'd probably do it for much the same reason I'd go see Clinton -- an interesting speaker discoursing on an interesting topic, worth attending for the sheer oratorical value of it. Cicero and Clay are dead, someone's gotta fill their shoes.
But you know, I think I've just wasted a lot of time yammering -- let me check MacRumors
Because if the group doing the integrating decides you dont need it, you dont get it.
Unless the group doing the integrating decides, on a lark, to join, embrace, and even contribute to the open standard/software movement. 'Cause then you might be able to still decide what you want or need.
But that couldn't possibly come from some over priced, consumer-electronic excuse for a computer, now could it? No way.
Just keep doing yer thing, man...
Now, I own three macs, they're great machines, but they are just that.
Mac Cultists really creep me out. I remember one past NAB tradeshow, watching this group of 5-7 mac people walking together. From behind, you could see that all of them were wearing IDENTICAL jackets with "Think Different" across the back. Ironic? or just creepy?
At any rate, everyone knows that there is only one computer that is worthy of religious devotion, and that is the Amiga.
Thank you,
The Wheeze
Its that Picassoish light bulb. People ask me what it is and I tell them its a symbol for good ideas that no one knows what to do with.
"You can see I know very little about pimp policy." George McGovern.
I know what you mean.
Up a couple of years ago, I didn't have much use for macs. I thought they were pretty machines, but they just didn't feel all that useful to me. Since '95, I've generally leant heavily towards Linux systems, built from parts. I bought a blueberry iBook as an experiment, but I didn't think it was suitable for my purposes. I ended up giving it to my parents, who never touched it. I ended up selling it on Ebay.
But when they came out with OS/X, things changed. I got an iBook, and it was perfect for me. I really liked it. I ended up getting my folks an eMac, which solved their virus/trojan problem instantly. And, I found that just about anything I might want to do was there.
OS/X was the turning point for the company, I think. Their older OSes were pretty limited, but this one is great, top notch. And, my iBook rules, I use it as my main computer at home. Nothing else is as smooth to use, as refined. I really dig it.
But like you said, I like it because of what it is NOW. I didn't like their older stuff.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
"My company distributes a product that is not compatible with Macs. Not our fault, we tried to work with Apple to get them to raise their standards in some specific areas, but they're not interested right now. No big deal. Since Mac users can't use our stuff, we don't want them hounding our sales people about it, so we don't let them on our website."
This reminds me of the joke about the bad salesman who goes "For the last time, we don't have this in stock!" when the hundredth customer comes in to ask for the same thing.
You go on feeling superior because Apple doesn't go down on all fours to fix your problem, that makes beautiful business sense. Given your attitude, I'm sure they're very motivated to do so.
Afterthought: how do you treat Windows users who for some reason can't use your product? Like shit, or like customers?
Really, your generalisations and "people skills" are just the thing that gives COMPUTER users a bad name (not that I care, I don't try to sell them things).
I think, therefore I am...I think.