The Unimportance of Upgradability (to Most
Users)
From Scott Selby:
Mr. Moore,
Once again, I hear the call of the unrealistic "its features and
size are comparable to the Air's, but it can still be upgraded." Let's
get real for a second. Just how many people in the world actually use
the expansion that is built into the systems of the world?
I will admit that my B&W has got several
aftermarket add-ons. But these are actually replacements for the
built-in USB and FireWire ports that have died on the motherboard. The
computer is running on the original parts with the exception of the
hard drive. Our mini, G5, and iBook have
had no additions with the exception of replacing the dead hard drive in
the iBook.
I would say that better than 90% of the people in the world -
including my mother, mother-in-law, brother-in-law and more than few
others - never go inside of their machines. Of course, this is why I am
running three Macs. I would rather work with the machine than work on
it.
Sincerely,
Scott Selby
Hi Mr. Selby,
I also prefer using my computers as productivity and
communication tools rather than tinkering with them, and you're
probably correct that a strong majority of users never upgrade their
machines beyond perhaps upgrading the RAM.
However, I'm loath to give up expandability and
connectivity. My Pismo
PowerBooks would have been relegated to the boneyard long ago if I
hadn't been able to upgrade their memory, processors, hard drives,
optical drives, add PC CardBus adapters, and so on. Because those
enhancements and upgrades were possible, they are both still
productively useful computers at eight years old.
The MacBook
Air, on the other hand, is limited to the standard RAM capacity and
a hard drive of 80 GB capacity, the latter due to aesthetics. This
strikes me as function following form, and I'm a form follows function
kind of guy.
I don't dispute that a substantial proportion of
MacBook Air buyers will be happy within the machine's limitations, but
I would not be.
Charles
Pismo and Lombard Cache Problems
From Charles:
Hi Charles,
Regarding the Pismo processor
problem, I have a Lombard, and I wonder if they
might have similar problems.
I didn't know it was a "known problem" until it happened to me, but
the Level 2 cache on the Lombard is known to fail. When it does, the
Lombard won't boot up after being shut down, and it won't restart,
unless you reset the PMU, which you have already said to do by pressing
the button on the back.
To confirm the problem, he should look at his System Profile and
look at the default Hardware menu. Mine is below. What you don't see is
a Level 2 cache entry (should be 1 MB).
I wonder if he could confirm the problem this way.
By the way, my Lombard works great without the cache for the usual
word processing and web surfing, email, etc. I always sleep it, so I
don't often have to press the reset button.
Hi Charles,
Thanks for your suggestion. I've forwarded it to
Mike.
I haven't heard of the Pismo being afflicted by cache
failures, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen.
Charles
Need WiFi Drivers for Netgear WG511T
From Daniel:
Charles,
Per your [WiFi Card for OS X
PowerBooks with PC Card Slots], I ordered and am attempting to
install a Netgear WG511T.
Contrary to your remarks, this card did not ship with any Mac OS X
drivers, nor are there any drivers to be found for OS X on the Netgear
web site.
Would you please send any links to drivers that you may have?
Thanks,
Dan
Hi Dan,
The Netgear WG511T sold by Wegener Media does ship with Mac
drivers, so I'm guessing you didn't purchase the card from them.
They might be able to help you out. You can contact
them from links on their website.
OrangeWare also offered a Mac driver
that they say supports the WG511T, and it is available as a free trial
download.
I hope one or the other will sort out your
problem.
Charles
A Bit More on the Conservative/Liberal Debate
From Brian in response to Thinking Different about
Liberal vs. Conservative Mac Users:
Hi Charles,
I enjoyed your piece very much, and though I tend toward the liberal
end of the spectrum, I too found the mischaracterization of
conservatism facile and offensive.
With regard to PCs and Macs, I tend to associate PCs with
totalitarianism. That is, companies that I have worked for that use
only PCs seem to impose a top-down IT strategy. They care not a whit
about personal preferences, including cognitive profiles and working
styles of their employees. And totalitarianism, as we know, can emanate
from either end of the political spectrum. Now I suppose that one could
say the same thing about Mac-only companies, but then again, I am happy
to submit to such repression.
Call me inconsistent.
Brian
Hi Brian,
The Mac has traditionally let the user choose among a
variety of ways to do things, whereas the Microsoft operating systems,
as you say, have a more totalitarian motif, and particularly drive me
nuts by wanting to do things for me (their way, of course) or just
chivvying and kibitzing annoyingly.
If you will indulge me in an observation,
conservatives tend to be individualists who like to do things their
way, which is why, at least here in Canada where I live, conservative
political movements and parties have generally tended to be more
internally-fractious than liberal/lefty ones.
