Like millions of other people, I've become a Mac user and fan over the course of the last 5 years. From about 2007 - 2011, it seemed like Windows couldn't touch a thing Apple was doing with its operating system (I'll try to stay away from phones and tablets for the moment). Leopard seemed to be almost perfect when it was announced, and Snow Leopard built on that core functionality. Whoever was designing these systems seemed to know how to build a program that got things done without a bunch of fancy crap that complicated the experience. But starting with OS X Lion last summer, the focus has seemed more on redirecting consumer spending back towards Apple than on improving the user experience.
Lion launched in the summer of 2011 with new features like Mission Control, the Mac App Store, Launchpad and inverted scrolling. All of them mimic or borrow from iOS software that was designed to function effectively with limited controls, small screens and direct hand gestures. And none of them really have a place in a desktop operating system. Writing for Gizmodo last summer, Jesus Diaz put it better than I can: "The OS X team has produced an incongruent user interface pastiche that won't satisfy the consumers seeking simplicity nor the professional users in search of OCD control." In the same editorial, Diaz's contends that Apple had gone askew by "attempting to appeal to everyone." With the announcement of Mountain Lion yesterday, I'm thinking that Apple isn't trying to appeal to anyone, but to create the type of simplified, restricted environment on Macs that already exists on iPhones and iPads.
The new "features" highlighted as part of Mountain Lion include Messages, a supercharged chat program, Notification Center, exactly what it sounds like translated directly from the iPhone, iCloud integration, Notes (this is a new feature?), Game Center, the most annoying of the forced apps in iOS, Twitter integration, and Gatekeeper, a program that forces you to buy all of your software from Apple provides upgraded security. Combined with the updates in Moutain Lion, OS X (the "Mac" moniker has been dropped) is now a powerful operating system with a ton of decorative iOS crap all over it. I'm sure a lot of this stuff is useful to some people, but in general, I'm not enticed. Where is the sleek, natural-feeling control, the machine that will do what it's told with smooth user control? If I wanted an idiot-proof Christmas tree of a system, I'd use AOL or surf the internet on a Wii.
And AOL is the apt comparison here. A few weeks ago, Adam Pash artfully decried the attempts of Facebook and Google to be what AOL once was: the be-all end-all of the internet, closed architectures whose design is meant to keep you within their system and only their system. As they've grown up, the services offered by Google and Facebook have only gotten bloated and creepy in a corporate-totalitarian sort of way. And the same thing seems to be happening to OS X.
Gatekeeper is perhaps the most telling feature of the new OS. By default, any program that you attempt to install that has not emanated from the Mac App Store or been registered by the developer with Apple is labeled as dangerous. A window pops up warning the user and suggesting that the offending program be deleted. These settings can be changed to become more flexible, but for many users, all software not approved by Apple will now be considered off limits. Gatekeeper is being touted as a security feature, one that coincidentally happens to direct users to Apple's own software (or software it profits off of). The direction this is going isn't hard to see: a computer architecture in which all software must go through the actual gatekeeper: the App store. And with every other feature seemingly designed to integrate iOS and OS X, Apple is moving towards full integration of all aspects of tech life into its own software and hardware, with all of the money going one way. Apple doesn't yet have the market power to do this, but it seems to be what they're gunnin' for. They are following the path that made Windows a progressively shittier product for a good 10 years: focusing on monetary domination more than user experience.
I'm also not writing to harp on Apple in particular. In "old media" as well as new, and across brands and products, this type of control is becoming more and more common. What worries me as much as the devolution of Mac OS X is the degree to which the internet and computer experience are slowly congealing around several huge companies, all of them working to make their products worse through a focus on control and commerce. We have a Google search enginge that redirects you to its own products, a Mac that tells you non-Apple software is dangerous, a phone that tracks everything you do on it, a social networking site which slowly removes its own privacy controls and sells your information all over the internet. I'm not saying that using Google, Facebook, a Macbook or an iPhone is currently going to stomp your freedom in some horrible way or that any of them are horrible products you shouldn't use (I use all of them); it's because I thought they were all so fantastic for a few years that it bums me out so much that they've all gone in the direction of gimmicks and control. I'm saying that as these things progress, there's a creeping feeling in my mind that all is not right, that the democratic aspects of the internet and the "tech revolution" are being increasingly rolled back by traffic directed to a few sources. Just as 90% of the media is the United States is owned by 6 companies, I guess the internet, and the programs we use to access it, are now the spaces being colonized.
