This is a post about Mac computers. Well, it’s actually not so much about the Mac computers themselves as it is about the changing computing landscape surrounding them. Actually, it’s not so much about the computing landscape as it is about my perception of that landscape and how it has changed in the past decade or so.

What I’m saying is that it’s very specific. But if you like computers you’ll probably like it anyway. If you just came here for trailer predictions and don’t care about anything else, you can see a nifty, “Trailer-Predictions-Only” version of this blog by clicking “Trailer Predictions” under the Categories box in the sidebar, or follow this link here.

I was born born into a Mac household. That’s totally untrue, since the first Mac wouldn’t be released until I was three years old, and my dad wouldn’t own one until 1993, but it certainly feels true. I played around with a Commodore 64 when I was a kid, but I didn’t really learn computers until that glorious Macintosh IIvx (which would become obsolete within months when its 68030 processor dropped off the bottom of many applications’ “minimum requirements” specifications). From the first time I loaded the demo CD-ROM into its 4X optical drive and started playing the game demos and promotional video (!) clips on its 640 x 480 13 inch (!!) monitor until I graduated from high school in 1999, I was a genuine Mac addict. Sure, I never played with the system settings or anything crazy like that. It was Dad’s computer after all. But the operating system was like an old friend, and whenever I was forced to wander in the Windows wilderness at school or a friends’ house, the sense of relief at returning to that welcoming “happy mac” icon was palpable.

During those six years, I also developed half-formed but passionate opinions about computers that bordered on political. I was like the Glenn Beck of Apple, the Keith Olbermann of OS 7.5.  If Windows was superior in any way, I didn’t want to hear about it, and I’d tell you why you were wrong even (especially?) when I didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.

Despite all my bluster, at the heart of this superiority complex was a sense of insecurity. If people didn’t support the Mac, it could die out! I needed to evangelize, to bring the lost into the fold, and bolster our numbers so that the platform would stay alive. Through it all, the thing that angered and frightened me the most was developers who didn’t support the Mac, especially game developers. The vicious cycle was evident, even to my addled teenage mind: nobody develops for the Mac, so nobody uses the Mac, so nobody develops for the Mac. You want to play Doom on a Mac? Have fun waiting an extra year. Want to play Fallout? Tough luck there, bud. I was left standing on the questionable platform that PC games weren’t important, and that the only games that mattered were available for the Mac anyway. This was woefully untrue in 1993, and it continued to be untrue until at least 1999, when I stopped using Macs.

I didn’t turn my back on the platform, but someone gave me a Windows 95 PC as a high school graduation gift which I soon upgraded to Windows 98 using my college discount. My loyalty to the Mac ran deep, but it crumbled in the face of a computer that was mine. I could do anything I wanted to this computer, and nobody would be upset. I could tweak it, install applications, uninstall applications, try those Windows-only game demos I’d been longing to try, and just generally make a mess of things with no serious consequences (except that time I messed with the bootloader and couldn’t figure out what I’d done). A couple of years later, I bought a new computer with my own money. Once again, it was a PC. I needed a PC to run the software I was using for school, and it was much cheaper anyway. My dad made the joke that the PC was dragging me into Windows much like marijuana drags people into harder drugs. It was like a “gateway” drug, except that it was a “gateway computer” instead. The joke sort of fell apart when we all remembered that it actually was a Gateway computer, with the cow logo and everything.

As most Mac fans probably know, 1999 may have been the best possible time to switch operating systems. In 2000, Apple released OS X, the most significant change to the Mac experience ever. Although it would ultimately lead to the company’s salvation, for the first year or so it was a mess of bugs and incompatibilities as Apple and the developers who wrote applications for the Mac all worked to figure out how this new system was going to work. There were layers of emulation, and plenty of old programs that were supposed to “just work,” but instead had to be run in a dual-boot environment (kind of like Boot Camp today, except that both OS’s were Mac OS). It was a headache that wasn’t fully resolved for most existing Mac users until years later. Those were the years I missed.

After I graduated from college, I finally bought a Mac. It was a G4 Powerbook, and it was beautiful. During my years in the Windows wilderness, I’d grown pretty comfortable with the Microsoft way of doing things. I’d actually started to believe that maybe, just maybe, the Mac way wasn’t really “better,” just “different.” It only took about a week with my new laptop to change my mind. I won’t elaborate on how the Mac was better; many people have written on this subject in more detail than I ever could. The important thing is that I felt like I was home, even though the interface was almost completely different from the OS 8.5 desktop I’d left behind four years earlier.

But something else was different, too, and here is where I finally get to the point of this article. The anger against Windows was gone. It wasn’t because I’d grown familiar and comfortable with Windows. If anything, switching from Windows XP to OS 10.3 made me even more annoyed with Windows in hindsight. No, the anger was gone because the insecurity was gone. While I was looking the other way, Apple had put together a serious operating system that was better in ways that the old Macintosh OS never was. All of those claims I’d made back in high school to defend the Mac against Windows were finally true, and they were so self evident that I didn’t have to preach them from the pulpit anymore.

Developers have started to take the Mac seriously, too, because the percentage of home computer users with Macs continues to grow. Business software is still focused on Windows because corporations mostly stick to large numbers of cheaper computers, but developers of quality software for single users, like games, are taking notice as Apple dominates laptop sales quarter after quarter.

Just the other day, I was looking at a website for a game that looked interesting until I noticed that it was Windows-only. That’s when I realized how much things had changed because I wasn’t mad at the game company. I was barely even irritated. Instead, I felt sorry for them. Why? Because they obviously didn’t have the resources to develop for two platforms. They had to pick the one with a greater user base (and which still has a disproportionate number of the serious PC gamers), but in the process they abandoned a potentially lucrative section of the market. They made the same decision that a game company would have made in 1999, but my perception of that decision has changed. I no longer assume that they ignored the Mac market, but rather that they had to choose to not develop for it. Presumably, they wish they could afford to support both Windows and Mac, but they just can’t.

It also helps that most of the really significant PC games make it to the Mac fairly soon after their PC release, and my favorite game maker releases them simultaneously. There are a handful of PC-only games that remain relevant for a long time, but for the most part, the most long-term successful games either focus on consoles or release their games for both PC and Mac.

It’s amazing how much things have changed, and I for one am happy with this new software landscape. I’ll still go on and on to anyone who will listen about the virtue of the Mac, but it’s a lot less religious now. After all, if someone doesn’t switch to a Mac today, it will be their loss, not mine, and certainly not all Mac users’.