Having to think about essential computerness

Years ago, a friend of mine who also uses Macs told me a story about why another mutual Mac-using artist friend chose the Mac over the PC some three decades ago. His technophile friends—of which he had many; this was Silicon Valley in the 1990s—often showed him what they were doing with their computers. The Mac users said, See what I did with my computer? But the PC users said, See what I figured out how to get my computer to do?

And so he got a Mac.

This has always been crucial subtext not for Mac lovers as much as for Mac haters. The specifics change over the years, but even the nerdiest Mac fans tend to appreciate that, by and large, they don’t have to think about the essential “computerness” of their Macs unless they choose to, while even the most casual PC fans—not users, but power users—tend to be inherently suspicious of any computer that doesn’t make its users think about that.

See, every PC fan knows at least one less tech-savvy PC user in their family or their workplace whose system is regularly FUBARed because they don’t understand things that are, to the power user, very basic shit. And then there comes the goddamn Mac, saying, “Hey, relax, you shouldn’t need to understand that. Look, I didn’t even have a command line for the first fifteen years of my existence! Have some kombucha. Kick back.” And it drives them absolutely bananas.

Okay. I suspect the power users I know (and don’t know) are already seething at me, but look. I ran Windows 2000 on my home PC and used Windows in various flavors at work. I installed Linux back when getting a GUI running on it required you to find the dot clock values your video card supported to enter them by hand in the XF86Config file. I’ve edited binary files by hand in hexadecimal on a TRS-80. What I’m saying is, I have walked the walk.

And, man, after OS X came on the scene, the most amazing thing happened: now Macs were Unix workstations—and still Macs. To this day, I still don’t think I can get PC users to really understand how flexible and extensible the Mac became under the hood once it became the successor to NextStep. (I have found that PC power users tend to judge customization on “can I reskin the windows” and Mac power users tend to judge it on “can I automate it”; I’m pretty firmly in the latter camp.) I can do everything on the Mac that I could back when I was running Linux and FreeBSD. But it’s still a Mac. This isn’t about being a walled garden—the Mac isn’t one, and I’m tired of uninformed or cynical arguments to the contrary—it’s about not finding myself trying to debug mysterious problems after the most recent major system update, or just because it’s been a year or two since I did a complete reinstall of the system. “Things will always eventually get weird and slow, and you should do a clean reinstall” has been advice for going on forty years in the Windows world.

But a disquieting thing has been happening over the last few years—some might say as long as the last decade, but I think I’d put it right around macOS “Big Sur” in 2020. That’s when the OS version number finally moved from 10.x to 11, the UI was redesigned in small, subtle ways (not all for the better), and Mac hardware started transitioning from Intel CPUs to Apple Silicon ARM-based CPUs.

More and more often, I have to think about my Mac’s essential computerness now.

Because sometimes things that were working just stop. Or don’t work right at all. For the first year and a half, the Studio Display itself occasionally had to be rebooted—the monitor had to be rebooted, because it runs goddamn iOS. For the last few months, I’ve been getting weird glitches with USB audio on occasion, including my external USB speakers just not working until they’re disconnected and reconnected. Lately, I’m frequently chided that I should have remembered to eject the backup drive from my laptop before disconnecting it, but there is no backup drive: it’s backing up to another Mac over the LAN. Most recently, in Big Sur, some of Apple’s new fancy screensavers and dynamic wallpapers just stop being dynamic until you kill their process to restart them.

And, like I said, I can walk the walk. I created a little Shortcut called “Kick wallpaper” that lets me restart that process easy-peasy. I was proud of that for the thirty seconds it took me to remember that I wouldn’t have to have written that little Shortcut if it wasn’t for Apple’s bug, one that they haven’t fixed in any Big Sur update.

What’s worse, sometimes the system just gets weird and slow. An application doesn’t launch at all, or some background task that should be running clearly isn’t. Desktop widgets stop updating, and since widgets have been the first thing in decades that’s got me finally embracing a task manager—that’s a future post—that widget better be current, or my task system falls apart. Hazel starts reporting weird errors, and after debugging, I realize Spotlight indexing has stopped. Why? Who knows. Will rebuilding the index fix the problem? Maybe. Would anyone but a power user even be able to debug this? Doubtful. Maybe they could just log out and log back in again, but I’m not sure most Windows or Mac users would think of that. They’d just reboot and hope.

Or do a clean reinstall.

I’m not going to pretend I’m going to switch to Linux any time soon, let alone Windows. There’s too much I’d miss. While I could find rough equivalents to Mac-only applications like BBEdit, Nova, Acorn, Ulysses, and Marked, there’s a coherence that I just don’t see anywhere else, still, after all these years. The Mac is, for me, still a better platform.

But I can’t help but wonder if modern Apple’s obvious inattention to software quality—there’s no kinder way to put it—is letting an important differentiator, potentially the most important one, slowly vanish. Now, once in a while, I sit down in front of my Mac and realize I’m not thinking what can I do with my computer. I’m thinking what can I figure out how to get my computer to do.