Secret Project random parts indie, pop and geek culture commentary

The Nature of Fanboyism (Life, the Internet, and Everything)

Elf Needs Food.

As anyone within earshot of me, or accidentally stumbles across my blog in a drunken stupor, knows well through my repetition on the topic: I have recently given in and completely taken the plunge and switched from PC to Apple. Nearly exclusively, at that. My affection with Mac is so still in the "excited honeymoon" stage that I fear my blog could turn into the type of thing that is a suspected corporate front or the product of a hired advertisement writer. Realism sets in at some point. More on that later.

Why is this admission blog worthy? For one, I think the history of the computer age has hit an unexpected turn recently, perhaps one that has implications very few are recognizing. Both good and ill. More on that later. This is going to take a while to explain.

I grew up a devout x86 kid. Parking my hard drive in Windows 3.x. Staying up late playing the original Test Drive and Gauntlet. Toying with CompuServ at the dawn of the internet age. Writing Basic without hard drives: four hours of work coding to make an ascii graphic that was gone forever when you turned off the machine. Taking as many machines as I could find apart to find out what made them tick.

Mac, at that time, was the "other". It wasn't what I was familiar with at home, and even though it is what brought me my beloved Oregon Trail at school, it seemed nowhere near as interesting to me. I had hard and fast rules about life as a kid. Liking something was a responsibility, total allegiance was my token gratitude. I played Nintendo and wouldn't touch SEGA. Full stop, adamantly opposed. The only comics that existed to me had Marvel printed on them, to read D.C. comics would have been tantamount to treason.

By my teenage years I thankfully lost this zealous disposition, for the most part. I began to discover the gems that ignoring the rivals of my heroes had cost me. Sonic. Mutant League Football. Watchmen. Dark Knight. Still, I held firm to my Windows fixation, and my disinterest in Mac slowly escalated to irritation then onto pure loathing.

It's not that I didn't realize how bad Windows sucked until this year. College brought the wonders of a Computer Lab stuffed with shiny new UNIX machines. It was 1994 and the internet was just peeking out of the primordial ooze and taking the first shapes of what we currently recognize. The series of tubes was being laid. Newsgroups, FTP and IRC fascinated me. I recall nights I sat up until dawn talking to bots to figure out all the triggers... or at least as many as I could....

Point being, I knew how far superior UNIX and later Linux were over Windows on a stability and security level, but so what? Windows had the games. At any given year, there would be a game I was utterly addicted to that was simply (sometimes only due to ignorance) viewed by me as my only anchor to the dreaded mess that has always been Windows. Doom. Quake. Ultima Online. Deus Ex. Half Life. Team Fortress Classic. The list goes on.. and on...

The draw of building my own machines also kept me solidly in the PC camp as well. Apple was still stubbornly making substandard chips and hardware, and arguably laughable at times in the gear department versus a PC of the same time frame. Windows was the clear weak link on the PC chain, but it was one I had come to live with. The sheer weight of time exposed to its numerous flaws numbed and jaded me to them. They became burdens one simply had to accept in life and live with.

Obviously, the last couple of years have turned everything around. The only glaring, missing piece left in the Mac landscape is the lack of support from Valve. Portal alone will keep a Windows partition necessary on my MacBook until Valve finally, (hopefully) releases Steam for OS X. Until then, they remain and represent the last thread of dependence I have to the NTFS world.

Just as the hardware logistics shaped my early allegiances in the computer age, so has my recent switch been due to the recent hardware developments from Apple. Particularly in the interface. I'd long recognized the fact that the keyboard and mouse were brutish, primitive interface tools that were ripe for being discarded in a massive evolutionary step... I just simply couldn't take the next step and imagine what those possibilities could be. I'm not saying we are there yet, but Apple is clearly taking the biggest strides in this department. The interface of the iPhone, and the trackpad on the new MacBooks may seem subtle, until you spend a month or two with them. The increased functionality and intuitive gains from what are seemingly small details reveal themselves to be so much more.

It's granted that PC side is, pound for pound, more powerful on a hardware level than Macs even with the recent adoption of Intel and nVidia for Apple chipsets. So what? Simply build an i7 Hackintosh with dual (or triple, something you can't do under Windows) GTX 295 cards. Perhaps a Boot Camp partition for Valve games and the other odds and ends that you can't play on OS X, but I'd be extremely shocked if that doesn't change in the immediate future.

The turnaround of fortunes for Microsoft and Apple has been, seemingly, so unexpected and sudden that few are voicing concerns about market domination and monopolization threats that Apple potentially represents. Perhaps it's due to the fact that they played the part of underdog so long in American collective consciousness, but the way I see it Apple stands poised to be far more dominant than Microsoft ever was. iTunes is the de facto digital music delivery system. Smart money says Apple TV will replicate that for digital video delivery. iPhone stands evolutionary leaps above every other phone on the market, and perhaps is only the start if the whispers about new Apple phones for other carriers prove true. They may be behind PCs in computer sales numerically, but nearly have three of the most prized modern markets in commerce under their belt. Add to that the image gap...

Microsoft has decidedly become a dreary figure in American culture. Microsoft and Windows, from advertisements to presentation to aesthetics and design principles could be personified as the middle-aged option of the operating system. It's for the generation that wears slacks and sweaters to work. Driving a minivan. Listening to ELO. Remember that massive waste of millions bringing Jerry Seinfeld in for an ad campaign that was heavily touted to turn the tables on image? It only succeeded in making an old, out of touch company look even more old and out of touch. The fact that when Microsoft perceived itself to have its back against the wall, and Apple was running away with the "cool factor" prize they turned to something that was popular in culture five years prior speaks volumes in and of itself.

Apple appears increasingly, impossibly cool in comparison. The company now elicits an image of youth, vibrancy (ironic considering the painfully drab color variations in 99% of official Apple gear) and modernity. Admittedly, there is also still a great deal of pretentiousness on Apple side, a fact I long griped about when I sniped from the other side of the PC war. I also don't appreciate the (mostly) snotty and grudging support I've gotten from Apple when I've needed it, but it beats the general stupidity and ineptitude I encountered on the few times I've been forced to call Microsoft and attempt to braze their incomprehensible, labyrinthe phone system. It's like living the movie Brazil. Seriously.

I recognize the irony that this screed against the perils of fanboyism in and of itself could largely be seen of a product of fanboyism. I also recognize that I'm improperly using the word irony, but you get the point. Just as my blind fanboyism robbed me of the joys of SEGA, D.C., Sony and Apple for longer than they should have, it becomes more than that with each passing year. I have begun to perceive it as the plague inherent in the stupidity of youth. The thing which makes any video gaming forum or video game comment box virtually unreadable. With each passing year, my repulsion to the blind, ignorant and seething hatred contained in the most idiotic comments ever conceived by man proliferate the arms race between X and Y in Western pop culture, be it "PS3/Xbox is gay" or whatever. Since I'm treading on themes well tread by more polished and notable web nodes, particularly my beloved Penny Arcade, it's time to close this wandering, aimless rant down and concentrate on the stuff that is important. Like, whatever happened to that spacy/cute Stoned Mac Girl?