Letting the Side Down

...after having seen the nth Frothing Mac Advocacy Zealot's blog this month (and the nth Jeez-Why-Are-These-Apple-Fans-So-Freaking-Bitchy blog), I can't help feeling all this advocacy is letting the side down a bit.

I can see why it happens, from the moderately creditable (sense of fun, quirkiness, desire to defend one's own 'tribe') to the moderately discreditable (fashion victim, desire to cover uneasiness about money spent on computer by talking it up, desire to attack the other 'tribe').

I love my Mac. Sometimes this love is expressed through gritted teeth and beneath madder-than-usual hair, but that's actually recognisably-similar to how I loved all my other computers (all PCs), and a lot of it's down to how computers are such ambitious devices, seductively promising to organise and collect our entire world into one tidy box, so that when they inevitably fail we feel mildly betrayed.

I really don't get all the 'This Computer Will Change Your Life And Suddenly Computers Will Make Sense' side of Mac advocacy. As a switcher (December last year), I found a steep learning curve in some areas, quite a lot of recognisable similarities, and some things seemed better while others seemed worse. Many of those 'worse's I accepted philosophically as to do with my growing up on a different OS, and if I couldn't live with them, I found workarounds.

One of the motivations to start this blog was to have a place to post the essay on 'Ten Things I Prefer on Windows...and Ten Things I Prefer on the Mac' that I desultorily started writing about three months ago after the last time I read one too many advocacy-zealot blogs. I'm not sure if it's finished, because I keep adding to it and taking things out as I find things out (for example, I took out the bit about viewing a PDF in a webpage being more difficult on a Mac once I realised you actually can zoom, just not with CMD+ as with webpages).

The immediate cause of my taking it up again was reading various advocacy zealots going after some marketing type working at a law firm. He'd essentially been sold a whole bundle of unrealistic expectations (This Computer Will Change Your Life/You Will Never Need To Pick Up A Computer Book Again/Lo The Mouse Will Become Even As An Extension Of Your Hand). As one might expect, these expectations didn't come true, and the man went through a lot of grief trying to get his (now Mac) Microsoft tools to work with the Microsoft tools and Microsoft tool-users already in place in his office. So he started a blog entry to vent his pain at these expectations not being met. It's very reminiscent of the amusing video 'Mac Killed My Inner Child' in some ways. I started reading it thinking 'well, he is a bit of a twit, especially for somebody whose job is advising people about technology', and when I finished reading it I clicked on the 'rebuttal' a Mac fan came up with, and ended up thinking, 'well, maybe the man had a point. Is it unreasonable to want not to keep bashing his head against something he finds uncomfortable to use?' It used to be IT departments for mainframes and PCs that told us it was our duty to adapt to the machine. Now it's Apple fanboys.

Somebody (the chap who does Designtechnica, I think) once mentioned in a podcast that if Mac advocacy goes too far people will just start edging away from us in public places, as with the person who thinks we need to know all about their religion or mail-order business or political party.

I feel that maybe we ought to try to be nicer than we would otherwise be: more mature, considered, reasonable and accepting. If we try to meet criticism of the Mac that way, rather than sputtering, 'but it just is better!', the long-term effects can only improve. We want something from mainstream society and mainstream tech-support departments, after all. We want ordinary people to think 'that's interesting' and we want tech-support departments to think 'oh, they've got a Mac, let me just look that up'.

The less we can get other people to think 'Go Away', the better.