These young men are only renting the Next Game machines, but they represent a larger community of hardcore gamers whose passions drive an entire industry. Even as major PC manufacturers such as Gateway and HP struggle with lowered earnings expectations, razor-thin profit margins and sluggish growth, one sector of sales remains healthy. The high-end gaming PC is in such steady demand that it alone keeps specialized manufacturers such as Alienware, Falcon Northwest, Voodoo Computers and others healthy. The rigs produced by these companies, costing upward of $6,000, are tricked out with fast processors, big monitors, artistic cases and the latest “3-D accelerator” technology — these days a GeForce 4 chip from Nvidia or a Radeon 8500 from ATI.

They’re the fast and furious of the PC world. And their specs are a moving target. A true gamer might replace part or all of his setup each year simply to play the newest games, games that each season further push the limits of what a computer can do. Just try running this year’s leading-edge entertainment on a computer from a year or two ago: In addition to getting suddenly sluggish frame rates, you’ll also miss realistically rippling water effects, the glint off an opponent’s helmet, or smooth, jag-free edges. To the true believers, yesterday’s tech is less than useless. It’s an insult.

On the other hand — to the dismay of the PC industry — the vast majority of productive users have been realizing for several years that they don’t really need a faster, newer computer just to run Microsoft Office. Though both Apple and Microsoft are scrambling to build new graphics features directly into their operating systems, such as translucent widgets and drop shadows that will drag current computers to a crawl, PC manufacturers are facing a hideous fact: Most buyers find that their two-year-old machine runs just fine, thank you.

Couple that with a shaky economy prompting businesses to hold off on capital improvements, and you’re looking at trouble for the consumer PC industry. But not where gamers are concerned. The market for 3-D accelerator cards alone — chips specifically designed to make computer graphics snap, crackle and pop — is worth almost $10 billion a year in sales to consumers and computer manufacturers.

These chips aren’t meant solely for testosterone- and Mountain Dew-fueled boys or lonely men spending hours in their custom-designed flight chairs, mastering the latest jet-fighter sim. Computer gaming pervades modern culture, threatening to unseat or overwhelm even Hollywood as an arbiter of cool. As a nexus of recreation, entertainment and computers, gaming has become a focal point for social concerns and entrepreneurial energy. The companies that make 3-D accelerators are feeding the dreams of a generation that seeks virtual reality entertainment on an ever more immersive, ever more addictive scale.

It’s a big market, and it’s getting bigger all the time, but it is also absurdly fast-moving and turbulent. And though the companies that make graphics chips increasingly serve a mass audience, their own profitability is pinned to keeping hardcore gamers satisfied. And that is no easy task. Gamers are fickle — their loyalty is not to brand but to performance. Indeed, one company, 3Dfx, which played a pivotal role in building this mighty market, was itself fragged barely two years after dominating the industry.

In 1996 3Dfx Interactive virtually created the demand for consumer-level 3-D acceleration hardware. Within two years it was king of the hill, with a capitalization of over $200 million. Yet by the end of 2000, the company was bankrupt and sold for parts. It’s buyer, Nvidia, meanwhile went from nowheresville to defining the legitimacy of the market. In late 2001 Nvidia was named to the S&P 500, replacing former high-flier Enron. While all around it the mightiest tech companies were falling victim to the dot-com bust, the telecom market collapse and the ensuing recession, Nvidia surged from strength to strength. In late April, when as a result of an SEC investigation Nvidia had to restate several years of earnings, the company ended up reporting that it had earned more profits than previously indicated.

Does that mean catering to gamers is a foolproof business model? Not necessarily, or 3Dfx wouldn’t have stumbled while Nvidia leaped forward. What, then, explains Nvidia’s success?

Cynics look at Nvidia’s close relationship with Microsoft; the company was one of the first graphics chip makers to endorse Microsoft’s software protocols for technical gaming support, and it was also chosen to manufacture the Xbox graphics processor chip. But Nvidia’s success is as much a tale of 3Dfx mistakes as it is of canny Nvidia prowess. Nvidia proved able to move with the agility necessary to keep up in a market keyed to hardcore gamer needs. 3Dfx, in contrast, promised too much and then failed to deliver.

Together, the contrasting fortunes of Nvidia and 3Dfx help fill in the background to an explosive period during which computer gaming rose steadily in cultural and economic prominence. The story of Nvidia’s rise, and rise, demonstrates how great the rewards can be for feeding the voracious maw of gamers who are always desperate for what’s better and faster and flat-out cooler. But the moral of 3Dfx’s decline, and fall, is that in this world of bleeding-edge technology the mighty can self-immolate at any moment. All it takes is another frame per second for another itchy trigger finger.

