Three years ago now, I got my “Dual 2” PowerMac G5. It’s a great machine and it’s still kicking out everything I need it to do with hardly a wimper. Around the same time, I got my first subscription copy of MacAddict. I read that magazine cover to cover ans with my G5 followed every move that Apple made, as if knowing it gave me some special status. It did in a way, because that was a big part of what I did at work, I had to be on top of what Apple was doing and what new types of software and hardware were coming out so that I could support our iBook labs.
This last month, I let my subscription expire and short of a new product entirely from Apple, the only times that I’ve been finding myself paying attention to what it’s doing is around the big shows. My online involvement in the Mac community has gone from being a regular on SpyMac to looking in on MacBytes once a day to see what happened. So what happened? Apple has gone mainstream and either moves to fast or in too many directions to really make following it “fun”. This is similar is some ways to anything else that starts off as a niche or underdog area of interest and then goes mainstream. No my interests have turned to photography as hobby, with Apple watching as a pass time. Sure I’ll still tell people to get a Mac any day over any Windows only machine, and I’ll still use Macs for everything that I want to do, but as for knowing that this little bump or that has been made to the new MacBooks, doesn’t really matter because those are going to be more frequent now. News of the iPhone… well that has been said before.
Being an early adopter is certainly fun and can be very rewarding, but after the “rest of the great unwashed” (a favorite line of an old colleague of mine) start to come on board, the people who stay dedicated are either incredibly specialized in their knowledge or are there for only a short while until they learn what they need and then turn their attention elsewhere. But the vast majority just don’t or won’t care.
But if you look at other pursuits, like photography, when you get deeper into the hobby, you start to move into SLR and skill and synthesis of knowledge start to play a role. It’s not enough to know that the Canon 50mm 1.8 is good for a certain lighting condition, you need to know what to do if that condition changes. Back to the Mac for a second, it is possible to do the same thing – move beyond the outside of the platform and look at it as a tool that can be adapted for various situations and you have a geek that likes Macs (I guess that would be me).
(Gotta love s-o-c rants), I guess in the end I’ve just grown up a bit now and started to realize a few things (and make connections to Bloom’s Taxonomy) – chiefly that knowledge on it’s own isn’t worth as much as synthesis. Though in the early stages of a field, knowledge is often enough because there is not enough to really do much more until a critical mass is reached. In classrooms we do this all the time – we drill in facts and reward that, but then when we move into synthesis, we start to lose people. Are we rewarding to early? Should that first stage of learning a new concept be a reward on it’s own?
That’s about it for now… back to the rest of your RSS feeds everyone, thanks for stopping.
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