Smugness unsettled
Here's a column I wrote in the week after Apple's big Intel switch announcement. It seemed like a good opportunity to use the old "smug Mac users" line again, so I did.
There's many collective nouns for Mac users, but my favourite is "smug".
Put a dozen Mac owners in a room together and the air will reek of smugness. They are users of the best computers and the best operating system in the world, and heaven help anyone who disagrees with them on that matter.
Mac users have made great efforts in recent years to point out their technical superiority over Windows-using friends and colleagues.
"You poor thing," the Mac user would ooze, "having to spend so much time worrying about viruses and malware. I don't have that problem, you know."
The Mac versus Windows debate has been a religious war for years now, and neither side has ever been willing to give even an inch to the other.
I say all this as a Mac user myself, for the last four years. I've been as smug as the rest of them; moreso, probably.
All of which goes part way to explaining why any Mac users you know might be acting a little strangely now.
Last week, Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple and surely the smuggest Mac user of them all, stood up in a crowded hall in California to make a speech. In it, he told his astonished audience that as from 2007, all new Apple computers would be designed around a new processor, the chip that is the "brain" of any computer.
The manufacturer of the new chips is Intel, famed for its close relationship with Microsoft. Apple's decision to embrace what it previously derided as weak technology seemed like a slap in the face to millions of devoted Mac users.
For a decade, Macs have used the PowerPC chips designed and built by Motorola and IBM. They were more expensive than Intel's chips, but worked harder and operated at far lower temperatures.
The last PowerPC chip to be used by Apple was the G5, a blisteringly fast piece of kit that turned humble computers into processing powerhouses.
Two years ago, Jobs promised that Apple would release laptops with G5 chips, but that promise was never kept. IBM could not produce a G5 that was small enough to fit in a laptop, or that could operate within such a small space without melting all the components around it (these processors get very hot indeed, and need extravagant cooling systems to keep them functioning).
Apple found itself in a quandry. It could hold out for further technical innovation in IBM's laboratories, or it could swallow its corporate pride and switch to a different kind of processor.
For the vast majority of consumers, the change shouldn't matter, or even be noticeable. Most people don't care who makes the components inside their computers, the only thing they worry about is getting a computer that works and is reliable.
But for the army of software developers who write applications for Mac OS X, Apple's award-winning operating system, dozens of questions have popped up. Not only do most of them face extra work just to make their programs work on the new Intel-powered Macs, they also wonder if those same computers could run Windows.
It sounds like the geekiest of concerns, but this announcement is the biggest story in Apple history for five years, and it has got under a lot of people's collars.
Some are confident that Jobs knows what he's doing, and that Apple can be sure of increased sales and greater success in the long term. Others gloomily predict the end of the Mac platform, and even the end of Apple as a company.
Whatever our view of the future, us smug Mac users can be forgiven for sporting a miserable expression for a little while. After all, the last thing we want is to have anything to do with - ugh - Windows.