Back in the early 1990s, when many of those now making games were in their teens, 3-D was mainly the provenance of specialized arcade machines and high-end workstations. It wasn’t uncommon for home-computer gamers to be treated to lush 3-D scenes for things like introductory movies and then get booted back to Donkey Kong-like graphics for the actual gameplay. In 1993, in fact, 15-bit “high” color was state of the art, and the hardware focus was on video cards that could pump out enough individual pixels — the dots that are the building blocks of 2-D graphics (think Lite-Brite) — simply to bring color to that flat world. To be fair, this wasn’t just a concern of gamers; burgeoning applications such as desktop publishing and computer graphics saw more colors and higher resolutions as a boon, too.

But true-blue gamers wanted to bring home what they saw (and lost innumerable quarters to) in the arcades. Those games at first presented the 3-D world as a construct of green-on-black vectors, as in the original Star Wars and Battlezone uprights. Then came the color Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter from Sega, both of which presented an exciting hint that programmers could attain their dream of creating lively interactive worlds that might actually look real. The machines that drove those worlds, however, were custom-designed and expensive. Unless people were willing to shell out a few thousand dollars for a machine that could run just one game, a different solution would be needed for home gaming.

There was absolutely no consensus among 3-D technologists at the time; the goal of creating more realistic games was simple but no one quite knew how to achieve it. Call it anarchic or innovative, but during this period a flurry of 3-D techniques with Lewis Carroll-like names — voxels and surfels, ray-tracing and tiling — were all claimed as the holy grail at one point or another.

This experimentation (or confusion) was exemplified by the different tacks taken by two companies that sprang up, one in 1993 (Nvidia) and one in 1994 (3Dfx). The latter was founded by the arcade fan, engineer and amateur game programmer Scott Sellers along with Gary Tarolli and Ross Smith, all of whom had developed graphics hardware for the soon defunct company MediaVision. Nvidia’s founders likewise had engineering backgrounds — Jen-Hsun Huang had worked at LSI Logic’s “system on a chip” project; Chris Malachowsky had been a senior engineer at Sun Microsystems; and Curtis Priem, who also came from Sun, had been instrumental in creating the first graphics chips for the original IBM PC.

Some longtime industry observers say, in retrospect, that Nvidia’s first offering in the 3-D acceleration market was ahead of its time. As usual, that roughly translates to “It was a flop.” Or, as Brian Hook, a 3Dfx lead programmer in 1996 who now runs his own game company puts it, “Nvidia nearly died with their first product.”

For that first product, the NV1 processor, Nvidia took a leap of faith and chose to rely on “quadratic texture maps” as a way of describing 3-D objects. Instead of breaking a 3-D object into straight lines and building them up from triangles (polygons), “quads” define an object by breaking it into curved surfaces. It is, theoretically, a more advanced method that could provide a smoother look than polygons.

In contrast, 3Dfx didn’t go about reinventing the wheel. It stuck with what seemed to be the most popular, if not the most powerful, solution — polygons. But 3Dfx did contribute something important of its own. In the mid ’90s, PC gaming lacked a standard set of 3-D APIs (application programming interfaces). An API is a specific set of commands that enable a software program to work with an operating system — in this case, the 3-D APIs might tell the computer to draw a line somewhere, or to move it vertically. 3Dfx wrote its own APIs, reasoning that this would give all programmers a standardized set of ways to describe the images they wanted to build on-screen. They called these proprietary APIs Glide; it was both what led 3Dfx to the top and what played the biggest role in its downfall.

Glide allowed game developers to write accelerated versions of their games for computers sporting 3-D cards equipped with 3Dfx’s new-for-1996 Voodoo chip set. In so doing, it set the stage for a great gaming leap forward.

“Glide was necessary early on because — and this is something that many people forget — [Microsoft's own API] Direct3D didn’t exist when Glide was released,” says Hook. “It wasn’t until after Glide was released that Direct3D finally arrived — and the first iteration was abysmal.”

But Glide’s superiority over Microsoft’s offering was far from a deal clincher. When 3Dfx first began courting game developers, asking them to write games that would take advantage of 3Dfx chips, the company met with resistance. The developers not only saw more work in coding an extra version of their games for the as yet nonexistent owners of as yet nonexistent 3Dfx cards, but they also felt the card’s projected price of about $400 would severely limit the market.

