Apple exudes raw creativity and intelligence; soon to become third-largest computer maker in US

20 years ago

“For everyone who knows me now this may come as a shock, but I was a bit of a nerd when I was in high school,” Ryan Vass writes for The Chicago Maroon (University of Chicago). “For some reason, in the winter of ninth grade, I decided that I wanted my boring PC to look like a Mac and I just became obsessed with fooling myself into thinking had a Mac. This was long before the Steve Jobs renaissance, the iPod, or even OS X. In fact, I suspect that this was some sort of rebellious urge to control and create my personal space.”

“I downloaded some program that changed the appearance of all of my desktop windows, and I configured them so that they would look and act like a Mac’s. I somehow changed my startup and signoff screen to look like the Apple ones, and I even configured the sounds so that I could hear that odd little ‘dripping’ sound that used to be on the old Macs. To a large extent, I succeeded, until the brilliant gray facade of the fake Macintosh began to crack, choking my sluggish Windows 98 machine with the sheer amount of crap I had loaded to hide the truth. The computer ended up completely shriveling to a slow death, until I had to format and reload everything. As I said, I was a bit of a nerd in high school,” Vass writes.

“That inexplicable urge I felt in high school to have an Apple seems to have spread virulently to pop culture in an entirely quantifiable way, to which Apple’s explosive fourth quarter profit reports attest,” Vass writes. “According to BusinessWeek, Macintosh computers currently trail the PC–based Gateway computers by 38,000 units. Gateway itself is the third-leading seller of PCs, trailing only HP and Dell… Macs experienced a 12 percent growth in sales during the third quarter (after its Intel release), a number which shot up to 56 percent growth in the fourth. Something must have happened before the fourth quarter.”

Vass writes, “In fact, shortly before the fourth quarter, which began July 1 and ended September 30, Apple released a piece of software that allows users to dual-boot Windows on their machines and run Windows programs. Thus, while the new Intel Macs had been released in February, the real gains weren’t seen until summer—after software was released allowing Mac users to run Windows programs. The significance of this piece of software cannot be underestimated. Previously, Apple computer sales were frustrated by Macs’ lack of compatibility with the rest of the world. Now, it seems, the final barrier to Apple world domination has been broken. Continued growth in computer sales, which comprise 45 percent of the company’s total revenue, will mean a steady stream of ridiculous quarterly reports like this one.”

Vass writes, “Apple’s brilliant campaign to convert PC–users by simply removing reasons not to buy their irresistibly well designed Macs will likely drive Apple to become the third-largest computer maker in the U.S. Couple that with another new video iPod release, and Jobs will only continue to shit in Bill Gates’s proverbial soup.”

Vass writes, “All of this goes to show that I wasn’t that far off during my excessively nerdy fall into Apple-lust in high school. Few companies operate by the same raw creativity and intelligence that Apple does—compare Apple’s recent history with Microsoft’s or Dell’s, and the contrast between wild growth and total stagnation is telling.”

More in the full article here.