★ “How the Editor of Windows Magazine Became an Apple Fanboy”

Cult of Mac:

After trying a long list of horrible music players, I started buying iPods for myself and my kids maybe five or six years ago. They made me an Apple customer for the first time in my life. They gave me a reason to spend time in Apple stores and the Apple web site, both of which I found appealing.

The year 2007 was a milestone in the history of computing. That year, Microsoft shipped the first-ever major multi-touch product, the Surface table. Steve Jobs announced the iPhone early in the year, and Apple shipped it that summer.

I’m a huge fan of MPG computing (for multi-touch, physics and gestures). I thought both Microsoft and Apple would then aggressively pursue MPG systems, Apple from the bottom up, and Microsoft from the top down. But only Apple did so. Microsoft slept.

Although I was floored by the elegance and design discipline of the first iPhone, I didn’t buy one. I was enamored at the time with my BlackBerry Pearl, mainly because of its size (similar to a box of Chiclets), voice quality (superior to any iPhone), battery life (a week on a charge) and laptop tethering, a feature I used heavily on business trips.

A year later, Apple rolled out apps for the iPhone, and the App Store. I was completely floored by the combination of iPhone user interface, App Store experience and the endless possibilities of all those apps. I bought one, loved it, and in fact have upgraded to every new version of the iPhone.

The perfect out-of-box experience with the iPhone, the elegance of the whole experience of using an iPhone, re-set my expectations for how consumer electronics and computers should function. I started looking at the out-of-box experience of buying a Windows PC with a new contempt. The crapware. The stickers. The anti-virus software problem where the cure is worse than the disease. The flimsy hardware. It’s not so much that I despised Windows PCs, but that it felt like Microsoft and the PC makers despised them, like they all have no respect for their own platform.

When the iPad came out – forget it. I did something I never thought I’d do. I actually waited in line for hours outside the Apple store. This product was the biggest consumer electronics home run I’d ever seen in my long career of covering the industry. Apple actually came out with a product that’s so good that it can’t even be copied or emulated to any significant degree. Even now, well over a year since it shipped, there is still no such thing as a “touch tablet market.” There is only the iPad, and a smattering of irrelevant failures. I won’t go on about the iPad – my views on it are well known from the many columns and blog posts I’ve written about it. The iPad = good.

Then, about three weeks ago, something happened that altered my worldview a bit. My main PC, a Sony VAIO laptop, burned itself out. Literally. It overheated, despite a fan that sounded like a jet engine. It still works, but can’t connect to the Internet. Normally, I would have trouble-shooted the problem, fixed it or bought a new laptop. I also have older PCs around that I could use. But this time, my son was about to leave on a very long trip abroad and offered to let me use his 27-inch iMac. I was too busy to deal with the Sony, so I just used the Mac.

…and that’s how it goes.