Mac aficionados - 4 categories

I handed the nascent iPhone 2G (not officially sold in Malaysia) to a friend and asked him for his take. He gave me four points for rejecting it:- 1. It felt like a bar of soap. 2. It did not have a physical keypad as in the Blackberry he was using. 3. Loading emails were slower than on his BB, given that attachments were loaded with text but on his device, only the text was loaded which was what professionals required on the go. The attachments, he said, could be read at his convenience on his desktop, and 4. Touching and swiping to open apps and pinching on text were adolescent behaviour and not natural for adults, as opposed to scrolling and clicking on the BB. I thanked him for his opinion which I stressed I valued but before I left, he asked me for my take, more on his opinion, than on the iPhone itself. I told him given that you don't have to be an old goat to grasp that change is the one constant that allows something to die, when another is born, points he offered for rejecting Job’s new baby were reasons for the ‘uninitiated’ such as myself to embrace it, for the following reasons:- 1. He is a lawyer and a good one at that, but I had the sense he had scant knowledge of computers and devices and how they would pan out in the future. 2. Given his training, he is rife with opinions, even on matters that are not in his domain. 3. When faced with a question from an ‘inexperienced’ person such as myself he would find it hard to refrain from a ‘no comment’ response, and 4. I told him that the 1^st generation iMac launched a decade ago drew a similar strain of negative comments from people who were dissing the new ‘slit-eyed’ USB because 9-pin printers and devices at the office were not compatible. Looking back a decade, the judgment of my friend on the new iPhone was a classic example on why reasoning in the dark could offer spot-on clues for the uninitiated, in the clearUsing a Mac got me wondering why users embrace it with such passion given that 90% of enterprise are Windows users. I identified four categories of Mac users and how they came in.The one who has not experienced the pitfalls of Windows belongs to the first category. He is ‘Born into Mac’ and as a result, his naiveté wards off criticism of Windows. He defends it even. For instance, with childlike curiosity the BIM taps the ‘Windows’ key and is startled by the pop up. In an un-patronizing way, he finds it ‘innovative’ or at the least, strangely different or innocently harbor doubts about the authenticity of Tiger when Vista looks somewhat similar. The second belongs to the ‘Born into Windows’ user who stumbles on the history of Jobs and Gates. The BIW conducts an independent read of their respective history from the 70s and in the time-line he identifies a trendsetter amongst them. The BIW is psychologically affected to say the least but not at all surprised that the innovator brought into the brand a culture, if not a cult, while his counterpart trailed behind. Sheer information bowls him over. The third is the BIW who thinks it is hip and hop to own the Shuffle or the IPod. He walks into an Apple outlet to check out the little puppies and while at it, he looks left and right and sights the amazingly sexualized iMacs with all the attention around them. He heard about those beautiful machines and waltzes over to see what the fuss is all about. Briefed by a polite and demure Mac girl, long held BIW myths are destroyed. Cost and Compatibility. In one sitting the sweet young thing, seemingly armed with information nearly matching Jobs at a launch, proves to BIW that on a power to power comparison, both machines are more or less even and at high-end desktop levels the MacPro for instance, cost even less than its Dell counterpart and that Macs maneuver into any nook and cranny Windows can. The Mac girl bowls him over.The fourth belongs to the BIW who is sitting in front of his psychiatrist because viruses have crashed his machine once too many. He is suicidal and his psychiatrist, a Mac user himself, prescribes the virus-free Mac. Viruses bowl him over.