The high price also caused problems when 3Dfx tried to get third parties to manufacture cards based on 3Dfx’s generic, or “reference,” design. (This handing-off to a manufacturer was standard practice among most video chip makers; later, when deviating from this paradigm, 3Dfx would make a costly gamble.) For consumers, the expense would be even greater, since computers equipped with a 3Dfx product would still need a 2-D graphics card — and this limitation remained until very late in the game for 3Dfx, long after competitors had released successful 2-D/3-D cards.

Hook says that at the time 3Dfx estimated it would sell about a thousand units a month if it was lucky. The rest of the company’s revenue, 3Dfx thought, was going to have to come from selling its chips to coin-op manufacturers, who could then make easy versions of its games for personal computers.

Then came 3Dfx’s lucky break. The price for memory chips — RAM — fell through the floor in 1996. The expected retail price for a Voodoo card dropped by almost $100, smashing through a psychological barrier. Manufacturers lined up to build cards with Voodoo chips, and game developers such as Core Designs turned out Glide-specific versions of games that stunned the gaming press from the fan boys to the jaded old coots.

Core’s Tomb Raider, with the curvaceous Lara Croft, became a worldwide model of the killer app for the new 3-D tech. PC owners without acceleration could still run the game, but they would see flat and opaque ponds rather than the Glide version’s translucent, shimmering water; their scenes would not have colored lighting; and, not least, the lower polygon count in unaccelerated versions meant that Ms. Croft’s greatest assets appeared a bit … pointy.

Another coup came when id Software’s game god, John Carmack, built a software compatibility layer that enabled 3Dfx cards to accelerate a version of id’s blockbuster game Quake. Thanks to Carmack’s reputation and the previous success of Doom and Doom II, Quake was a must-have, and it set a new standard for how a game should look; it alone prompted unknown numbers of gamers to shell out for a 3Dfx card. The company was on a roll.

As Thomas Monk, a writer for the Web site Accelenation, puts it: “In 1996 3Dfx produced a great product with fantastic image quality and performance. The transformation of Tomb Raider was evident for all to see and the Voodoo chip set was the most eagerly anticipated that year.” Other game developers jumped on the Glide wagon, writing effects-heavy games that created a demand for the Voodoo card, which, in turn, created a demand for more and more advanced-looking games. The cycle had begun.

While 3Dfx was revolutionizing the field, Nvidia was learning how to play nice with Microsoft.

“In 1995 Microsoft decided to roll its own 3-D APIs,” recalls Alex St. John, a former Microsoft developer who was one of the leaders of the effort to make the company a player in gaming graphics.

In true Microsoft fashion, the company “rolled its own” by purchasing another company — in this case, the British firm Rendermorphics, which had developed a set of graphics tools based on the polygon approach. Then Microsoft began approaching graphics hardware manufacturers, including Nvidia.

At the time, Nvidia had just made a deal with Sega (which would later fall through) for providing graphics acceleration chips for what would become the Dreamcast console. Since Sega and Nvidia were both exploring quadratic textures, it seemed like a good match.

But Microsoft, which had just purchased a polygon-based technology, respectfully disagreed.

“When the first [quadratic] products went out,” St. John says, “it was well known that Microsoft didn’t support them.” And so, he says, Microsoft put its considerable marketing power behind other companies, such as Creative, that were building accelerator cards using 3Dfx chips. Even though 3Dfx’s Glide was nominally competing with the Microsoft Direct3D API, the more high-end and accelerated games that showed up for Windows, the more desirable a new Windows-based PC would be.

St. John says he remembers making the point bluntly to Nvidia representatives, telling them, “You guys need to learn triangles [polygons] like everyone else.”

Nvidia took the advice to heart: “They got really religious,” St. John says. Nvidia began working on polygons.

Though having Microsoft on your side has rarely hurt a company, this was far from an anointing for Nvidia. The company still didn’t have a commercially successful hardware product; Microsoft’s own 3-D technology was clunky at best and drove developers away with buggy and difficult code. 3Dfx and Glide were still the darlings of a cabal composed of developers, hardcore gamers and the press.

It was a step, to be sure, and one that helped set the stage for the friendship that would eventually lead to Nvidia’s becoming the graphics-chip supplier for the Xbox. But Nvidia needed more than a helping hand from Redmond to start making its ascent.