Consequently, I don't find it surprising that I know a
lot of philosophically-conservative Mac-users.
Charles
Mac User, Prius Driver Correlation?
From Prius Driver:
I live in Liberal-bastion Portland, Oregon. (I honestly believe this
town is more liberal than San Francisco.) I am a rather common
political beast here. Fiscally rather conservative (definitely to the
right of center, Reagan would be happy) but socially very
liberal (Jerry Falwell probably prayed for my damnation daily, and Pat
Robertson probably still does. :-P )
I have noticed that, at least here in Portland, there seems to be a
high correlation among coffee shop patrons of Mac ownership and Prius
ownership. (i.e. I see a lot of Priuses in the lot, and pay attention
to who walks to them, and they seem to be largely the people in the
coffee shop that use Macs.)
Of course, Portland has both a high Prius ownership rate and a high
Mac usage rate, too. So the two might be completely uncorrelated, just
a coincidence of Portland-ness.
(You can probably guess that I'm both a Prius driver and a Mac
user.)
Hi P.D.
Hey, I'm a Toyota fan too, although I don't have a
hybrid. Our fleet includes a '90 Camry and an '89 Corolla, both of
which get really impressive fuel mileage and are awesomely dependable.
In the dependability context, Toyotas are very Mac-like.
:-)
Charles
Liberal Mac Users
From Edward:
I agree on your article stating that all Mac users are not liberal,
however an odd sign/interesting fact concerning the argument are a pair
of videos on YouTube. They popped up last year and are basically
the classic Macintosh ad from 1984,
based on the book of the same name. Two altered versions can be
watched, one with Hillary Clinton in the place of Big Brother, and the
other with Barack Obama.
Is it just coincidence that they would use an Apple ad to attack a
fellow Democrat/liberal?
Hi Edward,
Riffing on Apple's advertising themes is pretty common
for politicians and their supporters, and not just Democrats.
I think Howard Dean may have been the first to do it
in 2004, but this year Mike Huckabee's "Switch to Huckabee" YouTube
series pays homage to Apple's ads, and there are the two (unauthorized)
YouTube "1984" videos you mention targeting Clinton and Obama
respectively parodying the famous Apple 1984 Super Bowl commercial.
Apple just has great advertising ideas.
Charles
Liberal? Conservative? Green?
From Gerald:
G'day Charles,
I empathise with much of what you say.
In my late school-days (c 1972) I had an enlightened school-teacher.
He introduced us to ideas of ecology and environmental impact -
Malthus, "Limits to Growth", and so on.
Inspired, I sought to live my life in a sustainable fashion -
avoiding greed and waste, re-using whatever was not yet junk, recycling
what was. I sought to adopt principles of good "husbandry" - now a
neglected word. This wasn't so difficult then in England. The
privations of the two World Wars, and their aftermath, meant that
generations of folks still knew how to make do and mend. However,
post-1980, I found myself out of step with the zeitgeist. Throughout
the 1980s and 1990s, peoples' focus moved to conspicuous and often
selfish consumption. Mrs. Thatcher's children came to believe her
opinion that there is no such thing as Society. We now have a
generation of well-to-do who've never had to save, to conserve, to
sacrifice, to go without. So although they talk green, at heart they
have no true understanding of what this might really mean. (Sustainable
living does not mean everyone having a new Prius.)
Trying to live "green" when the rest of the world just thinks you're
barmy is not career-enhancing. I gave it up. I think the climate is
showing substantial change, largely wrought by the growth of mankind
through the fossil-fuel age, and it's out of our collective
control.
The market is a great leveller. Ultimately, market forces will
settle many things. F'rinstance - in Eastern England, there are some
very desirable beach-side towns, where the sea-front houses cost
millions, as holiday homes for the rich from London. It's highly likely
that within a few decades, the sea will be inside their front doors.
You'd be surprised how much this reduces the market value of the
houses...
In our family, we don't do green as a matter of principle any more,
but instead we do it indirectly, by just minimising our bills. We turn
things off to reduce the electricity bill; we save water to reduce the
(metered) water-bill. As I have charge of the electrical things, I'm
very conscious of their running costs. In general, if it has a heater,
or a motor, or a fan - it's costing you. I find this a most helpful
principle to apply to things like routers, servers, desktop computers.
Does it make a noise? Does it need fans to cool it? It helps that my
wife can't stand background noise, so that encourages me to seek out
silent, efficient equipment. She's just had a smart new iMac for
Christmas; not quite as quiet as the Cube it replaced, but nearly as
good, and much less temperamental.
