In my opinion “Iron Chef” is quite possibly the greatest television show ever. I’ll take chefs creating timed culinary masterpieces over the Croc hunter spurting graceful arcs of blood while whilst intoning “what a beaut” every time. For those of you unfamiliar with “Iron Chef” the show pits a widely acclaimed chef against one of the shows regular chefs in an hour long cook off. Both the challenging chef and the ringer (the ringer is called the “Iron Chef”; thus the text) are unaware of the main ingrediant until it is revealed, in dramatic fashion, by the Chairman. What you usually get is the Chairman, looking as though he was born with the sole purpose of being the next Bond villian, standing by a tarped tray of some ingredient soon to be converted into palatable food. He drags the tarp off and, with an amazing amount of gravity, announces the main constituent of the meal, usually squid eyeballs or musk glands or something equally unsavory. The camera then pans to the competing chefs who always look just a little scared. One wonders why they adopt the visage of trepidation as, generally speaking, the ingredient is dead, and even if it’s still alive it’s not very threatening. So then we get to the meat of the show. Both chefs have the same main ingredient foisted upon them and both chefs’ have the same final goal: make food taste good. One chef’s final product is deemed better than the others and then the audience realizes that one artist is better than the other guy, whom I suppose commits ritual suicide or, at least, is forced to manage a Wendy’s. This, naturally enough, makes me think of Apple and the PC world.
I suppose that the preceding paragraph begs for some explanation, but if you know where I’m headed skip to the end, there’s a great joke in the last paragraph. Take your average PC company and Apple. Basically they have the same ingredients. A bunch of copper wires, transistors, chips, tiny motors to spin hard drives at speeds that would slice your finger clean off before you realized you touched the stupid thing etc. Now give this jumble of raw materials to Dell and they’ll come up with a plain beige box you can sit a plain monitor on. Wow, the palate is overwhelmed. Take the same jumble of wires and spinning data coasters pile it up on an Apple employee’s desk and you get a flat screen floating seemingly in mid air. What I’m getting at is the Apple “style”. Apple seems to be able to take the same basic stuff as any other company and make it look cool, feel cool, and even smell cool as far as I know. Even the high-end stuff, stuff made for pros that normally eschew the “coolness” factor to go after raw horsepower, is cool. The style of Apple is reminiscent of the Will Smith in “Men in Black” the difference betwixt Apple and every other company is that Apple “Makes this look Good”
The coolness doesn’t stop with unique plastic tooling. The coolness factor seeps into the software. Apple software is always clean looking and easy to use. I am thinking specifically of iMovie. This is a killer app, though most folks don’t know it. If you get a Windows user to compare the movie making experience in Windows to the movie making experience on a Mac, you’ve got a former Windows user. Yet Apple doesn’t have some secret programming advantage. Apple doesn’t have a monopoly on a 1 or a 0, Apple just, somehow, consistently makes everything a little better than anyone else.
So just how does Apple take ones and zeros, copper wire, a little plastic and mix it all together to come up with something so superior every time? I have no idea, ask the Iron Chef. I suspect the trick is in seeing the possibilities rather than the limitations. Or perhaps frequent employee beatings, either way it’s nice to own a Mac.
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