Recently I've heard people talking about the "Apple Look," as in this or that looks or doesn't look apple. As you can see from the above images, the idea of an "Apple Look" is utter bullshit. I'll also argue that almost any application worth using has custom graphics in it. How is someone suppose to make a custom widget have the "Apple Look?"
This reminds me of the 1985 New Coke scandal which I just got done reading about at Damn Interesting. I'll refresh your memory in case you don't recall. In 1985 Coke was losing the Cola wars to Pepsi and the Pepsi challenge, so they decided to make a new recipe which people actually preferred more often than not, in blind taste tests, over the old Coke. But do you know what happened when they released the new recipe? Chaos! There were coke delivery men getting attacked by women screaming that the new recipe tastes like shit and some people compared it to defiling the American flag.
My point being is that product superiority comes back seat to your markets perception and we all know that the Apple communities perception is way off. It's a community built off of elitism over an over-priced computer. Some people haven't been using Apples very long but I have, and I'll fill them in on a little secret, before OS X Apple sucked. Do you know what saved Apple? BSD and GNU. I was there, I saw the change, the early adopters of Apple were unix geeks and they saved the sinking ship Apple. So whenever you hear someone brag about how long they've been using macs just remember that they failed, it's nothing to brag about.
Now Apple has a new problem, their plan worked. They sold the "we're better than you guys, but for 2000 bucks you can join us" image, and no one likes that person. Those are the kinds of kids that couldn't keep friends in elementary school.
People used to like Microsoft as well. Ohhh the public loved Bill Gates! Apple had better rethink their image before it comes back to haunt them. It's worked in the short term, we'll see if it works in the long term.
If windows was the borg revolution, linux the nerd revolution, and mac the elitist revolution, then the web must be the freedom revolution. It's open to all comers, any hardware, any software, no setup, anything goes as long as it's good/useful. I for one welcome the new era of network over desktop. I can't wait until it's development environment surpasses that of it's desktop contemporaries.
For now I'll continue to use my Apple computer and develop software for it, but I'll keep my eye on the internet.
