The Big Think

Time Magazine reports on the new Apple iPhone:

Apple’s new iPhone could do to the cell phone market what the iPod did to the portable music player market: crush it pitilessly beneath the weight of its own superiority…

…To Jobs’s perfectionist eyes, phones are broken. Jobs likes things that are broken. It means he can make something that isn’t and sell it to you for a premium price…

…When our tools don’t work, we tend to blame ourselves, for being too stupid or not reading the manual or having too-fat fingers. “I think there’s almost a belligerence—people are frustrated with their manufactured environment,” says Ive. “We tend to assume the problem is with us, and not with the products we’re trying to use.” In other words, when our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole.

This last paragraph sums up why so many people love Apple products. It’s not the cool-aid, or the famed Reality Distortion Field. It’s the fact that, to a far greater extent than any other computer company (or personal electronics manufacturer, for that matter) Apple products just work. Intuitively, painlessly, seamlessly, and well. And that’s why so many people are switching.

5-year-old Mac OS X compared to the new Windows Vista. Quotes:

Hidden behind all of this hoopla, however, is the fact that as much of an improvement Vista is over XP, its main competitor, Mac OS X, still stacks up really well — and even tops Vista in several important areas…

Windows is very eager to tell you what’s going on. Constantly. Plug something in, and you get a message. Unplug something and you get a message. If you’re on a network that’s having problems staying up, you’ll get tons of messages telling you this. It’s rather like dealing with an overexcited Boy Scout…who has a lifetime supply of chocolate-covered espresso beans…

To put it simply, you can work on a Mac for hours, days even, and only minimally need to directly use the OS. With Vista? The OS demands your attention, constantly…

I’ve yet to see anything in Vista that blows away the Mac OS, even a version of the Mac OS that’s over a year old. Microsoft still can’t manage to make something simple and easy to use. Vista reeks of committee and design by massive consensus, while OS X shines from an intense focus on doing things in a simple, clear fashion and design for the user, not the programmer.

If you’ve never given the Mac a chance, why not? I have many, many friends (from musicians to quantum physicists to computer geeks) who have made the jump to Mac and, without exception, they are all glad they did. Come on…. everybody’s doing it.