Opinion: Mac users are more interesting than Macs

12:45 pm, September 24th, 2008, Giles Turnbull

So, hello.

My name is Giles, and I am one of the new contributors here at Cult of Mac.

I’ve been given the job of covering the “Mac community and culture”. It’s the real “Cult of Mac” beat, and it came with a friendly warning from the boss, Leander Kahney: “It’s not an easy beat, because there are no press releases.”

And he’s right. The real Mac cultists do not tend to proclaim their Cult membership by issuing press releases; they are far more likely to post an image on Flickr, a video on Vimeo or YouTube, or a post on an obscure blog somewhere. My job here is to seek them out and share them with you lot.

So, what am I looking for? An obvious start: the crazy ones, those people Apple used to celebrate back in the old days.

People who collect Macs just because they like to rescue them from the trash can of fate, and enjoy the challenge of cleaning them up, switching them on, and making them work. Even if they don’t actually need another Mac in the house, because quite frankly four is plenty for most families.

Or people who use Macs old and new in strange and bizarre ways, like turning them into works of art, or hacking them to run outlandish operating systems, just because it can be done and it would be interesting to see it happen.

Or people who make their own handmade glass speakers just because “it’s a fun project”.

Even vice presidents who are so nuts about their iPods that charging them has to take priority over everything else.

Now, wait a second. Stop for a moment and consider: what is the one thing that unites all these examples? What one thing is common to all these ideal candidates for a Cult of Mac story?

Answer: “people”.

It’s people that provide the interest here, not computers. It’s people’s fascination with the machines and ideas for what they can do with them, whether those ideas involve any actual computing or not. That’s what my task here is all about: not the computers, but the people that that enjoy them, use them, code for them, play with them, and think about them all day and all night.

I like the sound of that. I like it not involving press releases.

Let me explain why.

The other day, I wrote a post about a bloke called Damian who collects old Macs and finds, to his mild surprise, that once he’s switched them on and found that they still work, he can’t get rid of them. He just casually said: “Once you discover that they’re working fine, you can’t get rid of them can you? You have to keep them.”

It’s that kind of gorgeous, delicious devotion to geekery that I find so appealing. Damian’s no nutter, he’s a perfectly ordinary fella with a wife and a kid and a job. And he was a pleasure to talk to. That’s one of the other appealing things about this gig: talking to real people about real things that they really enjoy is orders of magnitude more exciting and more interesting than talking to PR professionals about their client’s latest gizmo or most recent software release. Real people have so much more to say, and they are not being paid to say it either. They say what matters to them, and they say it with gusto and with passion, and they mean every word.

So if you’re one of those people — if you’ve got a Mac you’ve converted into an automated budgerigar feeding system, or if you’re working on an iPhone app that’ll call your boss for you on mornings when you fancy throwing a sickie, or even if you plan something as radical as text notes and todos that automatically sync between iPhone and computer (no, wait, that’s just impossible) — then I’d love to hear from you, to talk to you, and maybe to write something up about it.

That’s what most cults are all about, isn’t it? Spreading the word?

You can email Giles via giles (at) gilest (dot) org

Posted by Giles Turnbull in Opinions | Comment on this article