Editorial

Posted on 24 Jun 2002 at 14:48

 

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There are many nerds in my life. Some are definitely Alpha Geeks, the kind of people who speak in Perl if they deign to communicate via primitive, bandwidth-inefficient verbalisation at all. Others are Lesser Geeks. These are the ones who can fix the odd crashing Mac, kick a laser printer into life, and do other useful things.

Then, of course, there's supposed to be the rest of us. Non-nerds. People whose conversations don't revolve around acronyms, and who realise there is a life beyond the screen. There are none of these in the MacUser office; we leave that kind of thing to Messrs Tyler and Shaar Murray at the back end of the magazine. We, in fact, live our lives vicariously through their tales of rock and roll excess. They, of course, call us up for technical advice. So the balance of life is maintained.
While we realise there's a substantial proportion of our readership who are ludicrously technical, we like to think that the majority are more like our back-page columnists - urbane sophisticates who love their Macs but are interested in the cool things they can do with them, rather than in the machines themselves. They are Creative people, with a capital 'c'. And the Mac, for them, is the supreme creative tool - the Mont Blanc pen of the computer world.
Yet there's a disturbing trend looming, something that threatens the balance of power in the world of the Mac. According to my spies, recent gatherings of Alpha Geeks have seen a flourishing of Macs, and especially the iBook. Alpha Geeks, it seems, are coming to the Mac like ants to sugar.
But what is the sugar that's drawing them in? What, after years of sneering at Macs, with their colourful good looks and playful operating system, is pulling them towards the creative person's platform of choice?
The answer is obvious: Mac OS X. An iBook running OS X connected to the Internet via AirPort is a recipe for a very happy Alpha Geek; a great combination of all the traditional command-line tools they love with the best Unix interface in the world, and all in a beautiful, small package.
These are people for whom 'emacs' means a text editor, rather than a poorly spelled plural of eMac. They're people who will read the previous sentence and tut, under their breath, that 'emacs is much more than a text editor'. They're often scary as hell - but they're also the people who'll do a lot over the coming few years to ensure the survival and prospering of the Mac and Apple.
For they're the gatekeepers to another world for the Mac. They're the kind of people who, on finding an obscure piece of hardware that doesn't have a driver, will write one - and publish their work freely for everyone else to use. They're the people who'll port applications, build cool toys, and make sure the Mac has programs that aren't available on Windows and that are super-cool to use.
The Geeks are coming, and I am glad they're on our side.

Author: Ian Betteridge