You're not going to like me for this, starting with how I thought of something I wanted to tell you about when I was unwrapping my new iPad Pro. Maybe you've already got one yourself and this isn't a big deal, but the iPad Pro arrived early: I was in a call on my iPhone, making notes on my iPad Air, and I had checked my Apple Watch to see how long I had before I needed to get back to my iMac when it arrived. It was in that peak moment of total Apple-ness that I felt I may just have had enough.
Here was an undeniably gorgeous piece of technology in my hands, yet I looked at this iPad Pro and thought about how I'd be setting it all up, using the same iCloud again, in order to run the same apps on the same iOS. Then OS X has the same or similar apps, and while it has changed gigantically over the years, it's been sufficiently slow change that I feel like I've been running it for 15 years.
OS X for 15 years -- not to mention the Classic Mac OS for about 12 years before that -- and now iOS every single day, typically every single hour of every single day for nearly eight years. Just occasionally, enough is enough. Perhaps familiarity really does breed contempt.
It's interesting to me how I can usually accept Apple's "walled garden" very easily: I see the benefits of the company curating apps so that malware ones don't get onto my machines and into my life. I also see the benefits of having iCloud and Mail everywhere. I usually can't accept Google's near-exact equivalent: I find it frustrating how Google keeps asking me to log in and then mixes up accounts, does things I don't want, is just always in the way. I've wondered if that is just because I got to the Apple way first, and that if I'd found Google before that, I'd now be happy at their garden and annoyed at Apple's.
Both companies do the same thing in this line, they work to keep you, and they work to keep you away from their rivals. I don't think being so totally beholden to one firm as I am is a good idea, and even if Apple is no longer at the edge of death (as it seriously was just 19 years ago), it's far from guaranteed that tools I use today won't effectively vanish tomorrow.
I'm conscious of this, but I always have been. You can -- and people have -- called me an Apple fan, but I don't agree that anyone buys this stuff to look good: when I see someone carrying an iPhone 6s Plus, I might be impressed by Apple, but not by them. They just bought it. Equally, I may have the same pull to new Apple gear as anyone else, but actually, lately, not so much.
I thought perhaps I was becoming sophisticated, because I stayed with my iPhone 5 despite being out of contract and quite wanting the iPhone 6. It was only the quite wanting it that stopped me buying, plus the cost. I'd still be on that iPhone 5 if hadn't irrevocably broken. Similarly, I did race to buy the original iPad, but I kept it for three years, three months, and about 33 days before giving it to my mother. It took a few weeks after that, but I moved to an iPad Air and I won't lie to you: that has been a gigantic boon and I adore it.
I'm just saying that today, right now, I have seen iOS and OS X so much that I'm reminded of an editor I used to work for. He ran a department that used Macs, and said one day he wished he'd gone for PCs because they were different. Think about that, I can say to you (and didn't say to him because he was paying my salary), just think about it. You're bored of Macs, and you think the solution is to go back in time and buy PCs instead. Not for any perceived advantage, but just because they're different.
If he had chosen PCs before I came to work for him, it's possible I wouldn't have been exposed to Macs, and I would therefore not be writing to you now. I don't mean that because you're reading
MacNN, I mean it because I quite possibly wouldn't be a writer if I hadn't stumbled upon Macs. They let you get on with your real work, they positively encourage real work, they don't need so much tinkering and fiddling just to make them run.
I've known this for a very long time, but actually maybe it is an issue that I am now writing on
MacNN and so in the course of my work, I am examining this stuff. There is of course a great benefit to examining software and hardware, a great benefit for helping readers pick what they need, and also a great benefit to anyone doing this writing because it's fun. Yet you can get tied up in the details of something, and that risks being meaningless, damaging detail.
I don't know the statistics behind Apple's Smart Battery Cover, for instance, and I don't think that listing the milliamps would help me grasp whether that product was of any use or interest to me. However, I do know all the specs of my iPad Pro; I am conscious of how it exceeds certain MacBooks in processor speed.
Never tell me the processor speed. Only ever tell me what it does, what work I can do with this machine or that. Maybe I've gone a little way down toward the dark side, and if I don't write that this amount of RAM or that other processor speed is better than something else, maybe I have been thinking it too much.
I looked at that iPad Pro and I wanted to know immediately whether it was worth getting. The only thing you can tell immediately is the specifications, so I was immediately resting my iPad Air next to it to compare the screen sizes.
It's all fine lines: I can tell you that I am not interested in specifications, that I am only interested in my work -- but my work does include writing about these devices and these tools for a technology website. I am very keen on doing this, I think just that as good as it is for us all to find out a lot, and as good it is for me to grow and develop as a writer, it is always and forever the utility that matters, the work and not the device.
So if I do step back a moment and think less of the technology, more of the work I need and want to do, then something significant changes. It no longer matters to me that I am familiar -- to excess -- with both iOS and OS X, it only matters whether this is the way to do the work I want.
It is. More than the way to do the work I want, it is the only way. Seriously, if I want to move away from focusing on technical detail, there's no way I'm going to swap to a Windows PC. I think of that editor of mine. You spotted right away that if he had gone back into the past to do this, then when he got back to the present day he'd now be bored with PCs, and considering swapping to Macs. I think you're only partly right: he would've been bored only if he were lucky. Much more likely is that the department wouldn't have been able to do the work it had done.
So, yes, iOS is genuinely more familiar than any part of the back of my hand except the bits around the edge that I can see when I'm holding my iPhone. OS X is so familiar that I have had dreams interrupted by notifation-like banners popping up in my head.
Yet this year, I've written four books using Apple equipment, I've prepared 125 speeches and workshops that I've presented to nearly 2,500 people. I've produced radio, cut video, written drama scripts, interviewed people, and written over 500 pieces for
MacNN. Every word, every pixel of it was created on this peak Apple-ness I've got around me. No wonder iOS and OS X are familiar -- and so what if iOS and OS X are familiar to me? There isn't anything better, there isn't anything as good.
Here's the thing: I occasionally feel this stuff is over-familiar, I am sometimes weary of it, yet at usually it fills me with actual pleasure -- and I struggle to imagine ever swapping to something else.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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