mea culpa
These days, I watch the crap that goes on in the Mac “news” market with a combination of anger and bemusement. The anger part drives me crazy, because honestly, it’s none of my business any more, and I really shouldn’t waste energy even worrying about this shit.
I have a lot of friends in the market, people I’ve enjoyed working with, and whom I love, and I watch many of them (and lots of others) post questionable stories, poorly sourced rumors, and pure, unadulterated junk. I’m not going to call them out here, because (a) it’s a free Internet, and (b) I know how hard it can be to try and stay in business. Plus, I think readers are, by and large, pretty smart about going to the sites that matter for them, and if there’s a sizable contingent that wants nothing but rumors and high-fallutin’ smack-downs, well, let them have it.
When the anger starts, I just need to shut it all off, and go pay attention to something else. A lot of times, that’s pretty easy. I'll go weeks without looking at a single Mac site (or Mac silo in a bigger site).
But when the anger comes with that bemusement part, well, that drives me crazier in the end. That’s where I just want to detach myself from the quote-unquote Mac market, and drift away forever.
This ultimately isn’t because of anything anyone is doing (or writing); it’s all about me. You see, back in the mid-1990s, when I was the editor-in-chief at MacWEEK, I crossed the line. I let us become part of the story, instead of covering it the way a journalist should.
At the time, the Mac was on its way out (or so went conventional wisdom), and the only way that Apple would succeed was if they entirely opened up their OS and allowed clone manufacturers to sell Macs. That had been happening, but, by the end of 1996, things were fucked up, and it was really hard to see how Apple was going to pull it out. We certainly felt it at MacWEEK: advertising was dwindling, our core audience of IT professionals was increasingly turning to Windows, and Apple was stuck in a spiral of crappy products and inane strategies of colored boxes and cute icons.
This all culminated with the inexorable Gil Amelio keynote at Macworld Expo in January 1997. Hours and hours of drivel, culminating in the triumphant “return” of Woz and Jobs—but hey, we all got VHS copies of “Independence Day”!
[One of the zaniest phone calls I ever received at MacWEEK came the following week, from Amelio himself, asking, “Rick, was I really that bad?” It was almost as odd as running into Spindler at the ATM at the airport after Mac the Knife had cruelly eviscerated him for some bizarre moves involving Performa TV tuners and eWorld.]
With the acquisition of NeXT, and the return of Jobs, the issue of clones came to a head. The Jobs contingent inside Apple was adamant that the clone program had to stop, and there was an amazing full-court press from the primary cloners—Power Computing and DayStar, primarily—to stop Apple.
At MacWEEK, we didn’t want the clone program to fail, or stop. But instead of confining it to the editorial pages, sounding off from our bully pulpit, we let our passion drift into the news pages. It was a Cause. We were on the right side, and, if you read us in those days (our last full year), we were opinionated and never let up on how wrong Apple was. We became a shrill, one-note publication.
This wasn’t the fault of our staff—this was largely my fault. I let our editors and writers loose, and encouraged their passions. By the time I realized that we had gone too far, it was too late. We became part of the story, and, to be brutally honest, we had nothing to say.
To be fair, MacWEEK wasn’t going to survive. Even at the advent of the Internet era, a quick look at the economics of a newsweekly in a niche market pointed one way: down. But I didn’t help things. It saddens me, but I’ve done fine, and the world didn’t end, and a lot of good writers and editors found much more fulfilling careers rising from the wreckage of a great publication.
This is where that bemusement comes in. I look at some of the crap that gets thrown up on the Web these days, in the guise of “true” Mac coverage, and I remember how easy it was to get caught up in the passions of what was right and wrong. But the reality was that we got played. This was not about civil rights, it was about money, and Apple’s money won. (And, for the record, we were wrong, and Steve Jobs was right. Not that anyone cares.)
I don’t think Apple is a better or worse company than most others. I still love the stuff they turn out, and would much rather be pushing a Mac than a Windows box. But, for all of you who think that the Mac—or Apple, or the iPhone—is a Cause, and that somehow Apple cares about you, wake up. And for the folks writing and opining on all things Mac, remember that the world doesn’t revolve around you. You need to pay attention to providing solid, unbiased info about the products and trends in the market. Which rumor, what show, or who said what is not important in the long run. You might do well today, but if you want to be relevant in the long run, it would be smart to cater to a better audience.
If you're interested, my old friend Rik Myslewski wrote a nice overview of the Clone Wars for Macworld.com a couple of years back.