And of course 3Dfx and Nvidia weren’t even the only players in the market — that is, if Nvidia could even be counted as a competitor at that point. By early 1997, companies such as Matrox and Diamond had their own products, some of which were even competitive with the Voodoo. The Voodoo name, plus the established Glide API, still held a solid lead in the field. But ATI’s Rage Pro 3-D card, which was catching on thanks to its ability to accelerate both 2-D and 3-D graphics, was a strong second.

But by 1997, Microsoft’s influence with developers was already beginning to make its own Direct3D API (soon to be rebranded “DirectX”) a serious challenge to Glide. And Nvidia wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.

According to Monk, “Nvidia had learned from their initial mistake regarding Direct3D and decided to adopt it wholeheartedly … This was not so critical while D3D was feeble, but eventually Microsoft would get their act together, and once developers had gained a greater confidence with Direct3D, they no longer felt it necessary” to support Glide versions of their games.

For gamers, Microsoft’s influence was increasingly noticeable. Purchasers of a new game would install it, learn that their system required an update of Microsoft’s gaming APIs, and then wait while the upgrade was installed.

And then ooh and ah at the wonders of new technology. The late ’90s were heady years, not just for stock market speculators, start-up entrepreneurs and a world discovering the joys of online life, but also for a surging crowd of PC gamers. Games like 1997′s Total Annihilation and Diablo, 1998′s Starcraft and Quake II, and a host of others improved technically by leaps and bounds over what had been released the year before. The startling pace of change for the software APIs, the hardware chips and the games themselves was just one more proof that time, in the Internet era, ran faster than ever before.

Later, at the turn of the millennium, time slowed again for most of the tech industry. The economy began to stutter and air exploded from the dot-com balloon. But for gamers and the gaming biz there was no break. The pace remained breakneck, and only the nimblest would be able to keep up.

First of two parts. Read Part 2.

The game market especially, Doom and beyond, has been owned by consoles and the PC since the Apple II’s obsolescence. As many have noted, 1990s-era Apple management reacted to taunts in the business world that the Mac was merely a toy by purposefully distancing itself from games and game developers. Today, a solid seller in the Mac market may rack up one third of the unit sales of an A-list PC title — perhaps 30,000 boxes instead of 100,000 — with breakaway hits such as Tomb Raider or The Sims being a rare exception. This doesn’t seem to bode well, especially for a computer that sits on over 30 million desks worldwide.

And yet, call up a Mac game developer today, ask them how it’s going, and you’ll hear them say things like “it’s been a great year” and “we’re optimistic.”

The release of Mac versions of new PC game sensations will still usually lag behind, frustrating Mac fans no end, but over the last year, there has been a healthy growth in companies catering to those who want to spend some particularly unproductive hours in front of their Macs. In marked contrast to the events of a few years ago, when game giants Sierra On-Line and Interplay forsook the Mac market, new companies are picking up the slack and some steadfasts in the field are adding staff.

One, United Developers, even went so far as to license the venerable MacPlay name — under which such games as Castle Wolfenstein and Descent were produced — from Interplay. The company also runs subsidiaries Mumbo Jumbo and Rogue, both of which are turning out Mac versions of titles that sold like hotcakes on the PC side. Henry Price, MacPlay’s director of sales, is happy.

“It’s been a great year for us,” he says, “though software is bounded by the economy, which has been weak, and there are two new game consoles. And,” he adds somewhat smugly, “this year has been considerably down on the PC side, year total.”

Price notes that his company, United Developers, had no A-list titles this time last year. But now it’s headed into prime selling times with Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Sacrifice, Aliens vs. Predator and more, including the already successful Baldur’s Gate role-playing game. Price says the change is partly due to his company having enough funding to make significant deals and assign the proper resources in porting a title from one computer platform to another. But it also helps, says Price, that the games market is more mature, with clearer marquee properties.

Delivering higher-profile games is key, agree others. Peter Tamte, long a player in the Mac game world, recently started up Destineer Studios which, along with its subsidiary Bold, is focused on bringing PC titles to the Mac. “A bulk of the top 20 PC games make their way to the Macintosh right now,” he said.

But getting a handle on exactly how many games for the Mac are sold is something like determining the current whereabouts of the Holy Grail.

Publishers, which are for the most part privately held companies, are reluctant to share hard numbers unless a title is a landmark hit (as was The Sims). Few tracking companies note Mac game sales. And even those that do, such as NPD Intelect, conjure up numbers that appear to ignore the basic realities of the Mac market.

