For Mac Fans, the Fervor Has Died, but the Devotion Remains

Bliss consumed 14-year-old Michael Matas’ face as he held his hands high in the air, applauding repeatedly and exuberantly during the 1 1/2-hour meeting of the faithful.

It was almost like old times.

In the mid-1990s, when Apple’s Macintosh computer was truly an endangered species, meetings like this keynote address at the Macworld Expo last week in San Francisco resembled a combination of tent revival meeting and the “hate” indoctrination from George Orwell’s “1984.”

In 1996, for example, signs plastered all over the Expo declared, “You can take my Mac when you pry my cold dead fingers off the mouse.” A T-shirt that year asked, “If Microsoft built an airplane, would you fly in it?”

Michael had not even been born when the Macintosh was invented--coincidently, 1984--but he nevertheless had that old-time religion.

“I just feel like when I’m on a Mac, I’m a lot more creative,” said Michael, who had come from Seattle for the event and wants to eventually be a filmmaker. He is staying with his aunt in the Bay Area and persuaded his parents to let him skip a week of school for the Expo.

“Windows seems so dry,” Michael said. “When you’re on a Mac, you get inspired.”

Although it’s likely that few among the faithful at the Expo would have disagreed, the intensity of feeling had palpably diminished from the halcyon days.

After all, much of the fervor of the mid-1990s was stirred up by non-Apple computer manufacturers that were briefly granted licenses to produce desktops that would run the Macintosh software. That licensing was abruptly ended by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs after he regained control of the company in 1996.

And the disdain for rival Microsoft’s Windows operating system was dealt a blow when that company’s famed founder, Bill Gates, helped save Apple in 1997 by pouring $150 million into the company. Gates also promised that Microsoft would greatly increase its commitment to turn out quality software for Macs.

“We have to give up this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose,” Jobs told a booing crowd of Mac supporters that year when the Gates deal was announced.

The deal helped make Apple a player again, even though like other computer companies it has had several rough months of late. But at the Expo, the feeling that to be a Mac user was to belong to an endangered species was not in the air.

Cal Bernstein, 75, kind of missed it.

“It’s almost boring now,” Bernstein said. “In the old days, there was much more camaraderie, more sharing.

“We had a lot of fun.”

Part of that fun was to be had in the Mac user groups that flourished when Macs were more a novelty. But many of the groups--including the large one in Los Angeles that used to meet monthly in a downtown auditorium and host its own yearly expo--have essentially ceased to function.

There also used to be quieter meetings of devotees, where some software might be clandestinely copied and traded.

“There were pirate groups back then,” Bernstein said, smiling. “We’d meet in school rooms and some guy would come in with a whole box full of software.”

The user groups have not completely died off. Rick Calicura, 66, of the Diablo Valley Macintosh Users Group, headquartered in Walnut Creek, said membership in his organization recently topped 600 for the first time. “The iMac has been very, very good to us,” said Calicura, a retired probation officer. “We concentrate on getting the newbies, helping them out.”

But the Diablo Valley group seems to be the exception. Many in the Internet-savvy crowd at the Expo said that if they have a question about using their computer or a piece of software, they are likely to go online to get the answer. It was the old-timers, like Bernstein and Calicura, who had fought for respect as Mac users over the years who tended to be the most militant.

Karen Bringham is a public school administrator in Beaverton, Ore., where Intel--which supplies Pentium chips for PCs--has a major facility. But at the city’s elementary schools, about 85% of the computers are Macs, she said.

“They are easier to trouble-shoot,” said Bringham, 54. “And we use them to make our own instructional training programs.”

Does she get any pressure from the community to switch to PCs?

“We get some of that from the parents,” she said. “But Intel has worked well with us, and there has been no pressure from them.”

She feels more pressure from her own family.

“I have two sons who work for Intel, and they have been urging me to switch to PCs. But I’m standing my ground.”

Rick Wismar, 34, was spotted wearing a “Windows Killer” T-shirt at the Expo, but even he was not a rabble-rouser. Wismar works part time in a PC store in the Northern California town of Lakeport.

“I definitely prefer Mac,” Wismar said. “But I don’t think I’ll be wearing this T-shirt to work.”

Times staff writer David Colker covers personal technology.