Why copying is rarely competition

Dell announced (or rather posted) that they are discontinuing their MacBook Air rival the Adamo. It is pretty obvious that after Apple announced the Air a few years ago that many manufacturers tried to one up Apple in the thinnest and lightest laptop specs. They were copying and competing on those two metrics without really understanding the strategy behind Apple’s introduction of the MacBook Air.

In October, Apple said that the newest MacBook Air is the laptop of the future, and that the entire Apple laptop family would essentially be following suit. Bam! Apple’s strategy with the Air is finally revealed. They needed a product where they could experiment in the market on the dimensions of size, weight, and thinness. The used the MacBook Air to push the envelope of what could be done to reduce all of those factors. The unibody design, the lack of ports and drives, were all done to test the waters before moving the mainstream products in that direction.

Dell and other manufacturers were only creating one off products and copying the Air rather than using it as a strategic move for their mainstream products. So, today the Adamo project is done and Dell goes back to business as usual, while Apple goes forward revamping their entire product line using the lessons learned from the MacBook Air.

Grown-up Computing

I reread an old post by Marco that reminded me why I love Mac OS X. When I graduated from BYU in 2005 I also finished working at the BYU computer labs where we managed about 1200 PCs. We had a few really large computer labs and at one point there were a few Macs in the back of one of them. I voted to get rid of them because, well, they were a pain to support and maintain. It wasn’t that the Macs were bad it is just that when you have 1200 PCs and 4 Macs the support costs of the Macs was really high comparatively. I was also a big Dell fan. I had used and purchased Dell desktops and laptops for years and they had good (not great) support (at the time), although it was trending downward.

My first job after graduating was working for a small design firm where were used Macs. I was actually excited about learning about OS X since I had seen some of the cool features of iLife at the college bookstore and wanted to see what the Apple guys had been up to for the past 10 years.

On a PC I would customize everything, desktop background, mouse cursors, startup sounds, scrollbars, etc. On the Mac there isn’t much customization of the interface. You basically get to choose between two themes, gray with color buttons or gray with monochrome buttons. At first this kind of irked me, along with the transition of learning new keyboard shortcuts and some other things. However, the more I learned, the more I found that OS X did things the right way and Windows seemed more and more like a cheap knockoff. So much for Genuine Advantage. The menu bar at the top is a great example. It has simple icons on the right and dynamic menus on the left that change depending on which window you are focused on. The menus open downward with the most common options at the top. On Windows the Start bar is on the bottom (with the infamous, to shut down your computer, click, “Start”) and its menus open upward. However the most used items are still at the top. The whole thing is literally upside down.

On my Dell laptop, I would reformat the computer every semester. Yep every semester. That seemed to keep the machine running fast and efficient. I would defrag and troubleshoot problems all the time. I usually spent more time maintaining than getting anything done on the computer.

The Mac is different. It just works. If you want to write then write. If I want to read then I read. If I want to plugin a camera and import pictures then I can. I don’t need to download drivers and plugins and terrible vendor software to get my pictures and organize them. I just got more done on the Mac. It let me do what I wanted and got out of the way. No rebooting, no drivers, no defrag, no virus protection, no complex and intrusive utilities to maintain my computer. It just worked. Curiously, I stopped caring about customizing every little thing and started to focus on what I could use and get done on the computer. This was the start of what Marco terms “grown-up computing”.

So it has been 5 years since I started using Macs full time and my wife calls me an Apple addict. I’ve had a number of iPods, iPhones, and a bunch of MacBooks. Currently we have two iPhone 4s, a new (as of June) MacBook Pro, an iPad, and a 3 year old iMac. So we are definitely an Apple household. I’ve also converted my parents and a couple siblings (curiously just the girls…) over to Macs.

I get a few computer support calls every once in a while but it is usually a small toggle switch or someone trying to do it the old Windows way (it is usually easier and much less work than they thought). This is great for me because I have a better experience on the computer, they have a better experience and we all get more done so we can go and do something else.

The ironic part of this post is that although I think of using Macs for grown-up computing most businesses use PCs. I hope that businesses will soon grow up and see the light.