Appletell | Apple, Mac, iPhone, iPod | News, Rumors, Reviews, How-Tos

It’d be hard to think of a more popular technology than the VCR, which transformed the way people could watch TV, created the home video market, and brought the piracy issue out of back alleyways and into the home of everyone. And while home video is going stronger than ever, the ubiquitous VHS tape is now officially “dead” as the last major distributor cancels shipments.

Pop culture is finally hitting the eject button on the VHS tape, the once-ubiquitous home-video format that will finish this month as a creaky ghost of Christmas past.

After three decades of steady if unspectacular service, the spinning wheels of the home-entertainment stalwart are slowing to a halt at retail outlets. On a crisp Friday morning in October, the final truckload of VHS tapes rolled out of a Palm Harbor, Fla., warehouse run by Ryan J. Kugler, the last major supplier of the tapes.

And as I read this (looking over at the long-disused but still fuctional VCR sitting under my TV), I began thinking about how Macintosh, introduced in 1984, had gone through years of unpopularity and still hung on while VHS had reigned for years only to quickly pass away, unmourned.

The big difference, of course, is that Macintosh as a platform continued to evolve. There’s the familiar point-and-click user interface, folders and arrows, but that’s just a veneer placed over an operating system that works in a completely different manner, addressing an Intel chip and accessing peripherals over the Universal Serial Bus rather than Apple’s proprietary Apple Data Bus.

Wireless networking, ripping CDs, editing movies—these are all ideas that were added to the computer; “Macintosh” is more of a concept of how a computer should work rather than the OS itself. And it’s that idea that’s allowed the Mac to survive—to find an audience that would support it—when a more popular technology which couldn’t adapt, has died out.

Sometimes that adaptation has been forced. When Apple introduced the iMac with neither a floppy drive nor an ADB port, it was a sea change. You’d need to buy all new peripherals! What about all the data I had on floppies? But Apple bet the farm that the Internet was going to be the Next Big Thing, and that by embracing USB, it would be easier to get peripheral makers to write a bit of code for Mac, rather than gamble on making an ADB version (which were always difficult to find outside of mail-order catalogs). When Apple killed off OS 9, a group of developers asked for the source code to be Open Sourced, so that they could continue to tinker and develop the familiar system still embraced by the majority of Mac Users. Apple again said “no,” that the future of Mac was in OS X. Soon Mac couldn’t boot to OS 9 and eventually they stopped supporting “Classic” altogether. I didn’t even notice, because once I’d made the change to OS X, I realized that its benefits outweighed the problems of learning the differences in the system.

Now, of course, Apple is riding high on the strength of its iPod line, which has had its own evolution from a Mac-only MP3 player into a wireless internet device which also plays music. And the evolution hasn’t just been adding on features: the first was making it usable on Windows (rather than hoping it would lure Windows users to switch). More changes: switching to the dock port, including only a USB cable (cutting costs at the expense of supporting an Apple technology), ending Firewire support, all done with an eye on doing what was best for the iPod brand, rather than giving Mac users something to crow about. But whatever changes they’ve made, I believe that the iPod/iPhone is winning because Apple made it to be used by consumers, while making certain concessions to the music industry, while Microsoft planned the Zune in the opposite way: making businesses happy while figuring out the minimum they would have to do to sell it to consumers.

Ever since the Return of Steve, Apple has been making a series of hard decisions, many of which have cheesed off users, but almost all of which have paid off. The company’s market share is growing, and some are suggesting it’s because users who are frustrated with Vista are looking for a computer that can do everything they need it to do, but in a better way. And that “way” isn’t a technology: it isn’t Firewire or the PowerPC chip or the SCSI drive, because, as the death of the VHS demonstrates, all technologies die. It’s an understanding of how people use computers and how they want their consumer electronics to operate. Apple is a company, a MacBook is a product, but Macintosh is an idea.