NPD Intelect regularly puts out lists of the top 10 sellers in various software categories with numbers gathered from retail store sales. As in so many things, though, what’s good for the PC market doesn’t quite work on the Mac side of things.

Though Apple has in the last two years made a push back into the retail space, partnering with CompUSA and others as well as opening its own chain of boutique stores, the vast majority of sales of Apple hardware and software has been through catalog and online retailers such as MacMall, MacWarehouse, Outpost.com and even Apple’s own online store (representatives from all declined to discuss the topic). None of these are polled by NRD Intelect, nor are the individual companies, which often sell product directly from their own Web sites.

As a result, while the market for Mac games apparently supports the expansion of developers and publishers, who all claim strong sales, NRD Intelect numbers for the third quarter of 2002 show a drop of unit sales from 103,000 in the same quarter last year to 59,000 this year. Something’s not right, especially when two Mac game publishers contacted for this article casually mentioned they each had titles that sold over 30,000 units.

No one may know how big the pie is or what flavor it is, but the reports from the field appear to indicate that the games are selling. Which brings up the next question. Why? Why, in a recession, especially when personal computer sales are tanking, are games — and games on the Mac — doing well?

First up is the 9/11 argument: People are turning to relatively trivial entertainments, especially home-based ones, in the wake of horrible events. But this doesn’t account for why PC games don’t seem to be doing as well. It could be that the events of Sept. 11 have sparked a sudden sales downturn for some of the more violent titles that are sales linchpins of the PC market. Or perhaps the heavy promotion for PS2 and Xbox verions of some currently selling Mac games is resulting in a coattail effect.

But the most likely explanation is the growth of a more focused business model for producing, distributing and selling Mac-specific titles.

Tuncer Deniz, the editor in chief of the Web site Inside Mac Games, points to what some call the bad old days. “In the past, PC game publishers tried and failed miserably in the Mac market,” he says. Since they viewed the Mac market as just a small subset of their regular business, they put minimal effort and dollars into the attempt. Their inattention was partly understandable: There was little financial incentive to invest the time and effort for the modest (to them) profit a Mac title might show. The most telling example of where this trend would lead came last year when Sierra On-Line decided to shut down the work that was almost done to bring Half-Life, a tremendously popular PC game, to the Mac. At the time, the company cited future costs of supporting another version and maintaining both to ensure cross-platform online play.

This is just one example, says Deniz, of companies “releasing poorly done ports, providing awful customer and technical support for their Mac games, and putting zero dollars into a marketing campaign.”

Today, larger companies such as Activision, Electronic Arts and Eidos Interactive have learned to outsource their porting and publishing to specialized businesses. The porting houses, like Westlake Interactive, are comprised of programmers who know the Mac operating system inside and out rather than Windows experts trying to stuff that particular peg into a differentially sized hole. And the smaller publishers, including MacSoft, Destineer, MacPlay, Aspyr and others, not only maintain closer contact with Mac users and their targeted media outlets but also can react with more flexibility to bugs or, in a worst case scenario, when an update to the Mac OS breaks compatibility with their games (it happened most recently with MacPlay’s Giants: Citizen Kabuto and OS X 10.1).

What’s more, notes Deniz, this works out well for both the original PC and the contracted Mac publishers. By handing off to the Mac-centric companies, say, the work to bring Tony Hawk: Pro Skater 2 to the Mac, “Activision gets a nice check from Aspyr and doesn’t have to worry about the porting, the publishing, the marketing, etc,” says Deniz. “Aspyr, on the other hand, makes a decent profit since their overhead costs are low (it’s a small company of about 10 people or so), they have really good distribution in the Mac market, and know how to market the product in a Mac world.”

Compared to initial development costs that can run into the millions, porting even an A-list title totals between $100,000 and $500,000, according to Destineer’s Tamte.

It seems like a no-brainer, but it took years and plenty of failures before some companies learned to give up day-to-day control of some of their products. (There are exceptions — Blizzard Entertainment maintains its own in-house Mac porting and testing group and has seen solid successes with their Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo franchises.)

Finally, there’s one more mystery factor to evaluate for the present and future of games and the Mac: the ever-popular Mac OS X.

Peruse Mac-centric message boards, Web sites and professional groups and you’ll find every possible opinion about Mac OS X, Apple’s next-generation operating system that, though preinstalled on all new Macs, has yet to become the new default OS. Some see OS X as Steve Jobs’ Next Big Thing; some approach it as they would the Antichrist; others take a wait-and-see approach.

