PERSONAL computers are hard to like. When they fail to work as expected, they are irritating, counter intuitive, and a tremendous waste of time. When they do work, on the other hand, computers are just there. They do the job but it is the document, the drawing, the spreadsheet, the e mail message or the Web page that is interesting.
That is probably the view that most people take of their computers, but it is by no means universal.
A small minority of computers - the ten per cent or so that are Apple Macintoshes - arouse real enthusiasm, and sometimes even love, in their owners. The Mac, user can be spotted a mile off. He or she will talk about the neatness of the computer's design about its intuitiveness and ease of use and about the way in which you can switch on a Mac and start work right away with out wasting time learning about computers or the software.
It will not be surprising, therefore, if Mac users react more powerfully to the news of Apple's problems than others do. While the rest of the world is largely indifferent to the losses that the company revealed last week, and to the rush for the doors that those losses provoked among the company's senior executives, Mac users can be forgiven for being more wistful. For them, a world without Apple - a prospect that is now more real than ever before - would be a very different world from that of today.
When the Mac first hit the market, its principal competition was the IBM platform, which rang an operating system so hurriedly and shoddily designed that the company from which Bill Gates bought it on the cheap called it QDOS - Quick and Dirty Operating System.
The later commercial success of the PC standard, which curtailed the Apple offering to a tenth of the market, gave Mac owners a siege mentality, combining smug contemplation of their own virtue with justified anger at the victory of a clearly inferior technology.
Business pundits warned that by refusing to follow IBM's decision to license its technology to all comers, Apple had condemned itself to spreading research and development costs over a far smaller sales volume and signed its own death warrant.
Yet Apple's products continued to command a price premium which brought it a good living. The PowerBook range of notebook computers was an outstanding success and software houses' willingness to develop products for the Mac platform was surprising given its market share.
That party ended abruptly where Microsoft unveiled Windows 95 last August. Apple and its acolytes were derisive. The company even sent out earplugs to journalists to help them escape Microsoft's noise, and published" newspaper ads trying to remind the world that the features which Microsoft was touting as new and exciting had already been available on the Mac for years.
In a literal sense, that was true. But Apple's approach missed the point in two important respects. First, it was only Apple users who cared whether the good things in Windows 95 had been invented at Apple. (Even they faced some difficulty on this point, since many of the important features of the Mac were actually developed at Xerox's Palo Alto research centre in the 1970s.) To everyone else, the dispute over the fine points was ash pointless as the wars in Gulliver's Travels between the Little Endians and the Big Endians who differed about whether one should break open a boiled egg at its pointed end.
The second respect in which Apple's approach was misguided was that, by drawing attention to the similarities between 1995 vintage Microsoft technology and 1985 vintage Macintosh technology, Apple unwittingly, underlined its own slowness in, moving forward from the Macintosh operating system (OS).
Although not many customers bare aware of it, Apple does have a next generation operating system in development.
The new OS, which is now being released to developers for evaluation, was intended as a Windows 95 killer. But the project has run so late that Windows 95 will probably achieve a commanding position before the launch of the new product - not only with consumers, but also with software houses. Apple's problem is that to win back market share from Microsoft, the new operating system will now have to be quite outstandingly good.
The pessimistic conclusion is that the company faces a vicious spiral of declining market share, rising costs, shrinking resources and greater difficulty in delivering innovative technologies - and that though the Mac and its descendants will undoubtedly be around for a while, the battle for the PC desktop can be formally declared over.
A more sanguine line of argument from Apple's point of views is that Apple has confounded its' critics before. Even after the most recent defections, the company's ranks include some of the world's most talented computer scientists. Insiders also believe that the company possesses a number of outstanding technologies that will make Apple a takeover target even if its core computer business becomes fundamentally unprofitable.
Whichever view is correct, Apple and its creators still deserve thanks from even the least interested computer user. It was only the irritating example of the Mac that prompted Microsoft to develop a half decent operating system.
What matters from now is simply that some company should act the role of thorn in Microsoft's side for the future. Some say that Netscape's Navigator is moving in to fill the void. Apple's top management and its shareholders must hope that is mistaken - and that the Mac's descendants will again set the computer industry alight.