The Price of Fame: Mac Support is Sometimes Half-Baked

The Price of Fame: Mac Support is Sometimes Half-Baked

The birth of my second daughter at the end of January has me in a nostalgic mood, so I’m typing this — my first GearHead column in many months — on a Mac Classic (circa 1990 — I got it for free last year from a co-worker) running System 6 (also circa 1990) and Microsoft Word 5.1 (circa 1992). When I’m done, I’ll pipe the document through the SCSI-to-Ethernet adapter (a few bucks from eBay) that connects the Classic to the rest of my network, then use my 1998-era beige Power Mac G3 to send it to Adam, the MyMac Webmaster.

It’s a surprisingly pleasant experience, typing on this old beast. The 9-inch screen is clear and bright. Monaco 12-point is a great font to write in. System 6’s single-tasking environment means the display is free of clutter, and that I’m not distracted by an e-mail program, Web browser, ICQ client, or pretty desktop picture in the background. I can simply write, concentrating entirely on the paragraph at hand, while those before and after scroll off the edges of the tiny display.

I’m using this obsolete beige “toaster” — Apple’s first and only sub-$1000 Mac until the release of the most recent Blueberry iMac — to talk about one of the few unfortunate consequences of Apple’s recent successes. Because in the computer industry, I’ve learned, with success comes crap .

Just Because It’s Translucent Doesn’t Mean It’s Mac

Apple Computer (now just “Apple,” apparently) revitalized itself by abandoning its beige past. With all the new metal- and gumdrop-coloured iMacs and iBooks and G4s and PowerBooks flying off shelves both real and virtual, and exclusive Internet technologies like iDisk and Sherlock, Apple has a bigger market than it has in years. So third-party vendors of software and hardware are taking notice, when they wouldn’t haven given Mac users the time of day a year or two ago.

For a computer company, having a lot of vendor support is good. In general, that support is good for the computer company’s customers too — but we do have to be considerably more careful.

For instance, my father was kind enough to give me a CD-Rewriteable drive for Christmas. Knowing I had a Mac with a USB interface card (but being a PC guy himself), he simply purchased the first USB CD-RW he came across.

Trouble is, that USB CD-RW brand doesn’t support Macs, even though the iMac’s success drove the formerly-moribund USB market into prominence last year, and it would have required only a software driver to function. But that’s fine. I returned it to the Future Shop store where he bought it in exchange for another USB drive with a clear Mac logo and system requirements on the box.

Only that didn’t work either, because although the second vendor does make a translucent blue dual-platform USB CD-RW, they also make an otherwise-identical smoky-grey USB CD-RW that includes only Windows software. That’s the one I got, despite the Mac logo on the box, and it took weeks of increasingly frustrating e-mails, phone calls, and faxes to get the manufacturer to send me the Mac software. (It is not available on their Web site.) And then it turned out the drive was defective.

Eventually, I relented, returned the second USB drive for a refund, and contacted my favourite Mac dealer to buy a SCSI CD-RW with Mac software included. It has worked flawlessly since.

Stores and Boxes, Big and Small

My CD-RW fiasco told me something about what Apple’s success has done to the retail experience. In North America, Apple has been focusing on “big box” stores to push its hot consumer products, the iMac and the iBook. In the U.S., those stores include Best Buy, CompUSA, and Sears, while here in Canada the focus has been on Future Shop and a few others.

Apparently, Apple is confident that these big box outlets — with their base-pay staff, minimal training, and vast range of products from dishwashers to stereos to computers — can represent the company’s products well, or at least sell a lot of them. Sources tell me that Apple is in fact stonewalling those people trying to set up new Apple-specialty shops, in favour of the big box outlets.

My experience with the CD-RW shows the problem, though. If you go beyond simply buying a computer sight-unseen, the big boxes can’t help you much. Future Shop happily sold my dad a USB CD-RW that wouldn’t work on a Mac, even though he’d made clear that’s where it was going, and then had only a semi-Mac-compatible model when I came in for the exchange. The salesman essentially shrugged his shoulders when I tried to ask any Mac-related questions.

That particular store has only one iMac and one iBook on display, often not working properly, with the hard drives renamed to “asdfkjh” or something by people trying them out. iMac look-alike Windows boxes are usually more prominently displayed than real iMacs. There’s no specific Mac software section, and few Mac peripherals — certainly nothing for a pre-iMac era machine like mine that has old-style keyboard, monitor, and external drive connectors. (And my G3 isn’t even two years old yet.)

Meanwhile, smaller Apple dealers are still seeing improved sales, but often only to repeat customers like me who know the foibles of the big box stores. Apple is steering first-time buyers to those mega-outlets, and buyers there are not getting the service and support they deserve. I don’t know what happens when something goes wrong and they try to get help.

When Is a Mac Program Not One?

Hardware isn’t the only source of frustration in this new-Apple era. Application and game developers are also rushing back to the Mac, but not in the same way they used to.

If you look at my review of SimCity 3000 in the October issue of MyMac, you’ll see that I noted its hefty system requirements, strange interface conventions, and sometimes sluggish performance. They all arise because SimCity 3000, unlike its SimCity 2000 predecessor, is not really a Mac application. It’s a Windows port, contracted out to an admittedly talented team of programmers in the Ukraine by Electronic Arts, who developed the original PC version of SC 3000 in the U.S.A.

