A friend of mine used to drive a right hand drive Alfa Spider. It was a ridiculously impractical car, with all the niggles of old Italian engineering. He had to put his work access card on a stick and lean across the passenger seat to get into the office.
But he loved it. Where others saw niggles, he saw character. Where others saw ridiculous impracticality, he saw the coolest car on the planet. Or at lest that he ever owned.
Which is why I have always said “Buy the car you want, not the one that looks good on paper” †. The problem when you buy a car that ticks all the boxes the decision is too logical. So the pleasure or enjoyment you get out of it is minimised but all the quirks still remain. And those quirks can drive you nutty. But when you buy a car for emotional reasons (which can vary from “It’s red” to “It’s a sexy fast convertible”) you overlook those quirks or rationalise them in character, or simply don’t care.
Ever wonder why most car adverts try engage with people on an emotional rather than practical level? No one really cares about how many cup holders a car has. Note also the shift to things like fuel economy and safety as those issues have become socially and hence emotionally relevant over the recent few years.
Which brings me to Apple. Since the return of Jobs (and doesn’t that sound like biblical passage) Apple has more been engaging with people emotionally. From a design level, from a usability point of view, and from inserting itself into the social zeitgeist. Note the passion of Apple converts. It may be written off in the media as fanboys or fanatics or what not, but it’s a sign of a company building products that engage emotionally, and I can bet that Microsoft or Sony would sacrifice virgin coders to the dark forces if they could get it. Or get it back in Sony’s case. Nintendo has managed this too with the wii.
Of course their are cases where this passion can be counter productive. Some people hate a winner. Starbucks suffer from this a lot in the UK (perhaps elsewhere too). Apple gets a lot of people who resent the ‘hype’ (whatever that is) and don’t like apples products regardless of any logical reasoning. Seen often Daring Fileball as a jackass or being taken down by The Macalope
I had an argument with a friend this week on the iPhone. He “doesn’t buy into Apples hype”. Although he did go through 3 Sony MP3 players before now buying a series of iPods and an iPhone. But because he got the iPhone for logical reasons (best phone on the market) the quirks annoy him. And yeah the iPhone has it’s quirks, and bugs. But no more so than any other phone.
However because he has no emotional attachment to the iPhone (because he doesn’t like the ‘hype’), where he sees an issues with ringtones it’s Apple being crap, and not noticed that it’s the record companies or the fact he had the exact problem with every other phone. Where he sees it as annoying their is no drafts folder for texts, I see the fact that I have email that finally works, where he sees no 3G, I see the best mobile browser on the market.
We both have the same phone. But because I ‘like’ the phone and he doesn’t he sees the problems the phone has and I ignore them. I see the features the phone has, the design, and the general increase in use I have had over all my other phones. He never should have got an iPhone and I advised against it. Because it just frustrates him.
I always think you should buy products that you like.
I always think you should build products that people like. That people emotionally engage with. That people are passionate about. All the best websites do. If you want to be the best make sure you people who are passionate about what you do. If you want people to be passionate about what you do, you better be too.
† This may not be true for all people, or people who could car less about the car, as the fact it’s 4 wheels and box to get you from A to B. However most people I have found who own a car have some degree of passion for it, from Ford Fiestas to hand build Caterham Sevens. People who don’t own cars at all (and/or can’t drive) however often don’t get the car thing at all.
1. Cian
So I was a PC diehard. My fellow PC diehard bought an iBook about 5 years ago and I thought he’d either had a brain aneurysm or turned into a girl. He then said ‘no no it’s actually good’ so I bought one. And it was good.
For a while.
Then the joy of a ‘breathing’ white light and magnetic latches and the pretty box and the ‘i’m a graphic designer - look at me’ wore off and the pain of the retardedness of Finder, the lack of scroll area/2nd mouse button on the trackpad and the lack of the ability for a Mac to output DTS sound via optical and talk to any SAMBA server properly meant I just wiped the HD and installed Vista on it.
Yes - I put vista on my macbook and I love it. Jobs can eat my balls and I won’t install fricking stealthware Safari on it either.
I do have an Ipod touch which I like v. much apart from Jobs stupid insistence with Quicktime nonsense.
2. amcewen.myopenid.com
I haven’t bought into the Apple fandom yet, but can heartily agree with your car sentiments. I’ve had left-hand-drive cars for the past decade because the ones I wanted were only available that way (original BMW M3 and now a Lancia Integrale), despite having to get out every time I drove into a car park.
Now I’ve brought the Integrale back home to Turin, where the steering wheel is on the correct side, part of me misses the inconveniences :-)
3. Will
When I first bought a car for myself, aged 25, I bought a stupidly fast and fun one because I thought, “Well, why not?! Going as fast as possible is fun!” Having successfully scratched the go faster itch (and blown my engine at 160mph on one costly afternoon) after three years, I got rid of it and didn’t buy another car for three more years.
