By: Kelsey Brookes

Haven't we given enough in the fight to use the platform of our choice?

I love using Macintosh. I'm vocal at my place of work, I'm vocal at home, I'm vocal to my friends and even sometimes on the street. I spread the word, fight the good fight, and never back down from a reasoned, logical, yet passionate debate about the relative merits of the Macintosh over the Wintel hegemony. I don't deride people for their choice of platform, or even try to get them to change, but it's important to correct ignorance about the Mac, because the public perception is what counts.

If someone is thinking about buying a machine, and a less-than-well informed friend says "ugh" to the Mac through ignorance, the battle for that user is as good as lost. However, if the friend says "Well, you know that iMac looks pretty damn good," despite the fact that he/she has a Wintel machine, then you have a potential user who won't discount the Mac out of hand.

The point is that we don't need, or even want, everyone to use Macintosh computers. (Well, I do, but apparently we need "competition" to thrive, or something.) What we need is for the public perception of Apple to be a dynamic industry leader with a great product. Not an "alternative" to Windows, but at least an equal partner, something that someone really has to research extensively before choosing which platform to buy, since both offer their respective benefits.

Even if this were the case, and I have no doubt whatsoever that Apple is capable of making this a reality, there is one critical area in which Apple is still a loser in the battle for the consumer dollar - price. Don't get me wrong, I buy Macs, and will for the foreseeable future. I never want to use a Microsoft product ever again. But knowing the Mac platform like the back of my hand, I know it's worth paying that little extra to get the transcendent computing experience that is working on a Mac.

Everyman Joe Bloggs Does not.

You can bandy terms like "Total Cost of Ownership" and "Price/Performance Ratio Superiority" around till the second coming, but Mr J. will quickly see that while the iMac is a great product at a great price, anything else he wants is gonna cost him.

And even the iMac may not be immune to the sort of price-fixing that seems to be de riguer in the Mac market, where resellers take advantage of the fact Mac users don't have the choice to go elsewhere and get a better deal.

The Cyborg Stick - But will we pay more for the Mac USB drivers?

The best example of this lies with the market for PCI 3D accelerator cards. When PCI was first introduced on the Mac, I rejoiced in the mistaken belief that this would mean that all those great cards for the PC would be but a custom-driver away from the Mac. We all know now that's just not the case. The majority of PCI cards have never had drivers written for Mac use, and that's not a bad thing - we don't need Soundblaster cards, or Matrox Millennium video cards. These things are built into the Mac, as well as ethernet and SCSI, which usually need PCI slots on a Wintel machine. However, there are professional Audio and Graphics cards available for PCs at a fraction of the cost of Mac cards. Similarly, until now, Mac gamers have had no recourse but to buy re-badged Voodoo or 3Dfx cards from a third-party vendor who has written the drivers for the Mac - and charged for it. In some cases, customers were forced to hand over $250 for a 3D accelerator card that cost only $99 on the Wintel platform. That's $150 for a set of drivers. If that's not closed-market exploitation, I don't know what is.

So imagine my surprise when I find that there are bootleg copies of these drivers floating around on the net that are apparently better than the drivers shipping with the "Mac" cards. These drivers are supposedly compatible with a wider array of Voodoo cards than any boxed "Mac" 3D card. Mac users everywhere rejoice right?

Wrong.

At Accelerate Your Mac there is an article that derides the people using these drivers as traitors to the Mac platform, and urges all Mac users considering buying a 3D card to do the right thing and buy the "genuine" Mac article; pay the extra dosh and be happy that you're supporting the Mac industry.

As I said at the beginning - Haven't we done enough?

We bought the platform despite it's public perception. We have to defend our choice to friends associates and random morons on buses, we have to deal with our games coming years late, or not at all and we have to deal with the limited number of places we can turn to to buy Apple products in the first place. We already paid great, whopping amounts of cash for our machines, (and don't tell me again about my TCO being lower, economic rationalization only goes so far when you're gutting your wallet for that first CPU) should we really have to pay so much more for our peripherals when and if they come out for the Mac? Should we willing allow ourselves to be ripped off, just so we can keep another dodgy third-party company running?

I don't think so.

PCI cards were supposed to level the price-playing field between Macs and PCs - Will USB also fail to live up to it's promise?

Here's my suggestion: One of the main arguments about buying the PC-Branded cards is that the vendor doesn't know that it's being bought for a Mac. That's important. I don't advocate shelling out our hard-earned to support companies taking advantage of our love of Macintosh. I do however believe, that as with hybrid-CDs, we should be letting the manufacturer know that we're Mac users. Fill out those registrations people! Send 'em in, covered in highlighters. Send them email, and ask for confirmation of your registration - and while you've got them talking, make sure they know you're a Mac user.

That's a better solution, I think. You see, if we keep letting companies rip us off, they'll keep on doing it. Look at Microsoft.

But we better do it soon. USB has been touted as the great leveler of the playing field between Mac and PC peripherals. The deal is this:

Sound familiar?

The fight for the consumer dollar will be fought on this field. The cheap CPU is already here, but it's not much good if you have to break the bank to get the rest of the kit necessary to bring our machines up to spec with our brothers and sisters on the dark side.

Be careful, we've given enough in the fight to use the platform of our choice.

UPDATE 20/11/98

Soon after the publishing of this article, I was contacted by reader Jeff Lewis, who tried to add a USB card to his 7200, so he could begin the migration to USB peripherals while saving for a new machine in the future. I've re-printed the mail below - it's disturbingly prophetic, considering I was unaware of this at the time of writing the original article. The following email is reprinted with the permission of Jeff Lewis:

I recently purchased a Belkin USB 2 Port PCI card. It claims to be 100% plug and play with Windows 98 and MacOS 8.5., thinking 'ok - if I get this I can stick it in my old 7200 and over the next year, while I'm saving up for a G3 (or G4 - whatever) I can buy replacement peripherals to move from SCSI to USB where possible. These cards are startlingly inexpensive - just CDN$50.

Ok, I get it home, plug it into my Mac and attach a USB mouse. Doesn't work. Maybe MacOS 8.5 only installs USB drivers if it detects a USB host adaptor. Reinstall MacOS onto a spare partition. Reboot. Nothing. Hrmmmm....

I test the mouse - it works on a PC. I test the card - it also works just fine on a PC running Win98 (for once, plug and play actually works as advertised). I download the MacOS USB DDK, install the drivers. Still doesn't work. The USB sniffer can see the card and the mouse, but the mouse driver doesn't seem to relay the mouse information correctly.

I call Belkin. They inform me that Apple pulled USB support for systems without internal USB (read non-iMacs) at the last moment. Oh great.

If you go checking for a Mac PCI USB host now, they've all been pulled except for one company which doesn't offer drivers either, so I'm willing to bet it's not going to work. If Apple wants USB to be the 'next great thing' - it has to support existing systems too, unless it expects USB peripheral makes to do it all for the iMac.

Jeff.

Hmmmm food for thought, no?

Kelsey Brookes works full time at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, as The MuTech Guy. Or rather, the Technical Coordinator for Music & Media. He also teaches Sound for the Internet and Sound for Multimedia at The Computer Graphics College in Sydney, as well as writing contempory music, practicing Opera and designing websites.

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February 09, 2010