We have finally bowed to the inevitable. After 19 years of faithful devotion, the editorial departments of ComputerScope and its two sister publications of more recent vintage, are ditching the Apple Macintosh.
We are about to embark on a planned, systematic scheduled migration—following a methodology that we frequently write about but so rarely practise—to Windows notebooks.
Of course, layout, design and production work will continue to be performed on the Macintosh. Trying to substitute a ‘creative’ person’s Apple with a Wintel machine is a task to be attempted only by the very brave or the very ruthless and although our mild-mannered IT manager can make himself incomprehensible to ordinary mortals when he so chooses, his resemblance to Donald Rumsfeld ends there.
ComputerScope is one of Ireland’s longest established Macintosh sites, having used it since we set up in business in 1985, a year after its launch. As is typical of Apple sites, loyalty to the Mac runs deep among many, though by no means all, of its users.
Several factors have caused the change of heart, of which standardisation was perhaps the most important. In magazine production workflow, supposedly trivial matters like handling spurious characters, maintaining a consistent shape of punctuation marks and assuring file compatibility between different generations of software applications assume major importance.
Where two or more Macintoshes are gathered together in common purpose, that can be difficult to achieve. Unless you have a ‘forklift upgrade’ policy, whereby all old machines get junked and replaced with identical new ones at exactly the same time, disparities between different employees’ equipment are bound to exist as computers break down and have to be replaced, people leave and newcomers arrive.
Having various generations of Apple kit can be a problem because in truth, the company has never handled the issue of backward compatibility well. In its 20 years of existence the Mac has gone through a major hardware architecture change—switching from Motorola’s 68k processor family to the PowerPC in the early 90s; and a fundamental operating system shift as well, replacing the ‘Classic’ MacOS with the Unix-based OSX at the start of this decade.
Quite apart from those seismic shifts, it has frequently forced its customers to adopt significant changes, such as the complete disappearance of floppy drives which happened virtually overnight. And whereas PC companies like Dell have a policy of maintaining compatibility with docking stations for all but the most ‘ultraportable’ of its notebooks, Apple clearly does not consider that issue to be an important one. New notebook; new docking station.
Not long ago I had a stolen PowerBook replaced with another almost identical model, except that the SCSI port had been replaced by a FireWire connector. All well and good, but I was miffed that the SCSI-based Zip drive I had at home was now rendered obsolete.
The move to OSX has been the most problematic for us, particularly as we have had to maintain so many applications running on the older Classic operating system. Some developers have been slow to bring out native OSX versions of their products, others have rushed through products that have earned a reputation for being bug ridden and unstable and another gently suggested we might consider moving to Windows when we enquired about its OSX migration plans.
Finally, there is the old Macintosh cost problem. Differing economies of scale make it virtually impossible for Apple to maintain price performance with Intel-based machines. If you can afford to have the latest and greatest Macintosh perhaps this is not such an issue but cutting corners to narrow the price gap with Intel PCs can be painful.
I have been using a ‘competitively priced’ G3-powered iBook to run OSX for the past year and frankly, soldiers in combat have been awarded medals for less fortitude. Performance is not so much sluggish as comatose. Sure, it’s little white enclosure looks cute and is intended to appeal to the fashion-conscious but at the age of 43, such concerns are of no interest to me. Grumpy is the new cool for my generation.
Besides I’m looking forward to the features promised by the latest version of Windows. Especially the XML-enabled workflow features aimed at group productivity which Microsoft has been telling us about and which we Mac users have only been able to experience as slideware.
There are downsides too. Mail-borne viruses will no longer be irritating but harmless chaff blocking up our mail folders. Instead they will be dangerous active content that we must treat with great caution.
Of course it could yet end in tears and we might have cause to regret our belated jumping on the industry’s largest bandwagon. But for the moment, optimism reigns. Tell you what! This time next year, all things being equal, I’ll tell you whether we made an inspired move or a ghastly mistake.
26/04/04
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