Innovation in Software

I found this rather entertaining ‘review’ of sorts earlier today, and it made me think about my own relationship with Apple. There’s no doubt they’ve raised expectations of what consumers are expecting from their computers these days, but I have had a love/hate relationship with their machines going back over a decade.

It all change a couple of years back however, when I was running FreeBSD on all my machines at home, and where I could, at work. A lot of people involved in FreeBSD at the time were switching to Apple, and it became clear that a lot of them weren’t coming back. See, under the skin of OS X – Apple’s newest operating system – is a Unix that is based in large part on FreeBSD. One of the first to move over was Jordan Hubbard, who started the FreeBSD project and is, to my knowledge, still head of release engineering at Apple on the OS X product. He has been followed professionally by many people, and in terms of users, I don’t know of any local BSD guys who were knocking around a few years ago who don’t own Apple hardware yet.

My reaction to this at first, was somewhat… well… judge for yourself. On a FreeBSD mailing list, somebody asked if anybody had any tips for a BSD’er starting on OS X. My reply, below, aptly represents my attitude at the time (and yes, I did used to be this aggressive nearly all the time, jerk that I was):

My advice is that you sell your over-priced fashion-victim toy with it’s Fisher Price Unix installed, and use the money instead to buy yourself a top of the range Thinkpad. It will outperform it, run FreeBSD, not look out of fashion next season, has been built by a company that is truly committed to the open source movement and whose execs don’t patronise you by assuming you travel to work on a skateboard in cargo pants or worse, pander to your girlfriend’s idea of what a computer should be.

In addition, you’ll be able to easily and cheaply upgrade parts of your laptop, built as it is on commodity hardware with 3rd-party suppliers being plentiful. You’ll find either the manufacturer’s support much better than Apple’s, alternatively you won’t have to travel 300 miles to find your “local” dealer as pretty much any computer store in the country will be able to carry out any repairs you need. Spares will be cheaper, labour will be cheaper, and you will not be without your laptop for 3 months whilst a replacement TFT screen sits on a boat from Korea slowly plodding it’s way to you, thanks to a ridiculous spares and repairs policy.

In addition, you won’t be contributing to the “brain drain” that Apple has caused on the Open Source movement, will understand more about how your computer works as a result, and won’t spend half your working day fighting bouncing icons, “helpful” software that constantly tries to break into every WAP point within range and a user interface that was specifically designed to be helpful to 5-year olds and your technophobic mother. You’ll instead get to use an OS and an interface designed for somebody who understands computers, not have to put up with one that assumes you are a 6th-grader with learning difficulties.

Plus, brilliantly, people won’t point at you and laugh when you get your laptop out on a plane or in a cybercafe for spending thousands of dollars on a laptop that isn’t as powerful as Intel-based competitors just because you think it “looks neat”. You will be considered by your peers to be a man instead of a boy, a leader instead of a follower, and you won’t get any more snide e-mails like this when you post to a FreeBSD list for help with your hardware.

Hope that helps. Sorry it was you that suffered my rant on Apple kit, but you are, to my knowledge, the first in a while.

I will now don the fireproof suit.

You know what the really ironic thing about that is? Two weeks later I needed to buy a new laptop. I didn’t want to go through the pain of configuring a load of drivers and just wanted a laptop with supported bluetooth and WiFi out of the box, with some reasonably familiar BSD-style Unix. At the time I was working for a University and qualified for Apple’s educational discount. Price wise, I couldn’t get a similar spec Thinkpad – or indeed any other laptop – to compete with the iBook G4 I’m typing this article on right now. Yes, I switched. I am a hypocrite. After blasting a guy with all that, I went out and bought an Apple.

I am now at a point where within a few weeks I will need to buy some new hardware, and once again I am considering the value proposition of an Apple box. They aren’t cheap, but given that it’s a FreeBSD userland under the skin, and they now have a decent processor inside, it’s starting to look tempting to drop a couple of thousand quid on a Macbook Pro.

The problem is, when I bought the iBook it made me a bit of a radical. Now, it just makes me the same, but a different kind of sameness. When I had a coffee in my usual place in town this afternoon, I noticed 4 people using laptops – all of them Apple’s of one flavour or another. They all looked like they should be using Apple machines: they didn’t look Unix types to me, more “I don’t know how to use my mobile phone properly” types.

Whilst Apple were able to leverage the fact that Toshiba, Dell, Sony Vaio and Acer laptops were all a bit ‘samey’, the problem they might now face is that Macbook and Macbook Pro hardware now signals to the nearby people in the know that the buyer doesn’t really know what to buy so just bought something ‘easy’. There is much more variety in the non-Apple laptop market than there is within Apple’s range, and its starting to feel like a severe and horrible weakness on Apple’s part.

What’s more, whilst Apple produces a pretty decent operating system, it’s not perfect. I do prefer the power and adaptive configurations you can push a ‘real’ Unix into, even if that means I don’t get to run various commercial applications. I can now get a cheap laptop with similar high-speed Intel hardware inside to a Macbook Pro from a variety of other manufacturers and roll out Ubuntu, OpenSolaris or even my old ally in times of war, FreeBSD, with relative ease: driver configuration has improved leaps and bounds.

Oddly, by buying a Sony, or even a Dell, I would now actually mark myself out as being a little bit different once more. I’d save money, and get all the advantages of cheap servicing I mentioned in my post above. The one thing that might make me stick with Apple? I think I might have subconsciously become an Apple Fanboy. It’s not that I want to lick my Apple hardware, but I like not thinking about it, and maybe the kids in the coffee shop are onto something: who wants the pain of thinking about hardware when all you want to do is write, produce videos, mix music, write software, whatever?