How to Fix a Problem That Doesn't Exist

In the current issue of DaringFireball, John Gruber talks about Joshua Marshall's interest and uncertainty about buying a Mac. John mainly talks about familiarity being a reason for staying with Windows, but also succinctly addresses the idea of "being tied to one company."

As much as Microsoft tries to make it seem like the Windows platform is "open," it's really the antithesis of the term. All Microsoft means is that they don't make PC hardware. In fact, Marhsall makes a rather self-incriminating statement about this (emphasis added):

And over the years, I’ve invested a serious amount of money in software and various gizmos, all of which are PC-based. That in itself is probably enough to keep me shackled down in the Wintel universe.

It's right there. The DaringFireball article addresses all of these issues elegantly. The one other bit I found interesting, though, is Marshall's comment about maintenance:

I can open up my PCs and install things and actually do a certain amount of maintenance on them. Not sure one can do that with a Mac, at least not to the same degree.

Certainly a Mac is not made out of alien materials. It's still just plastic, metal and hard drives, just arranged in a different way. The question is, what do you want to do in there?

Serviceable Parts

Certainly installing memory is a reasonable expectation. Although it's a bit difficult in the Mac mini due to the small size, it's not impossible. Upgrading memory in an iMac is straightfoward, and doing the same in the towers is about as easy as it gets. Laptops are a different story, but that's not unique to Apple.

Other than memory, what sort of maintenance is there to do in a modern machine? Unless you have a well-cooled tower, you don't want to muck with the CPU or GPU because we're not dealing with 486s anymore. You add something faster or bigger and you risk upsetting the delicate heat equillibrium inside a compact form factor.

So what's left? You want to solder things to the logic board? Replace individual chips? Really, other than memory or a hard drive, what is there to replace or perform maintenance on?

Only Four Slots?

These phantom concerns remind me of when the Blue and White G3-style cases came out. There was an outcry from some media professionals because the new case didn't have six slots. Even at the time I wasn't sure what the fuss was about. A media professional needed a SCSI card and perhaps a media card or two, but that's still only three slots. What else is there to add?

Over time, we saw that Apple simply negated the need for most of these sort of slots by adding integrated hardware or software-level replacements like Final Cut Pro. This simplified the hardware design and allowed much more compact machines to be built.

Quick, to Macsbug!

The same phenomenon surfaced during the switch to Mac OS X. Some users were absolutely panicked that their existing Mac OS 9 troubleshooting techniques would be ineffective under Mac OS X. In this light, troubleshooting was cast as a feature, not a burden.

In reality, many of these tools were solutions in search of a problem. There's no need to rebuild the desktop database or quit applications in the reverse order to avoid memory fragmentation.

So my suggestion to potential switchers is to not worry about how to translate a Windows maintenance technique to the Mac world until you are at least sure that you'll have to do the same sort of hand-holding on that particular issue.

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