Mike Metelits
I got my first Apple Macintosh back in 1986, when men were men and one megabyte was a staggering amount of RAM. Things have come a long way since then, and ”bigger, faster” has become a mantra in computer circles.
No problem. The Macintosh plays the ”bigger, faster” game well, while falling down spectacularly on other, perhaps more important, fronts.
Apple has a long history of nearly getting it right. The corporation has an arrogant belief in the superiority of its products, and a naive belief that the market cares about superiority.
One example is the Apple Newton, which virtually introduced the idea of the personal digital assistant. Two-year-old Newton models can do basically everything the latest PalmPilot or Psion can do, yet Apple managed to lose money in the market, and abandoned the idea just when everyone else was about to copy them profitably.
But the firm has launched a comeback in recent years. Starting with the restoration of Steve Jobs, through the infusion of funds from Microsoft, to the introduction of a new range and direct Internet marketing (in some countries), Apple has fought back.
The iMac was an important salvo in this battle, and the new G3-powered range of ”minitowers” and PowerBooks is the follow-up. The new G3 machines are sexy. Styled somewhat like the iMac, the minitowers sport frosted translucent casings in white and a variety of muted colours: blue, green and other happy, unprofessional tones. The range yells ”cool” at the top of its lungs, disdaining the neutral tones and crisp Teutonic lines of computers designed to fit into standard office decors.
Design has always been an Apple strength, and the latest range is no exception, presenting an image so attractive it might have inspired French postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard: ”The commodity surface detaches from the commodity and excites desire without reference to any real object.”
Fine, fine, you say, but do they work? Well yes, and here we dive into the technical joys of computer-speak. The entry-level G3 comes with a 300 megahertz reduced instruction set computing (RISC) chip, 64 megabytes of RAM, a ”backside cache”, six gigabytes of hard drive, a 24x CD-ROM drive, built-in Ethernet jacks and a graphics accelerator card. This will set you back R16 000, which is a bit more than a PC with comparable technology.
The G3s are, in the words of Helen Batchellier of the Apple System Centre, ”seriously fast”. With all that RAM, sizeable caches and quite a fast processor, Apple claims significant speed increases over Pentium-based computers running the same applications.
The G3 350, one step up from entry-level, claims to be 40% faster than a Pentium P3 500 megahertz machine. Adobe Software claimed that early versions of the G3 Macs ran their software faster than comparable Pentium-based machines.
One other technical ploy in the new Macs is the inclusion of a 400 megabytes-per-second FireWire. The FireWire is the connection standard of the future, destined to replace Ethernet as a networking standard. It fits the Apple tradition of bringing innovations to the market first and letting less noble firms reap the profits later.
The G3s are monster machines, and in pure technical terms they will make many geeks drool, but does Apple have a chance to fight for market share here in South Africa? Maybe.
Asked to name the main problems with Macintosh in South Africa, Daily Mail & Guardian’s editor and Pentium fanatic David Shapshak said ”price, poor marketing and a huge installed base of other systems”.
Batchellier claims most of the price problem has been solved. Macs have always been more expensive, but Apple has gone to some lengths to cut the price difference between their machines and Pentium-based models.
”Dealer costs have come down about 50% over the last five to six years,” says Batchellier, adding that the new G3s ”will be a little more expensive, but not seriously”. This will no doubt be good news for buyers, but leaves the machines still priced out of the range of corporate bean counters.
Of course, Apple marketing only targeted corporate bean counters in the early 1990s, under John Sculley (no relation to Dana of X- Files fame) and Gilbert Amelio. Both these CEOs sold Apple’s funky, quirky, art-school image short in an attempt to fight Microsoft and Intel for corporate desk space.
That battle has long been lost, but the marketing war goes on. The iMac, according to Batchellier, is targeted at the home user. It is designed to come out of the box and plug in, probably to the Internet. Mac models have always taken a literal approach to the term ”plug and play”, enabling me to set up an old model out of the box to surfing the Web while catching MTV on a TV tuner card in about 10 minutes in the middle of a date. And that was in 1995.
The G3s seem to be geared toward high-end users. Few people will hook up FireWire connections in their houses this year, and the top-end machines come with 128 megabytes of RAM. Digital video disc is also available on some of the models, pushing Apple’s long- time connection with the artistic, entertainment and design industries.
Apple marketing, starting with the ”Think different” ads of the early Jobs restoration era, has gone back to defining its customer base as people who choose to use unique but fierce equipment. This is a good thing, and in combination with the new range made Apple the top computer seller in units in the United States last year.
But what does all that matter against the massive installed base of Pentium-based machines? Well, perhaps quite a bit.
With Ethernet and FireWire jacks standard, you should be able to plug a Mac into just about any network out there. Finding compatible software is another problem, but a surmountable one. The M&G uses a combination of Macs and Pentiums on the same network, and Batchellier says ”a lot of government departments are ordering them”. She explains: ”People who’ve trained overseas often insist on Macs, since that’s what they’re used to.”
Pat Botha, financial director of the Apple System Centre, argues that corporates are looking hard at Macs because ”of the stability of the operating system, despite the fact that they were originally targeted at graphic designers”. Remember, the Macintosh became Y2K compliant in 1984 when they were introduced.
What about compatibility with all those Windows 95/98 machines in the office? Enough already. Aware of their isolation, Apple bundles a utility called MacLink with their models, which enables relatively trouble-free file transfer between Macs and Windows machines. I used it to write this article.
Nonetheless, better but isolated is not a winning combination. Given the size of the South African computer market, it is less likely that the niche strategies which worked so well in the US will work for Apple here. It’s tough to fight a massive installed base and the perceptions that go along with it. Still, one hopes that this time Apple finally has it completely right.