I spent an entire non-working day in front of my Mac yesterday, and this got me thinking: OS X has ushered in a new era of hobbyist commoditization, with great, well-branded little products like NetNewsWire and SubEthaEdit, written by single people or small teams, which work on the desktop, but extend it in really interesting ways. Out of favour for a decade or so (and smothered by dotcom avarice), this particular kind of hobbyist-oriented action is really hot right now. It's not so much about being a rugged individual than the fact that more than ever, you don't need to be a huge corporation to make a cool, well-polished product. It's the Revenge of the Well-Pitched Hack. This is clearly true for OS X's culture, which requires both elegant UNIX geekery and an appreciation of what makes a cool consumer product. The latter has always been undervalued in Linux geek culture, which is why its many innovations will stay in the ether, and why its desktop ambitions have always been completely unrealistic. Of course, the anti-commodity tendencies of Linux culture can often challenge the whole dodgy idea of "the consumer" and "usability" in the first place, which is great, but too often it's the good stuff about consumer culture (the well-honed experientiality, coming out of a perverse but undeniable relationship with real desires) that gets thrown out.*
Meanwhile, Apple has always been about the spectacle, of how the commodity becomes pure image. I don't like capitalism particularly much, but Apple certainly performs its sexiest theatricalities with panache, if not very much market share. Steve Jobs has always known how to clothe a commodity well, and like a lot of pop culture in general, there's a lot to be said for that. So when he brings both his marketing genius and an elegant, object-oriented UNIX framework to Apple, the scene is set, in a kind of social-Darwinist fashion, for a particular kind of hacker -- an ideal cross between Steve Wozniak (Apple's original engineer) and Steve Jobs (marketer). I use classy little OS X tools every day -- right now I'm writing this in Kung-Log, and shortly I'm going to make a little stop-motion movie with some Dalek salt-and-pepper shakers and iStopMotion -- and it's a pleasure to behold such all-round canniness.
But Apple's problem is that the emerging hardcore market for OS X is very specialised: aesthetic alpha geeks. The well polished, powerful OS is great for "the rest of us", but in many ways that's not the point, as Microsoft has proven. Meanwhile, the Mac's mainstream core market -- the publishing industry -- is still largely stuck in OS9 (Quark only ported to OS X a few months ago). So basically, OS X has become the platform of choice for a ghetto of influential enthusiasts. How this will play out is anyone's guess, but it's certainly an exciting time to be in the Mac ghetto. That is, if you don't work in print design. :)
