Being a cradle Catholic, I have always regarded the enthusiasm of converts with amused suspicion. Many of them seem to lack the elasticity and good humor ingredient in that most important statement of Genesis: God made the world and saw it was good.
In the last few months, however, I think I have experienced some of that fervor that makes makes converts such an amusing if often exasperating spectacle for the rest of us. My minor metanoia regarded technology, not ontology. For years I had been a stalwart partisan of the PC. I regarded the whole world of Apple computers with disdain. Looking back on it now, I see that the first step was the irretrievable one: I traded in my Blackberry for an iPhone. From there, it was but a short step to an iMac, then a MacBook Pro, Apple TV and, of course, an iPad.
I always regarded the Kindle reading device as an expensive paperweight. My office at Encounter Books owns one but no one actually uses it. We’ve downloaded a few books just to see if they exist — they do — but we’ve generally been disappointed by how they look.
Reading books on the iPad is something else again. Aesthetically, typographically, there is still some way to go — the fact that (as far as I know) you cannot specify which fonts a given book will display is a big liability in my view. But leaving that to one side, books look terrific in iBooks, the iPad reader of choice. (But Kindle users do not despair: the books you bought from Amazon look great on the Kindle app for the iPad.) Which brings me to the denouement of this little tale: as of just a week or two ago, a whole suite of Encounter Books are available for the iPad through iBooks (and Kindle). Included in the the first big batch of titles is my book The Rape of the Masters. Any readers interested in “how politics sabotages art”? Of course there are! Now you can download and read it on your iPad. Three cheers for technology!
I’m a long time user of Macs— started with an SE, and a recent convert to Catholicism. I used to be an Episcopalian, who have lost their collective mind and sense of decency.
i was born incredulous. as such, i cannot be sure if i ever will convert to credulity.
re: “I traded in my Blackberry for an iPhone.”
i cannot fathom why someone would trade in a cellphone connected to the nation’s best wireless carrier for one currently locked into the worst. (but then, i couldn’t fathom how the mainstream media could possibly believe that then-candidate Barack Obama had the qualifications to conduct foreign policy.)
i had an assistant who was quite proficient with a PC, but who insisted i purchase her something called a Mac mini. i complied. subsequently, at a moment when it had ‘hung’ while trying to run a CD, i turned off the power supply to remove the CD manually. as it turned out, the Mac mini is so ‘cleverly’ designed that CDs cannot be removed with the power off (unlike the case with any PC). a CD can’t be removed unless the Mac mini is powered up, but it won’t boot-up if there is already a CD inside.
so, i took the unit to the Apple store in SoHo. there i was directed to a very long line of people who were waiting to make an appointment for their Apple product to be repaired at some future time. (thank goodness Mac’s don’t need repairs, or the line would have snaked around the block.) before turning around and walking out the door, i noted that aside from myself and an elderly gentleman hobbling about on a cane, it seemed as if no one else in the crowded store had yet reached the age of 30. since Apple computers have been around well more than 25 years, it appeared that with the passage of time, most of the early adopters eventually switched to PCs.
i then went back home to Greenpoint, and took the Mac mini to a Staples store across the street. the techie there informed me that they only work on PCs. i explained that i was haplessly at the mercy of my Mac-obsessed assistant, and asked him if he himself knew any such individuals. he admitted that he did, and in a spirit of compassion obtained his manager’s permission to resolve the problem (which he soon did).
for your consideration, this is a thread started by a convert who went in the other direction: http://www.cinema5d.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=3266
the upshot: nowadays with the interchangeability of internal parts, a Mac *IS* a PC — in a better looking case, with a user interface preferred by certain people much hipper than i, and a much higher price tag.
i am thankful that Apple is around though. without it, Windows would be much worse than it is.
I’m just beginning the confusing decision of whether to move my work to ebook (I’m still proud of myself for learning how to e-mail), so thanks for this enlightening post. The take-away is that ipad is better than Kindle?
M.A.C.I.N.T.O.S.H
Most
Applications
Crash,
If
Not
The
Operating
System
Hangs
In all seriousness though, Macs are not bad computers per-se. My objection to them has always hinged upon their proprietary nature. As a computer scientist, I’ve no need for a point-and-drool interface. What I do need is maximum flexibility, compatibility, speed, and easy replacement of component parts for the minimum price. I build systems, I don’t buy them. Apple has, at least since the end of the Apple II era, always worked to make their systems expensive, incompatible, and difficult to get parts for. Every time I’ve ever been told that they had turned over a new leaf in this regard it has turned out to be untrue. I’ve heard similar stories about the left, and we all know how that invariably turns out. I simply avoid their products on principle alone.
But the great thing about a free society is that you don’t have to.
I have to second a point made by Lee. Apple’s products are much more expensive than their PC competitors. Why are people so willing to part with so much money just to part of the “cool kids” club?
People buy Macs because you’re not always fighting with them. Reviews of Windows 7 says it’s the best Windows–because it’s the most Mac-like.
I admit to being an Apple fanboi, but I have a degree in computer science, admittedly from the 70s, which let me make informed decisions about the engines under the hoods of the two competing computers, and I chose the Mac. It was the right decision because I couldn’t have run my business with the sorry state of the PC in 1991.
I admit that the cult of Apple is irritating. I buy the products, they don’t buy me. But the problems that I hear of from PC users just don’t exist, and I have not had a SINGLE MAC, and I have eight in my business, and have bought 35 in 23 years, that had to go to a dealer for a stuck CD. I believe that there’s a key sequence to press while booting which ejects it but since I’ve not needed it I’m not sure if it still exists.
And Roger, you’re right that the Kindle on the iPad looks a hell of a lot better than on the Kindle, and you can get a IKindle app for your iPhone which will sync your iPad, Mac, iPhone and Kindle reading, if you are so interested.
Same experience as Roger and am a cradle Catholic as well. I’d like to endorse reading ebooks on the Touch. . . much more powerful and less expensive than the kindle. I looked for the kindle version of Roger’s book four days after this piece was published and didn’t find it. Does providing ebooks for the iPad not convert to an ebook on Amazon? After 20 years with Microsoft (I’m an old IBM SE) the cost of removing viruses is what drove me to Apple. . . the difference in the cost was made up in six months of having them cleaned off the Dell. The more I use the Apple, the more I appreciate it and one can actually get people for support: people with American accents rather than Indian. Pleasant people.
Converts.. Websters definition is a metamorphose… in other words an actual physical change which would have to take place neurologically. If you are over the age of 30 you are not a “digital native” therefore your conversion will be painful.
Well, then my conversion to Catholicism last year was a metamorphosis, but only a mental/spiritual change, making the dictionary definition not entirely accurate. Best thing I’ve EVAH done.
What, did the comments in this thread just beam in from 1997 or something?
1) If you boot up and hold the eject key down, the CD should come out. If not, the world is full of people who work on Macs, you don’t need the (admittedly smug and pretentious) Genius Bar etc.
2) Macs stopped crashing more than PCs when they stopped being, well, Macs and become Next computers.
3) Try and spec out two genuinely comparable machines and the price differential basically vanishes and is sometimes to Mac’s advantage. The fact that a Dell catalog shows off with its lowest-priced, lowest-configured model and Macs tend to be fairly high-end models doesn’t make that the logical comparison, any more than the cheapest Toyota tells you whether you should buy a Lexus or a BMW.
4) The open system argument doesn’t apply to most people– they want the program that works, not to write their own– but hey, if it works for you, PCs are still clinging to a bare 90% of the market or so, so chill out already.
This has been my only Mac vs. Pc comment for 2010. Good to hear about Encounter Books being on iPad etc.