Monday, September 27, 2010

"Control of the adjacencies"

I spent the next two days in a kind of Apple-induced thrall, thinking excitedly of what my new Mac laptop would do and when I could get it. I was thinking of all the new, non-PC things I could do when the spell began to fade and I realized I needed a counter-perspective.

So, I called one of my friends who once was a Mac devotee, but who moved his life over to the PC world. (Interesting note is that he blogged about this when he did it and got flaming, vituperative hate mail from Mac people he didn't even know. Everything has a dark side.)


"I've had cellphones," I told him, "but the iPhone completely revolutionized the experience for me. I'm feeling the same thing could happen with the laptop. You've done this. What do you think?"

The thing to understand about my friend is that he's very, very, very smart. So smart that he thinks in the abstract the same way that we breathe air and sometimes it's hard to understand what he says.

"It's not the same," he replied, "because, with the laptop, Apple doesn't control the adjacencies."

Now, over the years, I've learned to understand him and could, in some cases, act as a translation agent for some of his ideas. But this one baffled me.

"What does that mean?"

After several minutes of discussion, this is what I figured out he meant: "With a cellphone, Apple controls the entire experience -- the applications and the interface by which the phone will interact with the rest of the world (specifically AT&T 3G and wi-fi). With a laptop, the same is not true. There are just too many variables and you will run into problems interacting with the PC world."

"Can you give me a specific example?"

"Sure, PowerPoint. Make a presentation on a PC and send it to someone else who has exactly the same version of PowerPoint on the same PC OS and you'll still have compatibility problems. A font won't work or the colors will be wrong or something. Now, introduce a different flavor of PowerPoint and a different OS into the mix and you'll see what the experience was like."

"But isn't that a flaw of PowerPoint?"

"Absolutely. But it's reality. Until Microsoft and other software vendors start writing perfect software, you'll have issues if you need to interact with the PC world from your Mac."

"Rats. So I shouldn't buy a Mac, then."

"I didn't say that. Emotion is part of the decision, too. If you feel you're going to be more productive and your interaction with the PC world is more limited, then it might be the right decision. But you should know what you're in for."

Net net. I still don't know which one to buy. But I'm a lot smarter about the issues.

Of course, this is a blog about what I'm going to do in five years, so back to regularly scheduled programming. Sorry for the digression.

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