It’s Fun to Play With Stuff (or Why I’m Glad I Switched to the Mac)
On the day after Apple announced a record quarter, John Gruber runs down a list of possible reasons why people are switching to the Mac. I’m not going to argue with any of his statements — for the most part, I think he’s dead on. But I’d like to add one of my own, based on my personal experience of switching from the PC to the Mac.
I’ve always been a PC user, at least since our first 386SX-16 that my Dad bought for us when I was in high school. Before that, I used Apple IIs at school and spend many a day playing Pools of Radiance and coding text adventures on my Commodore 64. I had certainly played with Macs, but they always seemed foreign and inaccessible to me. I can vividly remember commenting to a friend (in the days of Windows 3.1) that using a Mac made me feel like I was trapped in Windows and couldn’t get out of it. Keep in mind, I also had about 4 different versions of my autoexec.bat and config.sys files that could be swapped in depending on the memory requirements of the program (or, more likely) game I wanted to run.
In any case, I pretty much lived and breathed PCs from DOS 4.2 through to Windows XP, and made my living developing web and Flash applications on a variety of PC hardware. In the meantime, I also ran Red Hat Linux on an old Pentium 100 (complete with F00F bug) that served as my router in the pre-LinkSys NAT box days, and even dabbled with a Debian (unstable) KDE desktop for about 9 months — although frequent reboots to Windows (or sluggish sessions in VMWare) to use Photoshop made it impossible to give up on Windows completely. All the while, I followed the progress of OS X from a distance, happily digesting Ars Technica’s in-depth reviews of the OS on every release from pre-beta through to Tiger. I’m a curious fellow that way.
For me, using a computer has only partially been about the tools that it provides. It’s also about playing. I love to install things, mess around with servers and settings, just to see if I can get it to work. It’s the same reason I bought a PSP — because it was hackable. I could make it do fun and interesting things. I could play with it, not just on it.
Right now, it’s the Mac that embodies this sense of play the best for me in the computer world. Linux was fun for a while, but it lacked the professional tools I needed to do my job. And it lacks the completeness that Apple provides, each service integrated with the other in a way that makes you want to connect the widgets to the doodads, and watch them play together.
This sense of play extends beyond the OS services and bundled applications. A system like Quicksilver could never exist on Windows or Linux, as much because of the APIs exposed through AppleScript as because of the giddy sense of discoverability built into the application by someone that clearly cares dearly for the Apple ecosystem. (It’s funny to write that about Quicksilver, an app I once described to a fellow Unix-head as “like a pipe for GUIs”).
The Mac opened up a whole new world for me to play in, and the rabbit hole runs pretty deep. For me, Vista was the final straw — not only did it not provide anything new and fun to play with, it made everything my PC used to do seems horrifically slow. It lasted a few months, and then I switched.
Because if it’s not play, it’s just work.
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Agree. And what I love about OS X as opposed to, say, Linux, is that I can choose when want to play and when I just want to work: that is, when I just want to get something done, it Just Works, without me having to mess around in the command line or look up man pages. But the command is always there if I want it, with access to cool Unix tools, Fink, etc.
Linux, on the other hand, has gotten to the point where it just drives me mad – yesterday I spent about 2 hours getting a USB harddrive to work on a Linux box I’m setting up as a backup server in anticipation of Time Machine. I mean, WTF? 2 Hours to connect a USB drive, in 2007?
A pipe for GUIs! What a wonderful way to describe Quicksilver. Maybe that will help me grok it a bit more.
I could not agree with you (all) more! I switched to Mac shortly after their Intel switch came about — I was fed up w/ having to spend 20 minutes just trying to attach to SSID tmobile in NYC every time i woke up my thinkpad. I began researching the new MacBookPro’s — and figured I would dive in with an old 800mhz white ibook — and i was sold. I forget the discussion group that pushed me over the edge — but the essence is “if you don’t think you can do what you do on a PC with a Mac you’re wrong, just try it”. Albeit, different I have found myself to be sold hook, line and sinker. I’m an IT tech and use (client’s) Windows all day long and Vista was a no sell — a Mac was such a breath of fresh air and still allowed me to “play” as you say — while still allowing me to do work and get more work done. I don’t play games I play as you do, install things, get them to work (gcaldaemon?), rdesktop via X11 (screw MS’s rdp client), etc… I live by what new comes down the pipe on Macupdate and scour the blogs out there for as much Mac news as I can get — i never thought i become one but i am now officially a fanboy. i’m even going to the apple store on Fri to get Leopard (not wait on line ahead of time, just go before 10PM). It’s wonderful to enjoy a computer as much as i do a Mac… AND i feel as though I learn something new everyday on it!!
Well said.
Petieg — re. rdesktop via X11 — if you haven’t tried CoRD yet, you gotta. http://cord.sourceforge.net/
The new RDC beta from Microsoft isn’t bad, but CoRD has improved my sysadmin life dramatically.
Tried CoRD — don’t particularly like it. Prefer Tsclientx for a packaged solution. Once you have rdesktop scripts converted to apps w/ Applets for rdesktop it’s much better. Thanx for the add’l input though maybe i’ll give it another go-around.
[...] Ben Sargent on computers and play: [...]
Yeah , I agree. For work , I probably said Windows. In the back of DOS age, I had have many version of autoexe.bat and config.sys for various purpose also.
But for playing purpose, I would prefer linux system, coz you can modify the system by yourself.