"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.