THE GEEKS DON'T GET IT

Lordy, lordy! I've just spent 24 hours with an iMac, and I have to say, this thing really is different. Where to begin? Perhaps by getting on the plane to fly to Arizona. . .

It all started about a month ago when my Uncle Buddy in Baltimore started badgering Mom in Arizona to get a computer. He's a retired postal worker and just bought himself one of those everything-included low-price PCs. He seemed quite taken with the thing (ignorance is bliss) and thought my mother owed it to herself to get with the program and see what the fuss is all about.

Of course I told her to "get a Mac!" just like I told Aunt Mary (more about her later). The model of choice was naturally the new iMac -- and of course, being my mother, she spent considerable time comparing the iMac's $1,299 price to all the "deals" trumpeted in the local paper. . .I told her the iMac was much faster, easier to use, and even looked good enough to have in her living room. That last point may have been important, I don't know. At any rate she really surprised me by signing up for one of the first iMacs at a local Tucson computer store, and on the Big Day she was there with everybody else to pick up her new iMac!

My PC programmer sister was kind enough to help her out. She sent me the momentous email message: "Mom's wired!" and said she couldn't believe how easy it was to set up. This is the same sister who recently upgraded her Windows 95 PC to Windows 98, poor girl! This was before the word had gotten out that Windows 98 is poison for older PCs, and she had to replace everything, even her hard drive. (It should be noted that both she and her husband used to work for IBM!)

But Mom still needed some help, and I hadn't been out there for a while, so a visit was in the cards. The long and short of this was that yours truly found himself at the Philadephia airport boarding the "flying sardine can" for Denver and Tucson, wearing my "Think Different" cap and lugging my PowerBook like all cool travelers do.

(Did I mention that the plane was ughh-ly? You can quote me on that! This particular 737 was a short, squatty little thing that was obviously designed to carry as many sardines as cheaply as possible. And United has chosen a dark blue and grey color scheme that hides dings, wrinkles, and hydraulic leaks. As far as I'm concerned, airliners should be white or shiny silver -- easier to spot amongst the rocks and trees!)

The flight was at least notable for its descent into "honey-mustard hell": honey-mustard salad dressing, honey-mustard pretzels, and for all I know, honey-mustard air freshener in the lavatory (when did "honey-mustard" get to be the national flavor du jour, anyway? Yechhh!!). And there was a 40-minute delay leaving Denver while the pilot waited for "maintenance clearance paperwork," which turned out to be "lost in the computer system." (Yes, that new multi-zillion dollar Denver airport is a wonder, all right.) It was only with the greatest effort that I restrained myself from greeting the pilot's announcement by hollering "Get a Mac!"

All good things (?) must come to an end, of course, and soon I was making my way through the very comfy and classy Tucson terminal, a human-scale establishment with actual art on the walls! (What a relief from Denver, where the immense halls echoed with the piteous footfalls of sweaty passengers running to make connecting flights. . .I had been lucky: my gate was only about 3/4 of a mile away and I had an hour to get there.) Yes, at last, the desert: saguaros and mountains and -- golf courses??? (Fools! The water being pumped out of the ground in this part of the world is thousands of years old, the remnants of Pleistocene rain that will never fall again. Wait another 10 or 20 years and you'll be able to buy Tucson real estate for next to nothing. . .)

Anyway, there it was: sitting on a table in Mom's sewing room sat an actual iMac! I'd been writing about them for weeks without ever actually seeing one, so this was really a treat. Wow! If you've never seen one, "wow" is what you will say when you do, take my word for it. This thing is gorgeous. It really is different from every other computer you've ever seen, and the pretty pictures in all the ads just don't capture how shiny it is! I moved it right away onto a round table in the teevee room off the kitchen. Damn! If the airplane looked half this good, I would have eaten all the honey-mustard on board and not complained. This sucker can sell itself on looks alone, and that is something that our boy Steve and the Apple industrial design team should get a standing ovation for. Yee-haw!!! (It's a little hard to get any work done, though. I keep getting up and walking around the table just to look at it. . .)

