| Friday, May 16, 2003 |
17:17 - Apple For the Neocons
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Mockery of Apple is not a new thing. Ever since 1984, the Mac has been made fun of; first for its toylike GUI in a world of command-prompts; then, after Windows killed that comparison, for the Mac's supposed "ease of use" advantage (only wussies used Macs); then, once Windows 95 came along, for the Mac's instability; then, once Mac OS X came along, for the Mac's bright candy colors; then, once every PC in the world adopted iMac translucency, for the Mac's slowness and high price and lack of games and so on. There's always something. And these criticisms are never constructive in nature, but rather a defense-- a means by which Windows users can assure themselves that Windows is the only reasonable solution for rational computer users. Windows is what they have, and what they know; they may not like it much per se, but as long as the Mac is an "other" that they can make fun of, it isn't something that they have to concern themselves with or consider as a viable alternative.
And that's fine, to a certain extent. There's certainly nothing wrong with an acceptance of a reality in which Windows is the only cost-effective solution. Workplace PCs are Windows these days, outside a few select industries; there's certainly plenty to be said for Den Beste's "network effect" observations. When everyone around you uses Windows, then using Windows is all benefit and very little hardship-- or at least only hardships that can be easily overcome.
Being a Mac user has necessarily, then, been something of an elitist position. Mac users have tended to be those who don't mind giving up a little bit of that network-effect benefit for the sake of something they feel is better, something they believe in. The "Think Different" campaign tried to capitalize on that, by painting Mac users as being in the same camp as those movers and shakers in history who have changed world events, thinking beyond the societal norm; what's seldom noticed about the figures showcased in the Think Different ads is not that the figures were all great achievers, but that they all had to give something up in order to achieve what they did. Whether inventors or social revolutionaries or political thinkers, they all had to sacrifice the comfort of a normal, unremarkable life in order to make their dreams reality. I don't think Apple was blind to this; they realize that Mac users are giving something up by sticking to their Macs. But with that tacit acknowledgment is the assurance that what they're buying with their rejection of what 95% of the world uses is going to be worth it. Most Mac users would tend to agree that it is.
But that's sort of a tired observation by now. Appealing to idealism forms a strong core customer base, but it alienates a lot more people than it beckons. The idealists of the world-- and even those who merely wish to buy into the cult of idealism-- aren't a large enough percentage of the computing world to justify a growing market share. So Apple has had to shift gears lately, putting its weight behind the Switch campaign, trying to appeal to frustrated Everymen rather than getting everyone to see themselves as John Lennons and Martin Luther Kings. It's debatable whether the new campaign is working, or whether it's doing more good than harm; but it's certainly a more extensible meme than the exclusionary Think Different one, and has enabled Apple to launch a lot more interesting stuff-- stuff that's targeted at those Everymen rather than at those who can see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower and infinity in the curve of a one-button mouse. iPhoto and 99-cent songs will sell Macs; it's not clear how many more converts are to be had on the basis of pure elegance and dreams.
What's more interesting to me, however, is a different perspective: the behavior of Apple as a company. It seems to me that Apple has acquitted itself admirably over the years, and in such a way that it has earned my respect, more so than any ad campaign could do. Their actions are what appeal to me and what make me defend the company. And what's more, I think these actions are right in line with what the populists and free-marketers and libertarians and freedom-seekers in the world would want from a company in Apple's position.
Apple is decidedly at a disadvantage in the computer market; they're having to scramble just to keep in the public eye and to maintain visibility as a viable brand. But they've never once played the victim card.
That right there earns them huge points with me, and (I should think) with a lot of other people out there.
Apple has never painted itself as an innocent victim of evil monopolies. The closest it's ever come to that was the GUI lawsuit back in the 80s, when they tried to claim what was rightly theirs, and backed off under threat and extortion. Since then, Apple has never made any press releases demanding federal action against Microsoft; they've never joined in class-action antitrust suits; they've never made excuses for their declining market share. One can criticize Steve Jobs for painting a deceptively rosy picture of Apple's balance sheet on occasion, when it comes time to court Wall Street, or for getting more excited about his products than reason should allow; but one thing he's never done is to stand on stage and tell the audience in steely frankness that Apple is headed straight for the dumper, and who is to blame but Microsoft! It's all their fault, not ours! ...Nope; that hasn't happened. Jobs has been known to shrug off financial difficulties with a smirk and a sigh, or to respond to snarky press comments with a covert but unmistakable gesture; but he's never claimed that the responsibility for fixing Apple's failures rest on anyone's shoulders but Apple's.