For the world, I fear we have bloody times ahead. War, pestilence,
famine, etc. Death and destruction on a grand scale. Probably some will
survive. Probably some cultures will survive. If not; well perhaps it's
time the ants had their turn.
Gerald
Hi Gerald,
Sounds like you and I are pretty much on the same page
as regards these issues.
I'm more of a passive than an active green these days,
and as you say, being thrifty and cost conscious is a great facilitator
of minimizing one's environmental footprint. We use mostly compact
fluorescent light bulbs, which save money (especially if you shop for
discount and sale prices for the up-front costs), and try to cut down
on energy waste (and cost) by air-drying laundry most of the time (but
using the dryer once in a while), taking shorter showers, walking
rather than driving when we can, and so forth.
One advantage of using notebook computers is that they
are energy-efficient, as quiet if you can keep the fans from cutting in
(I share your wife's aversion to noise).
I also share your pessimistic outlook as to the likely
outcome of all this. The market, as you say, is a great leveller. The
Second Law of Thermodynamics is an even greater one. The universe is
getting more chaotic with every energy transaction, so active effort to
fix things, as opposed to passive conservation, just ultimately
contributes to making the situation worse.
Cheers,
Charles
Liberal and Conservative Mac Users
From John:
Charles,
I think you are correct that most people place too much emphasis on
political labels. Whenever anyone says "Liberals are like..." or
"Conservatives think..," I roll my eyes and laugh at the gross
generalization of a poorly defined term applied to people that disagree
amongst themselves on key policy issues. To say nothing of the fact
that using a term such as "conservative," without noting what the
person is conservative about (such as "social conservative," "fiscal
conservative," etc.), is almost always inaccurate.
My problem with your article is that the purpose and target of your
writing is a marketing study. This is where I think most of our
problems start. A marketing company is looking for data to sell to
clients. They are the last people we should look for to debate
political issues, because in general they do not clearly think about or
define these issues. Marketing surveys are designed to show slight
differences in the buying public so that advertisers can have a slight
advantage as they decide where to spend millions of dollars to get us
to buy a product. They are not the ones to look for to define people's
political stance.
And in light of the marketing study I must chastise you for making
an erroneous assumption. They used the word "liberal," and you assumed
they meant political liberal, when it appears they were referring to
personality types. The words "liberal" and "conservative" have dozens
of meanings and shadings, many of which do not refer to politics. In
reading the original blurb it appears they were referencing personality
types, not political leanings. They mean "liberal" in the sense of
"open to new ideas," rather than politics. I think you assumed they
were talking about politics, and then knocked down the straw man you
created. I agree that to assume that "open to new ideas" is contrary to
political conservatism is probably wrong, but there is in no way that
the original blurb made that connection. Everything they talked about
referenced personality types, not politics.
Although I agree with your overall article, I do not think the
marketing report is referring to politics, not should its finding be
taken seriously outside of an advertising office.
John
Hi John,
Well, in fact I actually was thinking more in terms of
philosophical outlook than electoral politics, although I suspect you
would agree that there is an awful lot of crossover.
The Mindset Media "Openness 5" category describes
(liberal) folks who "tend to seek rich, varied and novel experiences
. . . believe that imagination and intellectual curiosity are
as important to life as more rational or pragmatic endeavors
. . . are receptive to their own inner feelings and may
experience life with more emotional intensity," the implied corollary
being that conservative types do not share these interests and
qualities.
Charles
Politics on Low End Mac
From Adam:
Low End Mac is not a place for politics. It is one of a few places
online where users from all political, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds
can get together and nerd-out about Mac computers, past and
present.
Comments such as, "Politeness and humility are conservative traits"
belong in political chat rooms where people type at each other in all
capital letters, not on LEM. Posting comments like these take away from
the sense of commonality of purpose and interests that I have long
identified with as a LEM reader.
Sincerely,
Adam
Hi Adam,
I wouldn't like to see LEM become a nexus for routine
political debate either, but my article was commentary on a topical
news issue in the Mac community, namely Mindset Media's assertion that
Mac people are allegedly more liberal, less modest, and more assured of
their own superiority than PC-users and/or the population at large.
Strictly speaking, my comments were more in a
philosophical than a political context, as was Mindset Media's survey
orientation, and, of course, Apple itself riffs on this with its "I'm a
Mac - I'm a PC" ads.
The article was a big mail generator, and so far yours
is the only response I've received protesting its inclusion, but your
input is appreciated and duly noted.
Charles
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