Doco puts Macheads under the microscope

Posted by Hitarth Jani | 10:14 AM | 1 comments »


A fan at the opening of an Apple Store in New York and, right, sex blogger and Mac fanatic, Violet Blue.

What is it about Apple products and the Mac in particular that inspires a fanatical, almost religious devotion among users?

The question has baffled marketers and others outside the Mac cult for years, so Kobi Shely and a band of documentary filmmakers went out seeking answers.

Over their two-year journey the seven-person team interviewed more than 50 "Macheads" for their film of the same name, which is due for release this year.

They included: Taylor Barcroft, the unofficial Macworld Expo historian with more than 3000 hours of footage in his private archive and three Mac cars with number plates such as "Mac Star"; Bruce Damer and Galen Brandt, Macheads since the '80s who operate the DigiBarn Computer Museum out of their barn in Northern California; Raines Cohen, the co-founder of the 250,000-member Berkeley Mac User group who helped spread the Mac community; and a "Mac family" with three generations of avid Mac users.

A trailer for the movie, published on the Macheads website, shows an interviewee saying of the annual Macworld Expo: "Muslims go to Mecca, we come to Macca."

Violet Blue, a popular blogger and sex columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, who also features in the film, says: "First of all, I've never knowingly slept with a Windows users ... that would never, ever happen."

But at the end of their long journey, during which the filmmakers spoke to virtually every prominent member of the Mac community, Shely hasn't come much closer to cracking the cult of Mac.

He said most Macheads volunteered "ease of use" and "design" as reasons for their devotion but this did little to explain how a subculture could develop around a computer.

"You can say that Sony PlayStation and Nintendo Wii are two brands that put design and ease of use as trademark but none really sprang a community around them," Shely said.

He concluded that the core reason for the Mac's unique success was Apple's ability to appeal to people's emotions.

When it introduced the first Macintosh in 1984, Apple ran an ad, directed by Blade Runner's Ridley Scott, during the US Super Bowl. The Orwellian-themed ad showed a tank top-clad woman throwing a sledgehammer at a TV image of Big Brother, which was an implied representation of IBM.

The ad, and subsequent marketing by Apple, positioned the Mac as "the underdog fighting the battle against the banality of the PC office computers", Shely said.

"Macheads developed a strong personal connection to their machine," he said.

"The Mac came not just as a machine in a box, it came with a whole community; they had the idea that they were part of something special, a social movement around a computer."

Shely isn't the first to try to dissect the Mac community. Leander Kahney, managing editor of Wired News, wrote the multiple award-winning book Cult of Mac in 2004.

Like Macheads, Cult of Mac presented a vast array of fanatical Mac users and attempted to explain their behaviour. In the process, Kahney became a devotee himself and is one of the people featured in Macheads.

Shely said he was inspired to create the film after witnessing the vitriolic reaction from the Mac community after Apple announced the ability for Macs to run Windows.

The Mac camp showed its typical air of superiority, saying the move would be like a gourmet pizza restaurant starting to serve Domino's, while the Windows camp fought back saying it was an acknowledgment of the superiority of Windows.

Those covering the Mac community frequently used words such as attachment, rivalry, obsession, religion, betrayal and crisis.

"I called my brother and told him that this issue stirs that much emotion we have to make a movie about it," Shely said.

He said several film distributors had approached him after the release of the Macheads trailer and the documentary would be released for "international screening" in the middle of this year.

1 comments

  1. Raines // February 21, 2008 at 12:22 AM  

    It seems like their press release must have it wrong, so I'm setting the record straight wherever I find it: BMUG peaked at around 10,000 members, with a budget of perhaps $250,000.

    And personally, I think there's no mystery here: it's not the product, it's not the company, it's the people. Apple laid the groundwork that happened to bring together folks in ways that we started to care for and take care of each other... through User Groups and other connections. And that launched a positive feedback loop that continues to function today.

    Raines Cohen, co-founder, Berkeley Macintosh Users Group (BMUG)