Bridging the gap between appearance and reality, and escaping skepticism, have never been easy. It is one of the perennial issues in philosophy. Trying to bridge the gap in a new way was Plato's great philosophical achievement. Consider a stick in water. Perception (what we actually see) tells us one thing, but it is wrong, namely that the stick is bent. Reason and memory, on the other hand, tell us something else, which is correct, namely, that the stick is still straight; it only appears bent. So Plato tells us the way to bridge the appearance-reality gap is through the proper application of calm and considered reason. Reason trumps perception in epistemic conflicts. Perhaps it is time for the Mac Web to take Plato's advice. First, a little background . . .

Appearances are the way things seem to be but are not. Reality is as it is. It is a distinction which has worried philosophers for centuries. After Heraclitus, who said that the world appears unchanging and stable, but in reality is in constant flux, philosophers developed the following worries: What happens if we confuse appearances with reality? What if we cannot bridge the epistemic gap between the way the world appears and the way it really is? What happens, for example, if what appears morally right is in fact morally wrong? Some, believing the gap cannot be bridged, resigned themselves to "living by appearances." And so skepticism, the view that we have no way to bridge the appearance-reality gap, was born. It is a philosophical problem we live with even today.

The distinction between appearance and reality is a very simple distinction. Examples of it are obvious to all. Consider: A stick appears bent in water but in reality it is straight; a white wall appears blue under a blue a light but in reality is white; a painting appears to have depth and dimension but in reality it is flat. Abstraction from this is easy: The world appears Euclidean but in reality, Einstein tells us, it is non-Euclidean. Go a head, look around you right now. Find things which appear to you one way but you know in fact not that way at all. See? It's all around us. It is a pervasive problem. And philosophers love pervasive problems. Now it might surprise you to know that it even shows up at Apple and on the Mac Web.

Rumor Mills

The problem is seen, first of all, on so called "rumor sites." They are, to put it frankly, the Jerry Springers of the Mac Web. ("Tonight on FalseMacRumors.Com: Lesbian Couples Who Cheat on Each Other and Have the Inside Scoop on the Pismo and Apple-Branded Palm.") These sites endlessly try to bridge the appearance-reality gap at Apple. More often than not, in fact almost all of the time, they fail. The appearance is the rumor; the reality is their predictive failures and Apple's actual strategies. Case in point: The SF Macworld Expo and the Pismo. Everyone, including this author, were tricked by the rumor mills about the Pismo. In case you don't know, the Pismo is the next generation PowerBook. Everyone was sure it was going to be announced at the Expo in January. It wasn't. But more than that: AppleInsider also claimed, falsely, that Mystic, the dual-processor G4 was going to be announced at the Expo. It wasn't. They claimed the 17 inch iMac would, according to AppleInsider," surprise the crowd" at the Expo. It didn't. And then there is the article, "Mac OS 9.0.1 to appear in January." Well . . . it s February and no 9.0.1. Need I go on?

These sites may have their successes. But they are few and far in between. But then again it depends on what you mean by "success." Most of what they publish is after-the-fact articles: Something happens, say a month ago. Few know about it. They announce it will happen in a day. The next day they show how it happened and so were right! The Apple "rebranding" is a case in point. Pathetic. Moreover, some sites are writing articles about why there was delay of the Pismo, that Steve Jobs seemed a bit "off-script," and this is because of the last minute Pismo pull. The simple fact is that we do not know and so skepticism is the rational response.

I noticed something interesting after the failures of the predictions at the Expo: I began to doubt Apple and Steve Jobs. Not that they are forever beyond doubt, mind you. But I was so sure the rumors were true that when they failed to actualize I was disappointed in Apple. "In Apple?" I asked myself. Herein lies one troubling after effect of the rumor mills' errors; We doubt Apple. I soon realized that in fact I needed to doubt AppleInsider and all the other Jerry Springer sites out there. Now multiply this by the thousands who followed the rumors and you get the picture: Thousands who are doubting Apple. Indeed, Steve Jobs hates these sites (so do we), and he is right, they hurt Apple by raising false expectations which are later dashed. This causes confusion in the consumer community and Mac devotees become suspicious of their pet company. This spreads to stores where shoppers are told that Apple "failed to deliver" on something no one really knows they planned to deliver in the first place. The sale is gone. (And it is never the rumor mill's fault, mind you.) So the simple fact is: Rumor sites hurt Apple, plain and simple.

The problem with rumor sites is obvious (to put it technically, as a philosopher that is): Their claims are not falsifiable. That is, they are stated in such a way that there is no way to tell if they are satisfied or not. (You know, like astrology and fortune cookies.) In other words, there is rarely a way to show that they are false. So, for example, it is not correct to say that the Pismo rumor was "false." Oh, no, it was right. It wasn't false. They say: "There was a last minute glitch. Just look at how Jobs acted, and . . . . blah, blah, blah." Think you can imagine a world in which the rumor was false? Think again. Rumors are like concept of "God": It is in fact difficult to conceive of a situation which would count as evidence against his/its existence. And then there is the fact that Apple loves to publish disinformation, bunny trails for rumor sites to follow while they go about their business. The healthy philosophical response to all rumor sites is simple: Skepticism. That is, doubt them regularly, doubt them severely, and doubt them with extreme prejudice. We the rational wish to live by reason and follow Plato's advice while the rumor mills blindly seek reality in Plato's cave.

OS X and Appearance verses Reality

Case #2: OS X. The appearance-reality gap shows up in OS X as well. And it has caused some problems. Not to put too fine a point on it, some silly writing on the Mac Web has resulted from it. The problem? The problem is that it appears consumeristic, but in reality is very "pro."

