Like it or not, Apple is going back to the Mac. The regular Mac user, fan, fanboy – whatever you’d like to call someone who showed a deep affection to Apple’s desktop operating system for the past decade – should like the fact that Steve Jobs confirmed Apple is still committed to making the best personal computers, based on OS X. The same regular Mac user, though, is immensely scared by the concept underlying Jobs’ statements: Apple is going back to the Mac, taking the good things learned in 3 years of iOS development with them. OS X turned into iPhone OS. iPhone OS became iOS for iPhone and iPad. Now, everything’s going back to where it all started: the Mac.
We have heard this story before. In fact, we all commented on Apple’s October 20th event by saying that, with the right approach, the Mac App Store and some iOS elements coming to the Mac might be the best thing that ever happened to the platform in years.
As weeks passed and developers started playing around with the idea of “iOS hooking up with OS X”, however, the regular Mac user, initially tricked by Jobs to think that the whole transition would be joyful and painless, started having doubts. Doubts and questions about what sounded as a great promise of innovation at first.
And rightfully so: in these past weeks the regular Mac user has seen things he didn’t think would ever land on its beloved OS X machine five years ago. The Mac App Store purchase system and guidelines, the iOS-inspired scrollbars, the revamped UI of iLife ‘11, Reeder for Mac, the Osfoora for Mac sneak peek. The past four weeks must have been terrible for the regular Mac user. I totally understand his fears, doubts, observations. But I don’t support him.
The general assumption is that Apple is turning OS X into a desktop variation of iOS. That is simply not true. The thin line that marks the difference between “turning into” and “getting inspired by to improve” lies between the success of iOS as a platform and the historical nature of the Mac. Apple won’t kill the filesytem on the Mac, won’t drop the Terminal and won’t force you to buy apps exclusively from the Mac App Store. At least not in the next two years. But you can stay assured they’re doing everything they can to make OS X a better, easier to use for the average user, faster, more intuitive operating system by giving less importance and visibility to features and interface schemes that shed light on the decade-long history of the Mac.
The Mac’s history serves a double functionality: it keeps the nerd happy and it frustrates the new user who bought an iPad and decided to give a shot to Apple’s computers, too. “Why can’t I install Mac apps from the App Store? What’s the Finder? Why is AirPort so difficult to configure?” Can you hear it? That’s the sound of frustration. Like it or not, that’s happening every single day, every minute in thousands of new Mac users’ houses. It happens in my own home every week when some friend of mine comes around and asks me why, for God’s sake, he doesn’t know how to use the Dock menu.
Yes, we geeks sometimes call these people, these users, “stupid” and “n00bs”. To us, they look like unexperienced young men trying to learn how to write with the same pen they’ve been holding in their hands for years. They just didn’t know how to do complex writing with that pen.
Did iOS create a new category of non-geek users? It sure did. Do we have the right to ignore this category and hope that Apple will never change the Mac because, heck, we got there first? We do not.
We, as geeks and long-time Mac users, get mad at Silvio Rizzi because he didn’t respect the Fitts’ law and went for an iPad-like approach in Reeder for Mac. We condemn the hypothesis of a Finder-less Mac. We also make fun – yet we don’t admit it – of those new users who buy a new Mac and expect it to work like an iPad. We are the ones who have a voice in this market, after all. We are the ones who blog and tweet about Reeder and share screenshots pointing to obvious UI inconsistencies. But guess what, we’re not the ones who generate Apple’s revenue. That stupid friend of yours who wanted to install Angry Birds on her new MacBook Air is.
You and me have to come to terms with that.
I do know that it’s easy to cut down the whole “iOS - OS X” situation to these very simple points and say that everything is going to be ok. I don’t know what’s going to be ok and what’s going to be terrible. But you don’t know, either. And for the sake of keeping things simple, clear and minimal, I just want you to remember this: in the very end, Apple’s goal is to make money by making great products. No matter how complex and intricate the guidelines of OS X and iOS are, no matter how desperate the geek community is going to get, no matter how difficult it will be for developers to find the right combination of desktop and touch interfaces – I know exciting times of reinvention, discovery and modern computing are ahead of us.
So maybe you should wait before criticizing people, developers and stuff you don’t know about yet next time. Because remember, you can only connect the dots looking backwards.