Even programs given rave reviews by the Mac press as “real” Mac apps aren’t always all they should be. As I type this article in Microsoft Word 5.1, I think sadly of Microsoft Office 98, which I have on my Power Mac. Word 98 has a lot more features, sure, but those features were largely determined by what existed in Word 97 on Windows a year earlier.

And the Office 98 suite is much less friendly than its ancestor too. Try saving a document in an older format (like Word 5), for instance. Depending on how you do it, you’ll be faced with one of two different dialog boxes asking you if you’re sure you want to. In one, you should click Yes to confirm a save in the old format. In another, you should click No to prevent conversion to the new format. Two opposite answers for the same result, and not very predictably either! Office 98 may not have much code directly ported from Windows, but many of its ideas still are.

Microsoft is one of the largest software developers for the Mac. People make a big deal out of that. But what Mac products do they make? Office 98, Internet Explorer, and Outlook Express. Oh, and the Windows Media Player for Macintosh, and an instant messaging client. Plus outdated versions of Visual FoxPro, FrontPage, and Encarta, and a few kids’ games. Some of them are great (Outlook Express), some are good and getting better (IE), and some are just adequate (Office, in my opinion), while others are clearly on life support and only appear in the product listings because there’s nothing new coming.

Last year, Microsoft quietly discontinued its cross-platform high-level programming tools , concentrating its Visual Studio platform on Windows only. The Access database application, which is part of versions of Office for Windows and is the lingua franca of in-house database development for many businesses, has never been made for the Mac. Nor has its programming counterpart, Visual Basic. Microsoft BASIC for the Mac disappeared a decade ago.

There are no Microsoft server programs, programming tools, or BackOffice components for the Mac — nor for any other non-Windows OS such as Linux or OS/2, for that matter. That’s great for Mac companies such as Metrowerks, FileMaker, RealBASIC, and Tenon, but it doesn’t say much for what is supposedly such a prominent Mac developer.

Even an Internet Computer Shouldn’t Require the Internet

Back on the plus side, Microsoft has started making hardware for the Mac — well, Mac/PC combo hardware, anyway. Their IntelliMouse with IntelliEye and IntelliMouse Explorer are genuinely cool, using optical technology to operate without a dirt-attracting mouse ball, and on almost any surface. (The technology comes from Hewlett-Packard , but that’s another story.)

Had the IntelliMouse been available when I went shopping for a USB mouse last year, I might have bought one instead of the Logitech Wheel Mouse I did get. But I noticed something while looking at the IntelliMouse package the other day — “Macintosh usage requires Internet download,” right on the box. (Same for the Logitech, just so you know.)

This harks back to my USB CD-RW troubles. How is it acceptable to include Windows drivers in the box, but make Mac drivers only available by connecting to the Internet? The file is 1.7 MB (something not mentioned on the download page, I should add), and so could take ten minutes or more to retrieve over a modem. These mice have been available for months, yet I’ve seen no second-generation packaging that includes Mac drivers.

I know the iMac is touted as the “Internet Mac” — that’s the name. But not every Mac — especially those in design and prepress houses where people really want to replace the terrible stock USB “pucklet” mouse and keyboard — is connected to the Internet. Even those who are don’t necessarily want to hook up just to get their mouse working.

Apple itself seems to have been carried away by its own hype sometimes. The Apple USB keyboard and mouse, so unusable compared to the Extended Keyboard II and ADB Mouse II that preceded them, are just one example. Some perfectly functional Apple printers won’t work with the latest Apple operating systems.

Human interface guidelines that served Mac users well for 15 years go ignored in favour of advertising-heavy, style-over-substance looks in the QuickTime Player and Sherlock II . (I like thew new Aqua appearance for Mac OS X , but it has its problems too.) All too often, essential Apple software upgrades are available only online, sometimes only through non-standard “auto-updates,” at least until people complain. Finally, Apple’s warranties are among the shortest in the business, as most reviews on the Web are quick to point out.

What’s the Lesson?

Companies that genuinely support the Mac — and by “the Mac” I mean Mac users trying to get our jobs done, not Apple trying to sell products — tend to have started on the platform, even if they later moved to Windows too. Think of Bare Bones Software, Nisus Software, Qualcomm’s Eudora division, Adobe, and Macromedia. Of course, Microsoft was one of the original Mac developers, but you probably agree they’re a special case, with complex and vested interests in several different directions.

From what I’ve seen, developers coming to or returning to the Mac only in the post-iMac age have a lot of learning to do, both in how they build their products and how they support Mac users.

I sound disillusioned, maybe, but I’m not. I’m glad this Classic is not the only Mac I have a chance to use, since it won’t even run a proper graphical Web browser. Apple and the Mac’s new-found success is good for the platform and good for those of us who’ve stuck with it. We have better Macs, more software, and more peripherals, all at lower prices. But we have to stay on our toes, and keep Apple and its vendors on theirs too.

If something strikes you funny about the New Mac Religion among developers who sneered at Macs last year, or if Apple looks like it’s trying to screw you again with a processor speed dump or hugely long product wait, then complain! Return products! Demand refunds!

Good products only succeed when the bad ones aren’t allowed to run on momentum. And momentum, from inside Apple and out, was what almost killed the Mac last time around.

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Derek K. Miller
dkmiller@mymac.com