In general, consumers are hesitating when it comes to buying. In Apple’s second quarter 10-Q report filed with the SEC, OS X sales totaled only $19 million of net sales; in the company’s third quarter report that number wasn’t broken out but “software, service and other net sales” (which can include Apple’s other products such as AppleWorks, Final Cut Pro and others, as well as repair revenue) came to $230 million, down $30 million from the previous quarter. These aren’t the kind of numbers that indicate a gold rush.

As Apple itself admits in these reports, one reason users aren’t migrating in droves is the lack of applications specifically designed for OS X; older apps run, but within a “Classic” environment. This fall saw the release of Microsoft’s Office v. X, which will run on Mac OS X 10.1 (note the redundant nomenclature) only; this — along with more and more applications both large (Adobe Photoshop, soon) and small (IRCle) evolving to new versions — may tempt a greater number of users both professional and consumer.

Some developers have expressed a hope that Mac OS X would make it easier to port games from one platform to another. But in the world of Mac game publishers, where development money is never free-flowing and many customers are playing on older hardware, most companies are taking a cautious approach, writing games to Apple’s “Carbon” standard, which allows applications to run both on OS X and older operating systems, back to the now-venerable OS 8.6. “It’ll be great when we can do some OS X-only games,” says Mark Adams, president of Westlake Interactive, “but I don’t think we will until the end of 2002 at the earliest.” So far, only one game — MacPlay’s Giants: Citizen Kabuto — exists in an OS X-only form. Surprisingly, it sold out. Which could be good news not only for MacPlay but for Apple.

As more games play only in OS X and sell well, more game makers will feel secure coding for that operating system. Graeme J. Devine, a game designer and programmer at id Software, makers of Quake and the new Return to Castle Wolfenstein, (for which there will be a Mac version close on the heels of the PC release) can’t wait. He’s a “big fan” of the technologies that underlie OS X, stating, “Apple evangelists should only be saying ‘Cocoa,’ ‘Objective-C,’ ‘IB files’ and ‘QuickTime.’” (Cocoa is the OS X-native object-oriented programming environment.)

The more games that require OS X, the more people will be interested in that operating system. And simply to run OS X, which has rather stiff RAM and CPU speed requirements — oddly, almost as high as those for many new games — users may have to buy new iron. That’s good for Apple, which has always derived the lion’s share of its revenue from hardware sales. And it’s not so improbable: We all know some game fans who have dropped a hundred or so on a new video card or even spent a few thousand on a souped-up machine just to accommodate a must-have game. True gamers, like audiophiles, will not be denied.

Drawing a line back to game sales, Destineer’s Tamte says, “It’s my hope that OS X will cause growth in the sales of Macs, which will quickly make the Mac games market much more profitable.” He posits that “even a small growth in the rate of Macintosh sales will cause exponential growth in Mac game profitability.”

But even if Steve Jobs unwraps WunderMacs at next month’s Macworld Expo trade show (rumors are currently flying), don’t expect the Mac to be a heavy hitter in the gaming world the way the Xbox has suddenly become amongst consoles. As Suellen Adams, co-founder of Westlake Interactive, puts it, “We expect [Mac gaming] to remain the niche market it is but we don’t see that niche going away soon.”

In a post dot-com world, there are worse fates.

As Janelle Brown noted in her Salon review of Mac OS X, I may be setting myself up for accusations of being a Luddite (or simply a stick-in-the-mud), but I think it’s important to focus on what is lost in the change from the current Mac OS user interface to the Aqua-fied OS X. After all, even as Windows was slouching toward such “modern” OS features as preemptive multitasking, Mac users could point to Apple’s seminal, research-driven Human Interface Guidelines, which helped shape the Mac’s UI into one of the most usable and intuitive in the computer industry. But, as noted previously, Jobs, who seems to be the prime mover behind OS X, also seems to have little regard for interface engineers. And it shows.

It’s true that OS X offers more graphical goodies than the platinum theme of Mac OS 8 and 9, including translucent menus, throbbing save lozenges, photorealistic icons and multicolored window widgets. But after the first blush wears off, the new interface reveals itself as more hindrance than ideal helpmate.