The iMac comes loaded with Microsoft's Internet Explorer as the default browser, I soon found out. "Die, browser, die!" (Would you believe that Guy Kawasaki himself once emailed to berate me for dissing Explorer? I told him he might be right, but that as far as I'm concerned, any child of Redmond is a "bad seed" and rates a mercy killing.) Navigator is there, too, though, so salvation is at hand. And after looking at the default email client, Outlook Express, the question arises: is Macworld for real? How could they ever give this thing such a high rating?? If they were coerced or chemically influenced, they must have been taking the wrong drugs: what a visually offensive piece of dreck! Like Explorer, it's saddled with tiny flags and tabs and needlessly complicated features. Mom was not going to like this one bit -- Claris Emailer to the rescue!

"Well gee, but like, uh, don't you need to be able to use the Emailer floppy disks to install the software??"

Wrong, geek-breath! Well, in a way, yes, but hear me out: before I left home I made disk images of the Emailer installation disks, then stuffed and FTP'ed them to the Applelinks server. All I had to do here in Arizona was download the files, unstuff them, and voila! In less than 30 seconds the iMac gobbled up Emailer and was ready to roll. It was so easy. . .

And that's why all the whiners are eventually going to shut up. "Boo-hoo, it doesn't have a floppy drive." Who the hell cares? My mother certainly doesn't. She wouldn't know a floppy disk if it bit her on the ass. Steve is right! When I first heard that the iMac was naked, I thought: "Cool! This is going to be fun!" Why? Because that makes it an Internet appliance, a gadget for the ungeeked masses to fall in love with. Not having an evil-sounding grindy floppy drive makes you turn to the Internet or forces you to think "Ethernet!" The quicker we all do this, the better. . ."Boo-hoo, I can't use my printer without buying an adaptor.". .get a G3 desktop, for God's sake, they're cheap as peanut butter sandwiches these days. The iMac is for everyone else!

Did I mention this thing is fast? Woo-hoo!! I keep finding myself clicking on this or that and thinking, "Hey! Nothing happened! What's wrong?" and then realizing that the web page or whatever did change, but so quickly I didn't see it! No joke. Double-clicking on this column's Tex-Edit file icon opens the document instantly. Did you hear me? "Instantly!" My beloved PowerMac 8600/200 bows its beige head in shame. . .

Meanwhile, the ole lady has some work to do. Practice, actually. She's never used a computer of any sort and hasn't spent much time on the iMac, either, but she'll be surfing soon. What I've noticed with her and with Aunt Mary is how hard it is at first for the uninitiated to do simple things like move the cursor where it's supposed to be and learning the difference between a folder and a file, simple things like that. If there's any improvement in user-friendliness to be made in the future, interface designers will have to keep this in mind. Aunt Mary is now emailing with the best of them and reading her nephew's web columns every week, though, so Mom won't be far behind.

The only problem now is that my aunt is envious of Mom's iMac and wishes she had "one of those blue jobbies." If she's reading this (and I know she will), she can relax: Apple is selling so many of these things the price will surely come down soon, and then she can sell me the PowerMac 8100 I found for her. I'll just slap in a G3 processor upgrade and take off!

It won't look the same, though. And it has a floppy drive. When people point to that and laugh, I'll say, "hey! Don't blame me -- the darn thing came with one. . ."

Bottom line: complaining about an iMac not having a floppy drive is like bitching about my Nissan 240SX not having a crank! At least the Road Rocket is a work of art, like the iMac.

(But I think this "blue jobbie" is faster!)

John H. Farr also edits the Apple Computer News for Applelinks.com), welcomes your comments. His own web site, the ZOO ZONE, is a marvel of wit and astonishing art works, despite his not having updated the darned thing in months.

Remeber, the Farr SiteDiscussion Board is now open, so have a look and leave some digital graffiti of your own!