I just recently bought another car (because the horror of the tube to Acton was slowly driving me insane) and this time, I felt very little inclination to go for speed, style, showing off blah blah, and purchased entirely on practical reasons. I’m very please with the result (£4.5k ford focus automatic (!) for those that care), spending not a lot whereas if I’d gone for the show off Audi equivalent (as a friend did at the same time), I’d have spent and extra £14k (really) for a car that does hardly anything more than the focus. And has a wooden dashboard.
Still, my friend’s a first time buyer, so perhaps next time he’ll buy a reliant robin, but for now he’s just scratching that boy racer itch…
PS Cian - your comment cracked me up.
4. Adrian
Cian,
I’ve found with 10.5, it’s easier to connect to the SAMBA NAS box in the office with OSX than either Vista or XP.
The track pad has both scroll and right click. You just use two fingers.
And that is a good example. I find the scroll pad method much easier on a mac. It’s easier to target (cf. Fitts law) than trying to hit the edge of a pad on PCs. It’s a much more elegant solution. (Also I fail to see how installing Vista gives you a second click)
Quicktime powers iTunes encoding. You can’t have one without the other. It’s like having a Zune without Windows Media Player.
But if we look at the finder for example. Sure it’s not great, but it’s not as bad as it was. But I’ve used Vista in the office and have found it such an obtuse and painful and user unfriendly OS. I’d happily use a ‘lame’ finder than be stuck in the Vista UI which after 2 mins was driving me batty. Hell quicklook is worth the cover price alone.
5. cian
sev - you are right. I do enjoy the two finger scroll action but now I enjoy it in Vista rather than OSX. My main issue is that I’m much much faster in Windows for actual multitasking work than a Mac despite my best efforts (nearly 4 years on OSX and about 15-20 on windows). It’s just a bit spazzy - expose is just a hack to try and find the window you were working on but now is hidden under a pile of windows and confusion about which app am I in and how can I tab through windows within an app and where am i and who am i talking to and is Jobs really just an evil robot created by Microsoft to destroy us all?
6. Adrian
I was much faster in windows for ages after the change. But since going pure mac, I can barely do anything any more, much less in vista which is l find highly frustrating.
Some of this is muscle memory. Being used to something. I had the same problems going from Nokia to SonyE (although not from SonyE to iPhone).
And some of it is pure emotional engagement. You’re faster on the platform you think you enjoy using more.
Where you see confusion, I now see productivity. Mac and Windows have different paradigms, and it’s always going to be easier to work in a paradigm you understand. An easy test of this is watching people surf the web on a PC in full screen mode in massive monitors. No one does this on a mac, because the UI engagement paradigms are different.
Overall I’m finding the Mac easier and easier to use. It’s not without it’s faults and I could point out far more of them than a PC user. But because I enjoy using my Mac now and because PC frustrates me, it’s not surprise which platform I use quicker.
On the plus side I get OS updates annually on a Mac, rather than every 7 years …
7. Matt
“how can I tab through windows within an app”
With Cmd-‘, obv. Sheesh.
I use both a Mac and a PC every single day. The Pc has XP, the Mac has OSX and Vista. OSX wins (by a MILE), every single time.
8. cian
maybe I just don’t get why it’s better. I only liked it for ‘quicksilver’ and vista kinda has that when you hit the windows key and start typing. Everything else is too fisherprice/ here’s a computer for my mum who keeps deleting her photos and writes ‘click’ instead of right clicking and ooh it’s shiny shiny happy happy.
Though i’m tempted to switch back because of
http://www.osxbmc.com/
and then I installed it and my hdrips streamed from my windows server via samba as quickly as peanut butter through a brick.
9. Adrian
See like I said, Some people aren’t the right consumer for the product.
Where you see fisher price, I see ease of use. I see the complete inverse on vista (looks more fisher price and harder to use).
You’re not the right consumer market for an Apple. Like my friend with the iPhone above, might be best if you didn’t buy a product that you weren’t going to like, regardless of the reasons you may not like it.
10. cian
you’re probably right. It’s like being straight and then being gay for a bit and then realising it wasn’t really for you because it didn’t really work in the way you expected or were used to and whatever you tried ended up all a bit wrong.
Not that I did this.
Though I do like my iPod touch so I’m probably about a 1 on the Apple Fanboy Kinsey Scale.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinsey_scale +
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FanboyCian’s love affair with his iPod touch.
11. Jonny
So where on the Kinsey scale would someone who was “straight and then being gay for a bit and then realising it wasn’t really for you because it didn’t really work in the way you expected or were used to and whatever you tried ended up all a bit wrong” be? Discuss.
12. Cian
That’s probably a 4.
Predominantly Windows, but more than incidentally Mac.
Sevitz and Jobs are like the San Fran rainbow disco assless chaps marriage in the Market Street branch of Abercrombie level on the Kinsey scale; “Exclusively Mac”.
Also the headline ‘Passsionate about inanimate objects’ is scaring me now. I might stop commenting much to The Sev’s relief.