The candy colors, for example, drew the ire of graphics professionals immediately after the first public demo of OS X in January. All the multicolored dollops, went the plaint, would pollute their perception of color in their work. In the recently released public beta, there is a quick option to drain these colors from the on-screen widgets, but here’s a tip for prospective interface designers: When a feature can be eliminated with little end effect, or even a slight improvement, it’s time to ditch the feature. As for the translucent menus? They’re good for reminding people of Apple’s style-setting computer casings, but try to read one of these menus when it ends up over a page of dense text.

Photorealistic icons, where your hard drive icon actually looks like an internal drive gruesomely ripped from the guts of your computer, brings up a more philosophical problem: The whole point of icons is to abstract meaning, from a specific item to a more general class.

Facing a door with a photo of Ross Perot on it, some men may decide to go elsewhere, fearing a lecture on tariffs studded with folksy yet incomprehensible sayings. Adorn that same door with the generic image of a man, and many will make a different decision, stepping inside for a little relief. What, then, to make of an icon of a compass and a loupe? You don’t have to start tossing around semiotics terms such as “unarticulated narrowcast codes” to see there’s a problem here.

A simple label — you know, words — might help, but OS X, perhaps loath to sully its pictures with ordinary, humdrum letters, strips icons of labels where they’d most help — in the “dock.” Ah, the dock.

The dock — that launcher, application menu and minimizer at the bottom of the OS X screen — may catch a few eyes, but from an interface design standpoint it’s a mess. It tries to replicate the combined functionalities of the Mac’s familiar launcher, Apple menu, application menu and “windowshade” feature (all of which are banished from OS X). That’s a lot to jam into one horizontal bar. It’s all too easy to end up with the same enigmatic icon, sans descriptive but unaesthetic label, representing a minimized application, a minimized document from that application, a running application and a button to be used to launch the application. What’s more, if you place multiple folders — MP3s, URL shortcuts, minimized windows and documents — in the dock you end up with a Rockettes-style lineup of identical, generic icons. It’s true that you can “scrub” over them with the mouse to reveal their names, but is that what you want to do if you have dozens of files docked? In an attempt to reduce the clutter of the average user’s desktop, OS X simply displaces it.

But perhaps OS X’s greatest problem for those who use their computers day in and day out is that it not only forces a sea change in how one works but requires users to conform to its system if they want to achieve any kind of OS satori. It’s OS X’s way or the highway, and there are plenty of other operating systems waiting to ask you where you want to go today.

The traditional Mac OS offered what Bruce Tognazzini, one of the founders of Apple’s original Human Interface Group, called a “spatial” orientation — that is, you could place a file anywhere in the virtual desktop environment. This allowed for dragging and dropping files as well as arranging your work patterns with any or no organization. OS X replaces this with abstraction, partially as a result of its Unix heritage and its stronger resemblance to its actual parent, NextStep, the operating system developed by the company Jobs headed during his forced sojourn apart from Apple. As a result, OS X binds you into keeping all your files in a “Documents” folder, your applications in another folder and so on. The desktop browser windows are evidence of this, with big, Playskool buttons that lead you to each of these. The problem is, do you work that way? If you’re like me and almost everyone I know, you have hundreds of files and dozens of applications and utilities. Is it easier to sort through, say, all your personal correspondence mixed with business papers mixed with pictures? There are ways to get around this, by hacking up the preapproved folders into little fiefdoms, but these methods allow you to work in spite of the OS, not with it.

Granted, there are some technical marvels at work in OS X, and even a few great UI innovations. OS X’s BSD base promises stability up the wazoo. And getting the “Classic” environment, in which older Mac applications can run natively, works very well. It’s not totally transparent — there’s a noticeable launch sequence and a jarring (or comforting) switch back to the traditional Mac OS look and feel — but the fact that Apple engineers basically got the Mac OS running on NextStep is a nifty technical feat. Add in the fact that running the Classic environment incurs no noticeable speed hit (unlike running the VirtualPC emulator on a Mac) and the boys in the lab should be proud.

They should also be proud of OS X’s “sheets.” Unlike in the current Mac OS, where alert and dialog boxes float freely and offer no hints as to which window they affect, in OS X they slide out of the relevant window and remain attached. It’s a crucial feature, especially in a system like OS X where you can continue working in one application even as another hits a wall. The Disney-ish way the sheets unfurl from each window is more than a bit cloying, true, but overall it’s something every UI should adopt.