Owning up to one's responsibilities is one of those big American traits, those things that are looked at with such pride by patriotic conservatives. Other such traits include fighting for one's own defense, and responding to adversity by committing even harder to excellence. What's the fundamental precept of market economics? That competition will bring out the best in the products of the competing companies. Apple is an underdog in every sense of the word-- and historically speaking, they should be lagging behind in their products every bit as much as they are in their market share. They should be like Amiga in 1990, or IBM's OS/2 unit in 1995-- not bringing out any new products, but stroking their loyal fan base with empty promises of glory to come and excuses for the current sad state of affairs, blaming them on oppression and occupation (sound familiar?). But Apple isn't doing that. They never make promises. They never even (intentionally) let rumors get out about upcoming products. They paint no pictures of glorious futures or of the inevitable justice to be wrought against the unjust monopolies that hold them down in the mud. Instead, they do something that makes my capitalistic little heart fill with blood: they excel. They knuckle down, roll up their sleeves, and develop products that make headlines. With their paltry few thousand employees and their one meager campus, they've been creating products that rock the world, achieving more with less resources than Microsoft or Dell do with their armies of genii all plugged into their efficient cubicle-matrices and warrens of thought. Apple keeps outdoing them, producing objects of lust that are either best-of-breed or serious contenders in every field that they enter. iTunes and iPhoto and iMovie and iDVD are perfect examples of software that Apple's done better than the whole massive rest of the computer industry, and for what? Just its small cadre of loyalists. These applications aren't just proprietary also-rans, providing basic functionality to the ghetto, a token effort to parrot some industry standard; they're leading the industry. AirPort. LCD monitors. Case design. The iPod. These are all industry-leading examples of their genres, the things that everybody else copies, and they all come from this one tiny company. iSync and Final Cut Pro and Safari are more examples of such projects, as is Mac OS X itself. What company in history has been able to pull off a hail-Mary play like OS X and make it so well respected, so well polished and supported, in so little time? And on top of that, they've written AppleScriptability into everything, open-standards connectivity (XML, SOAP, etc), and hundreds of little pieces of overachiever eye-candy like Quartz that no beleaguered underdog company in its right mind would commit itself to delivering. Apple's creating its own destiny and ensuring its own future, by acting like that future is already granted them.
One thing that has always characterized Americans is their insistence upon being the masters of their own destiny-- of being willing to fight and die for the sake of that right, whether it means giving up convenience, social acceptance, or privilege. Those people who have focused their attention on the American political landscape in the days since 9/11, or who have made it their study for far longer, understand the nature of that struggle and how central it is to the American spirit. Call it rugged individualism, call it entrepreneurship, call it manifest destiny, call it what you will-- the defining right that we hold most dear is that of holding our destiny in our own hands. What galls the opponents of such an idea is that it denies pleasing fantasies-- even if a fictition, to borrow a Michael Moore-ism, is better than reality, the conservatives will reject it in favor of a hell that they know is real. There's a sharp divide there, one that can be illustrated quite well by the dystopia of The Matrix: do the humans prefer to live in the blissful fantasy of the simulation, even though it's not real-- or do they rebel against it, preferring to dwell in the hellish Real World, just because they know it's the real thing? The conservative American ideal would tend to go for the latter. And Captain Steve puts it more interestingly still:
More to my liking are the lizards here. If you look closely enough, you see them everywhere. In between our dorm buildings are shaded pavilions where we sit on cool evenings. They're wooden decks with canvas covers . Wire-mesh fly traps are bolted to the decks, and most are occupied by the fattest little lizards I've ever seen. Like the flies, they found their way into the trap and can't get out. They are pale pinkish yellow - the color of the sand, and they appear perfectly happy to have given up their freedom for a never-ending supply of food. I think they must be democrats.
Where would you say Apple fits into this scheme? I would argue that Mac users know that the world they're buying into is no paradise; they know it's full of hardships and sacrifice and a distinct lack of the best new MMORPGs. And yet they buy into it anyway. Why? Because they know what computing is like, can be like, with the right software and the right hardware and the right infrastructure in place and the right dream directing it all. I would argue that a Mac user is like a person who has learned first-hand the value of the Second Amendment, who has internalized the profound meaning of the right and the mandate to defend oneself with deadly force, either having experienced the need for it first-hand, or having reached that conclusion through study of history. It's like such a person then being faced with the threat of having that power taken away from him, legislated away, obsoleted away, assimilated away. Having known that level of power and freedom and then losing it is far worse than never knowing it at all.
