On Tuesday, Frank Fox posted a riposte to
my recent column
in which I proposed that some of the magic has gone missing from Major
League Baseball and the Apple computer experience. Frank says that he
couldn't disagree more.
I appreciate the debate, but while standing my ground, I don't think
Frank and I are as far apart on these matters as he seems to have
inferred. It wasn't my intention to imply that I have soured on
baseball, which I love, and I remain a Mac fanboy. It's just that it's
not the same as it was with baseball prior to the 1994 strike that
killed the World Series that year, or with Apple computer subculture
prior to the second coming of Steve Jobs.
Perhaps its partly just getting older, something Frank alludes to in
his article. I expect that Steve Jobs would unreservedly agree that
Apple culture is radically different today than back when he and Steve
Wozniak were launching the company out of his garage and in the early
days of the Mac.
Baseball
Frank points out that baseball had weathered and survived
contretemps prior to the 1994 strike, citing particularly the 1919 "Black Sox"
scandal in which several players for the Chicago White Sox
conspired to throw the World Series in return for cash bribes. Indeed,
in his Historical Baseball Abstract, Bill James refers to the
period From 1910 to 1920 as "a decade wrapped in greed," which
culminated in the Black Sox farrago and was marked by falling
attendance, which had peaked at about 7.3 million in 1909, then
collapsed below 4.5 million in 1914, and never fully recovered until
after the reforms swept in by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the first
Baseball Commissioner, in the 1920s. However, while greed (or, more
accurately, frustration with player exploitation and poor pay) sullied
the 1919 Series, it took a more banal and less justified or defensible
form of greed to actually cancel a Series in 1994.
That said, I really share Frank's delight at the Boston Red Sox
finally winning the series in 2004 after a three-to-four generation dry
spell. Here in Atlantic Canada, the Red Sox had traditionally and our
"home" team for decades prior to there being any Canadian MLB clubs,
and while that classic era predates my own serious interest in the
game, many folks here remain loyal and enthusiastic Red Sox fans.
I was also glad to hear from a reader that MLB attendance has
recovered since the post-strike slump, and to read that the 2008 spring
training Grapefruit and Cactus League series enjoyed their highest-ever
attendance. Perhaps the magic is coming back. I hope so.
Mac Magic
As for the Mac magic, I don't dispute that today's crop of Mac
hardware is the best it's ever been, and that OS X is a singularly
superb operating system. My newest Mac, a G4 PowerBook, has been a
virtually flawless performer, now in its third year of service with me,
and is immeasurably better than my first PowerBook, a 1996 PB 5300 (Frank had one of those
too). I don't doubt that the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros are even
better, and the next generation of 'Books, sketchy details of which are
just beginning to filter out through the rumor mills, will be better
yet.
In my estimation the
aluminum iMac is pretty much the best value for the money Apple has
ever offered in any computer, the Mac mini is a fabulous little niche
machine, and the Mac Pro the
best desktop supremacy computer Apple has ever built. Even the MacBook Air, with which I am
personally not all that smitten, at least shows that Apple is still
surfing the bleeding edge of design innovation.
To however, there is a je ne sais quoi quality, a sort of
ineffable combination of cachet, mystique, and fraternity - and more -
that just isn't there in the same way anymore. Macs are now just very
good computers incorporating pretty much the same innards as their
Windows PC competition, with a kick-ass great operating system, still
special, but not as special as they once were in the context of the
golden age of Mac subculture.
The Mac is now close to mainstream, and whatever else it is, the
mainstream is not magic.
