I’ve always been pretty neutral when it came to hardware elegances.  I’ve worked with many life-long Mac addicts and have always found their devotion to the Apple brand amusing given it inevitably leads to a comprehensive technology lock-in.

But even when Macs were clearly inferior to PCs (between 1997 and 2000 when Mac ran on OS9) and more expensive – the Mac faithful never faltered.

However, from where I type this today, I can see no less than four Apple logos on devices I purchased with my own money!

How did this happen?  When did I turn in into a Mac-man?

I’m not sure how it happened but I seem to have become encircled by Apple products.

I’ve always been pretty neutral when it came to hardware elegances.  I’ve worked with many life-long Mac addicts and have always found their devotion to the Apple brand amusing given it inevitably leads to a comprehensive technology lock-in.

But even when Macs were clearly inferior to PCs (between 1997 and 2000 when Mac ran on OS9) and more expensive – the Mac faithful never faltered.

However, from where I type this today, I can see no less than four Apple logos on devices I purchased with my own money!

How did this happen?  When did I turn in into a Mac-man?

Like most it started with an iPod, a small, innocent device with seductive looks and an ingenious flywheel interface. Who’d have thought it would the domestic Trojan horse for an army of Apple consumer products?

The iPod, of course, needs something to run iTunes on. Initially I used an old PC. But driving an iPod from a PC required more cables and didn’t run very well on the Windows platform. Queue my iBook purchase.

The iBook ran OSX, based on an old friend of mine, the Unix operating system, so we got on fine.

Next came the suggestion from the other half that we needed an iPod docking station to share our eclectic music mixes. I pointed out that we owned several thousand pounds worth of hifi and that listening to music on a couple of tinny speakers six inches apart would be a backwards step in our quest for high fidelity.

Queue the purchase of an AirPort. This Apple gizmo plugs into your amplifier like a CD player. You then beam music to it wirelessly from your iTunes. (Note: your neighbours can also do this and play their music in your living room if you don’t encrypt the device – hilarious the first time.)

Next, assuming I was an Apple man, my family bought me an AppleTV for Christmas.

Turns out I am. The Apple TV transforms your TV into a giant iPod for images as well as music (it also lets you access YouTube and Flickr ).

You load all your holiday photos onto it and create high definition slide shows for your TV. Dinner parties are always fun at my house!

The final nail in my Apple coffin was hammered home last week when my PC at work packed in. The IT department assumed I’d accept nothing less and wheeled in a brand new iMac.

Ironically, in a world where interoperability is increasingly cherished and the purchase of content without strings attached is universally desired, Apple’s proprietary products just keep flying off the shelf and into my life.

Is it down to the merits of the technology they each have given to the world and the fact that people love Macs and hate PCs, or simply that Steve has a personality and Bill does not?

Bill gets mostly maligned for creating technology that locks people into Microsoft.  

Yet, having just paid £50 for a replacement power lead for my iBook, only available from Apple, I’m inclined to argue that it’s Steve who’s got us sewn up!

His iTunes online music store is another example. Buy music from iTunes and you can only play it on iPods, thanks to Apple’s Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, called FairPlay.

Eager to regain the pro-customer stance, Steve recently posted an article on the Apple website explaining why this was not his choice. Steve wants to rid the world of DRM, and make all downloaded music free of usage limitation.

I’m not entirely sure why, when iTunes makes a big killing out of selling DRM music, although the ripple of applause he got from the blogosphere might have something to do with it.

Steve tells us that it’s the “big four” music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI records, that insist on DRM and he has to sell their music under their terms.

He points out that it is thanks to him that popular music is legally downloadable at all, as talking the big four into allowing their catalogues to be released electronically was no every day miracle.

He is now trying to convince them to let him remove the DRM.
According to Steve, only three per cent of music on the average iPod is purchased from iTunes and protected with DRM. The rest is unprotected, having come from CDs as well as both legal and illegal file sharing.
In other words, the music industry has already lost the battle, thanks largely to its own, unprotected format, the CD.
Meanwhile back in the evil PC world, where you can run Windows Vista on computers made by many different manufactures – for which you can buy new power supplies from Maplin for ten quid – Bill has been saying DRM is bad for months.

But nobody noticed. Despite hanging out with Bono and diverting most of his fortune to saving the third world, Bill just isn’t as cool as Steve.

Back in December, at the launch of Microsoft’s new Zune music phone, Bill expressed his desire to make downloaded music more portable between devices, but no one was listening then either.

Most read this as: “I want access to FairPlay so people can play iTunes downloads on Microsoft devices”.  Steve, controller of the world’s larges DRM Empire, says virtually the same thing, and few can see the irony.

Anyone who was anything else in the digital world, including Bill Gates, was at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Vegas at the time.  CES is now the largest gathering of geeks in the nerd calendar, but this year’s visitors had gone to the wrong party, as history was being made on the West Coast.
 
To use the words of the Holy One himself:  “This gadget combines a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough Internet communications device”.

He probably wanted to use the term ‘paradigm shift’, but his PR advised against it.

Having drooled over the video demonstration of the iPhone on Apple’s website for an hour myself, I think Steve might be right.

I’ve had many a smart-phone in my time, but none good enough to persuade me to leave my iPod, Blackberry and digital camera at home.  OK, I’ve never actually owned a Blackberry, for fear of ridicule, but you get the point.

The iPhone’s touch screen interface removes the need for one of those all too tiny keyboards that hamper other manufacturers’ attempts to make a truly usable device for sending e-mail.

This is by no means revolutionary in hardware terms, many other smart-phones have had touch screens, just none have had Apple’s user-interface genius applied to their driving software, to make them truly intuitive to use.

But perhaps the real breakthrough is the screen real estate. With no physical keypad the screen can extend the full length of the phone and make web browsing practical.

The use of the standard Mac web browser, Safari, means Mac users don’t have to learn how to use it either, although web designers will soon need to think about how their sites look on these mini-screens too.

Sadly we won’t be able to get hold of an iPhone in the UK until the end of the year and those who fancy importing one themselves from the States will have to take out a contract with Cingular, the largest network-operator in the US, who have the exclusive rights to distribute the iPhone.

There are some downsides to the iPhone though.  It’s not a 3G phone and it is rather expensive.

That means you’ll have to use WiFi hot spots to access the Web at a decent speed and want to spend $499 dollars on a phone – although some cash can be recouped by auctioning your iPod on eBay!

I’m still getting one though, as soon as they are released in the UK that is.  Unless, of course, the world stops turning again and Motorola, or Sony Ericsson, bring out the next best thing in the meantime.