Thinking About the Mac (Premium)

I've closely followed the one-time key competitor to Windows for decades, and I've always owned at least one Mac. But many misunderstand my relationship with Apple's desktop platform. I'm not sure that even I understand it.

But it goes something like this. Endlessly fascinating. Great hardware. Software with some big hits and some equally big misses.

Studying how Apple has evolved Mac---both the hardware and the macOS platform---over the years is instructive for any Windows fan. Apple and Microsoft are roughly the same age, and both companies competed head-to-head for many years. There were successes and defeats on both sides. And the fact that Apple is now a much bigger and more successful company than Microsoft is only interesting in that the Mac had nothing---literally nothing---to do with that success.

The parallels are endless. Here in the waning days of 2017, Microsoft is keeping the dream of Windows and the PC---the platform on which it once gained control of the personal technology industry----alive via new initiatives like the Windows Insider program and cross-platform integration with Android and Apple's iOS. Apple, meanwhile, is keeping the Mac drive alive, too, by bringing some great ideas from iOS to the desktop and by aggressively courting new technologies.

There are difference, of course. Where Microsoft has embraced active pens and then multi-touch in Windows, Apple has declined, on both counts, to do so on the Mac. Apple argues that these technologies have more place on mobile. But I feel like this has more to do with keeping their prize pig fat and happy. That is, the Mac has been denied pen and touch only because iOS is so much more successful. It's almost incalculably more successful, and Apple has been talking up the "post-PC" world for so long that some have simply forgotten that a Mac is a PC.

Anyway, strategy is what it is, and both companies are driven by forces both internal and external. That both take different approaches to the desktop is what makes life interesting, at least to me. There is a lot to discuss here.

But let me start with this. I've been using a Mac regularly since roughly 2000, when I purchased my first Mac, an iBook. At that time, Mac OS X, as it was then known, was incomplete, but you could dual boot between whatever classic Mac OS version (8, maybe. 9?) and Mac OS X.

But I was only interested in Mac OS X.

An eager student of personal computing history, I had come of age reading every book ever published about Microsoft, Bill Gates, and Paul Allen, and about Apple and Steve Jobs. I poured through early accounts of Steve Jobs's NeXT, and of its pushes for advanced graphical and audio interfaces, object-oriented programming, and elegant hardware. Watched as it crashed and burned, and failed. Watch as the idiot Gil Amelio resurrected Jobs and sealed his own fate. Watched as Jobs and Next staged a coup of Apple and turned it into a different company.

Fascinating, all of i...