Imagine picking up a pay phone to call directory assistance. You dial 411 no change necessary, of course. A recorded voice asks you what number you're looking for, and you speak into the machine, waiting for your information. Then you wait. While you're waiting, a funny thing happens: you hear an ad for the iMac. Your brain tells you your ears must be deceiving you, so you hang up before you get the phone number you've been waiting for, and try again.

There it is one more time, an ad for Apple's new fruit-flavored computers, coming at you and all of your fellow callers over public phone lines. Are you in Cupertino? On Skywalker Ranch? Traversing some Pixar-rendered version of Steve Jobs' fantasy world, maybe? No, you're Down Under, calling information in Australia.





These are the attitudes of todays Australians, as described by the Mac faithful on a continent halfway around the world from Silicon Valley. Telephone ads aside, Apple's place in the computer community Down Under isn't so different from its place in the American hi-tech world. Macintoshes have found their niches in the education, publishing, and multimedia communities, but only recently has Apple begun to market its colorful machines and user-friendly operating systems to the business and home-computing worlds.

With the return of Steve Jobs, the advent of the iMac, and the ever-growing swell of Internet users, Apple is beginning to position itself as a major player in the Australian computing market, much as it has recently started to do stateside.

Matthew Healy is the president of the West Australian Mac Users Group, and has been using Macs for eight years, which has helped him to "do all sorts of things for a living." He says that while many people in his city of Perth (pop. 1.5 million) think of Macs as "the coolest computer to own," few computer users actually own an Apple machine. "The main problem," he says, "was that the currency exchange rate between the US [and Australia] was making Macs substantially more expensive than PCs, which are made locally. This is changing, though." Healy, who runs a lifestyle magazine called Phenomena, owns a Web design shop, and does tech support, claims that while Apple is starting to pop up in cinema and in print and radio ads, most computer users in Perth still think of

Apple as a "dead" company. "PC users here seem to think that Bill Gates owns Apple personally," Healy notes; "I correct them at every opportunity. This is a shame. The major news outlets don't do much to help this, as you hardly ever see anything about Apple on TV. We see lots of iMacs on different shows, just no mention of the company itself." While bearing in mind that Australia's population is only 20 million, Healy says that Apple is gaining in popularity at a rate relative to what's going on in the bigger, more technology-driven U.S.

"PC users here seem to think that Bill Gates owns Apple personally,"

Healy's relationship with Macs began in the early nineties when the school he was attending set up a lab with Mac Pluses on LocalTalk with a sole ImageWriter printer. "Each student," he recollects, was given an 800K disk to fill with "system software, apps and a year's worth of documents. Try doing that these days!" Today, Healy's home setup includes a Centris, a Quadra, a Performa, two beige G3s and a Rev. A iMac, not to mention a mid-eighties vintage PC XT with dual floppies.

Much like Healy, Robert Hook was also first exposed to the Mac platform when Griffith University, where he was studying, in 1985 began installing Macs in their student labs. "They were absolutely hammered by students doing word processing and data analysis - and cutting code," he recollects. "My third year 'thesis' was in fact an analysis of the Macintosh as a platform to determine whether it was a 'real' computer or just some sort of toy. To prove the point a mate and I sat down and hacked out a 3D graphing program in Pascal ('PossumGraph. Unlike CricketGraph, it can climb trees!'). Was it a serious machine? Even at 128Kb with that dinky little screen it was obviously something amazing."

"huge Mac fan. It's probably my exposure to, and high expectations of, the lower levels of computing technology that led me to be so keen on Macs,"

Much of Hook's work is done for the Australian government, and involves systems design as well as "traditional" database work. As such, he has first-hand insight into the structural workings of workstation and network technologies, and is a self-styled "huge Mac fan. It's probably my exposure to, and high expectations of, the lower levels of computing technology that led me to be so keen on Macs," he explains. "My current beige G3 is, oddly, only the second I've owned, but I think it says something about the Mac that the LC575 I had before that was in active use daily for over five years, and still continues in use by a mate for desktop publishing."

Stuart Murdoch, a Melbourne-based artist who teaches photography at a post-high school level known in Australia as TAFE (Technical and Further Education), sees a similar feeling in the professional imaging community.

"The majority of Macs are owned by imaging professionals in Australia," he explains. "They use them because of stability and ease of use, mainly. I know one person who is not a graphics pro who owns a Mac and she uses it for its ease of use."

Murdoch, who now works on a beige G3 and plans one day to "get rid of my wet darkroom and do everything digitally," has been using Macs for about five years now, save for one work-related stint on the PC platform. "I did for a while in 97/98 work for a state institution that had a policy of IBM only. I learned a lot about computers in general in that six months. And the problems that I had with [my PC] made it a very unproductive tool. It kept the help desk guys busy, though!"

Despite the hardcore Apple brand loyalty displayed by computer professionals like Healy, Hook ,and Murdoch, the fact seems to remain that Apple has done nothing short of an overwhelmingly poor job of marketing the Macintosh in Australia. Hook pulls no punches when describing Apple's business strategies Down Under. "Apple and Macs have a serious image problem in Australia," he explains. "The general perception of the Mac is that it's too expensive and doesn't have any software. Obviously this is a misperception, but it's a very deep-seated one." He goes on to describe a phenomenon not at all unknown to Mac advocates in the U.S. "There is an ingrained and completely unfounded bias amongst IT professionals against Macs as desktop clients. Then parents and schools choose Wintel boxes because thats what's in use, and what the 'professionals' recommend."

Like his countrymen, Hook has seen the beginning of an upswing of late, but also says that Apple's work Down Under has only just begun.

"The uptake of Macs has been recent, and almost definitely due to the iMac," he says. "Most parents and many older people wanted a machine that they could understand, and the iMac arrived at the right time to be the machine of choice." Still, the company's marketing strategy has been almost nonexistent for much of the nineties. "Apple's presence - particularly its advertising - has always been appalling. There's been no attempt to debunk the myths of the superiority of the Wintel platform. The only time in a decade that Apple did a good marketing job was with the introduction of the iMac - and the market responded." Though optimistic, Hook offers this decidedly unbiased view of the company's business history in his homeland, "To be completely blunt, Apple's marketing presence and approach in Australia could be held up as an example of how not to market successfully."

With the iMac, and the iBook soon to follow, Apple has begun to reverse that trend in Australia, and the computer professionals there can see a future in which more and more of their friends and neighbors begin to appreciate the Macs elegance, stability, and ease of use. In a market stocked to the brim with cheap, no-name Wintel boxes, only time will tell, though, if our mates Down Under can be persuaded by the folks in Cupertino to give Macintosh a go.