Mac users are the lizards who choose to have to hunt for their food, because they know it's better than living in a fly trap.
That's why it's so hard for so many of us not to stand by Apple, even in the face of the most compelling of arguments in favor of its downfall. It's for the same reason that the NRA is made all the more steadfast, the more gun-control laws get passed: you can have my Mac when you pry it from my cold, dead hands, is how the refrain goes, isn't it? It's not just a chunk of metal and plastic, it's a symbol of something better, something that we'd better enjoy while we have it. And while the company making it possible is still turning out miracle after miracle, against all the odds and punditry, fulfilling the mandate of capitalist economics beyond anybody's reasonable expectation-- who can sniff callously that they may as well just give up, cash in, bow out?
America doesn't like whiners or professional victims; that's at the core of what our current war is all about. We refuse to be victims of terrorism. We refuse to be taken in by others' claims of victimization. We believe in hard work as the foundation for the creation of value, hard work and ingenuity and perseverance. We believe in earning respect. The ideology against which we're fighting is the ideology of entitlements, of victimization, of quotas and restitution and making sure nobody gets offended by anything-- respect enforced by law. And it seems to me that Apple has managed to do quite well without having to succumb to the temptation to whine. Sure, some of its user community might rail pointlessly against the Microsoft Hegemony; I've done that myself in the past. But I'm starting to think that that does no good at all, because Apple itself doesn't support that tactic. The company is speaking with its deeds. While Microsoft flails about trying to simultaneously entrench its credibility in business and to extend its brand into totally bizarre areas (apparently the iLoo story was not a hoax after all-- Microsoft has retracted its retraction), Apple keeps turning the crank and refreshing its offerings, and creating new and genuinely useful products. Where others theorize, Apple delivers. Today it's the iTunes Music Store, the first coherent answer to the years-old debate over the record companies' role in the digital age; before that, it was iTools/.Mac, while .NET is still mostly vapor; before that, it was wireless networking where they blazed ahead, and integrated DVD authoring, and flat-screen monitors, and video editing, and a long litany of such fields where they were the first to stake a claim-- and in many cases, remain the reference for it. They're the very model of the industrious, uncomplaining tinkerer in his lab, emerging-- you never know when-- with the airplane, the movie projector, the automobile, the transistor, the moon shot. Time was that we celebrated such figures.
It may be foolhardy to back Apple, when all the economic indicators state that they're doomed. It may well be more practical to say "Aw, to hell with 'em; they gave it a try, they contributed some good stuff, but their time is over. Let it go." But there's an ideal that Apple embodies, and I'm not just talking about the ideal of Proper UI Design or of Thinking Different or of Sticking It To The Man. I'm talking about the ideal of braving the storm, of playing the odds, of defying fate for decades upon decades and succeeding where so many others have failed. It's about learning from one's mistakes, of owning up to one's shortcomings, of solving problems and making things better. It's about the American Dream, really, and notwithstanding whether Al Gore is more popular with Apple's shareholders than even Jobs is, the behavior of the company demonstrates a performance that ought to bring a tear to the eye of any adherent to the thoughts of the Adam Smiths and Thomas Jeffersons of the world, indeed to the very eyes of the Founding Fathers and their revolutionary contemporaries who saw clearly what it was they were creating: this is what it's all about.
Who knows what's around the corner for Apple? Maybe prosperity, maybe death. I know that Morpheus' echoing speech in Zion ("We're still here!") applies, however; if we're determined to paint Apple as an underground rebel, with its own prophet exhorting the faithful from on stage, well-- he's either Morpheus or bin Laden. Some might not see a difference, but I do. It's their actions that define their worth, and Apple's actions are something to be proud of.
NOTE: IANA-Economist, but it should hardly need to be pointed out that monopolies belie market economics; they might become monopolies through superiority in competition or through other methods, but once they have reached monopoly status (or form a cartel), they no longer have the incentive of competition to push them to improve their products. Because improving their products costs money and is no longer necessary for their survival, they don't do it. That's why it's consistent for free-marketers to oppose monopolies. Even if a monopoly is the culmination of a company excelling in the free-market game, as soon as it's a monopoly it ceases to play by the free market's rules and plays only by its own, and should be acted against.
I should hope that intelligent fiscal conservatives would recognize this as well-- that it's not in their own interest to allow monopolies to run unchecked. The best expression of capitalism at work is when there are multiple viable competitors in a market, not when one of them has won.
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