Notice the candy-like interface, the fluid new Finder. All very simple, all very elegant. The problem? It looks too simple and fanciful. It appears like something an AOL-using newbie would like. It just looks too playful. I mean really, gumdrop buttons? Fanciful windows? An almost playpen environment? It all adds up to one thing: Apple has become a consumer company. On the surface OS X appears very consumer-like; it doesn't look "professional," whatever that means. But when we take this appearance for reality we get into trouble.

Under the hood, in reality, we have a UNIX model (some say it is UNIX in fact). We have Carbon, a revolutionary way to port applications. We have Cocoa, a Java-like program language and environment. This will help pros and consumers alike. Want a simple application to sort emails on a server? Do it in Cocoa. Want a simple desktop calculator for scientific equations only you use daily? Write it in Cocoa. And then there is the "Classic" the environment in which we can run pre-OS X applications minus memory protection and Aqua. There is QuickTime, OpenGL and Quartz, all geared towards the professional user, though the consumer benefits as well. (See more info at Apple's site.) The candy-like appearance hides the reality of a robust computer shell. Those who claim Apple has become, or is becoming, a consumer company because of how OS X appears might be the ones who think Madame Marie Curie, the physics 1903 Nobel laureate, was just a "babe." This OS is no dumb blonde; she is beautiful and smart. One just has to think around and through the beauty to see it.

There has been a lot of talk on the Mac web about whether Apple has become a consumer company. Many find this state of affairs saddening to the Mac faithful. Is Apple really now the company of mini vans, cell phones and soccer moms? What about the power user? The artists? The designers? What about the unique, albeit a bit off tilt, Mac hippie? What about the Mac user group member? Are we feeling threatened by these new users? Is this just a stage middle-aged authors go through?

Apple has not left the power users behind. Apple is not aiming at the lowest common denominator. Apple is not "becoming Microsoft," as one article put it. Apple is not becoming a consumer company. I am saying this because Apple has always been a consumer company and so it cannot, obviously, become one! That was the whole point of the first Macs-to make a computer, as Apple said, "for the rest of us." Back then, "for the rest of us" meant "those who don t know all the hardware details and command line languages." Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't that what we mean today by "consumer"?

The pejorative use of "consumer" is itself interesting. It is like "newbie." (I do not like the word "newbie" because it has acquired a condescending tone. How about just, "new users"?) "Consumer" has taken on some negative meaning on the Mac web. "Consumer" seems to mean "someone who doesn't appreciate the Mac the way it should be appreciated." It means a Mac user who is not also a Mac Fanatic. He reads Fortune not MacAddict. I suppose this is pejorative also because it describes so many Wintel users: They are just users/consumers not fanatics and loyalists. They are the common person. Perhaps the Mac community's distrust of all things Wintel has caused it to look with suspicion on the new Mac users. They come from the same social classes and suburbs, after all.

But why is this a bad thing? Consider: When I listen to a symphony, say by Mozart, I do not understand all the technical ins-and-outs of the music. But I appreciate it. Why? Because I am not distracted by the technical aspects of the music. Now these new Apple "consumers" are like me when I listen to music. And this is the whole point of the Mac. They may not have "GETAMAC" license plates, or read MacWorld, or even know who Steve Jobs is. But at this point I ask that most important of philosophical questions: "So what?" We at applelust.com welcome all new Mac users. The more the merrier. We will take their hand and introduce them to the good of the Mac web, Mac magazines, and other things Apple; we will tell the history of the company and explain the beauty of the Mac thing we have. We will show them that core Mac users are happy to share our applelust with them. Who knows, maybe at some point they will turn into true applelusters themselves. Our exclusive club is still exclusive, it's just a bit larger. And no matter how large it gets, it will always be exclusive, won't it? And the last thing we want to do is drive people, new users, away because we are arrogant and supercilious. I even make it a point to go to a local computer superstore and help just these people out, throw out the red carpet and baptize them into the Mac family. We should all do that. If we act arrogant and rude, then we are no better than Wintel users (you know, the one's who know MS-DOS and expect everyone else to), and we are better than that!

There are many other things which the confusion between appearance and reality shows up. I cannot mention them all. But one other case of appearances confusing consumer matters is John Martellaro. In his article "Apple is Out of Business" he might have been seduced by appearances. He argues that Apple has no business strategy and in fact has no business reputation so that it can gain in that market. We realize that he uses rhetorical devices such as overstatement in this piece. And we find most of his stuff interesting, though we do not always agree with it. And we know Apple has long left the business sector to others. They are not inept. Now it certainly appears that Apple is clueless about the business customer. But ask yourself, "How do we get a business to change?" Easy answer; "Change the consumers who buy there." If Apple succeeds in changing enough consumers to the Mac, then the business community will follow. And what of OSX server and the G4 Server? What consumer buys these? They do have a "Power" line as well as a "Consumer" line, too. And Apple is targeting education and as an educator myself, at a university, I can say that universities are businesses too. It is time to slow down, my dear reader. Take a deep breath. Apple s turn around has been remarkable, but it will not happen over night. Prudence tells us to just wait and see. Apple knows what it is doing. Believe me.

I could go on and on about how appearances and reality become confused on the Mac Web. And I might to it in future articles. But Flatus's counsel still stands: Use reason to bridge the gap between appearance and reality and invoke skepticism only at the right times. It will be better for all of us, new users, old users, and everyone. It takes work, but as I have said many times, "Thinking Different is needful, but not easy." Think about it . .

David Schultz