What’s perhaps most disturbing about the new OS is that it’s not clear exactly who OS X is for. The geeks who’d love the BSD microkernel, command-line power and such have no need for Aqua’s pretty colors. Conversely, the beginning users most likely to be lured by shiny new objects could care less about protected memory and the like. They may appreciate a more stable system (to be fair, the last few iterations of the Mac OS have been rather solid for day-to-day use), but OS X with its arcane Unix physiology promises to change troubleshooting from an amateur’s to a professional’s job. And traditional Mac OS users, in Web sites, newsgroups and mailing lists, are loudly protesting that this isn’t what they signed on for; this isn’t what they’ve defended over the years; this is no more the Mac OS than Windows is.

It’s a paradox Jobs himself might appreciate, but a paradox may not be what you want on your computer.

Now, in a successful bid to shore up its ebbing market share, Apple is moving aggressively into the consumer market, pushing candy-colored iMacs and clamshell iBooks to people who may never have known the comfort of booting up a computer and being greeted by a smiling Mac icon. But will those enticed by the luscious casings be happy with what they find on screen?

Maybe. Or maybe not. This year, Apple made its first recognizable break with the tenets of its own Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), which have for two decades been the guiding light of the company’s operating system. As a result, the intuitive interface — long Apple’s strongest selling point — has been compromised.

It began with the April 20 release of a preview of QuickTime 4.0, a significant technology update to Apple’s multimedia player. Accompanying that update, however, was a makeover that violated almost every one of the company’s guidelines. Not only has QuickTime 4.0 (QT4) lost the look and feel common to every other element of the Mac OS, it “breaks” if you try to apply to it the same user behaviors that have long been cultivated by the operating system, such as clicking on the upper-right-hand corner of a window to collapse it. And this crack in Apple’s interface foundation is spreading: Upcoming Apple applications — including the video editor Final Cut Pro and Sherlock 2, the next iteration of the Mac OS “Find” function — are saddled with similar, and arguably damaged, interfaces.

Response has been overwhelmingly negative from developers and users. Online bulletin boards, like the Mac the Knife forums, have been flooded with complaints. A dissatisfied user named John Christie posted a Fix QuickTime page, noting that the new QuickTime “has an absolutely terrible interface.” QT4 has even been inducted into the Interface Hall of Shame: “The new interface represents an almost violent departure from the long established standards that have been the hallmark of Apple software,” says the Hall of Shame review, posted by Isys Information Architects, an interface design firm. “Ease of Use has always been paramount to Apple, but after exploring the QuickTime 4.0 Player, the rationale behind Apple’s recent ‘Think Different’ advertising campaign is now clear.”

If this new design philosophy proves to be a cuckoo, spreading and breaking the successful unity of the Mac OS, it could break Apple. After all, as some have said, if you want a poor imitation of the Mac, you might as well use Windows — at least you get the newest games that way.

When you opened a movie file in previous versions of QuickTime, you got just that — the movie in a standard window, with basic controls. At the bottom of the window there were small “play,” “forward” and “back” buttons. A pop-up vertical slider (revealed with a click on the speaker icon) controlled volume. These were all standard Mac OS cues — which made it difficult to distinguish QuickTime as a technology distinct from the operating system, which perhaps, to Apple, was a problem.

QT4, in contrast, presents a “player” that mimics the appearance of a real-world object — a high-tech Sony Watchman, say. Instead of opening a movie in a simple, Mac OS-standard window, QT4 presents movies within thick borders, designed to look like brushed metal, that consume valuable screen real estate. In fact, if you open more than one movie at once, you can quickly cover your entire screen. Despite this expanse of pixels, the QT4 player offers none of the standard Mac OS window elements, other than the “close” box, which has been so thoroughly made over as to be almost unrecognizable; if it weren’t in the expected upper-left corner, it might lose all of its functional cues. It takes some non-intuitive and time-consuming noodling to resize the window, and as for collapsing it — forget it.

It gets worse. Again, the real-world object metaphor dominates far beyond the suggestions of the Human Interface Guidelines. It’s true they condone the use of metaphors — after all, what are files? — to “take advantage of people’s knowledge of the world around them,” but they also advise designers to keep in mind the limits of the ability of the computer “to support and extend the metaphor.”

Case in point: QT4′s volume control evolved from a vertical slider to a thumbwheel in the beta version. A thumbwheel? On a real product, which you can actually touch with a finger, a thumbwheel is an elegant technical solution as well as good ergonomics. On a computer screen, though, it’s a disaster. Do you click and hold? Move the mouse upward in a straight line, or in an arc? It’s difficult to figure out, and to use — and this is the most-frequently used control in the application. The designers pulled back a bit on the final version and made it possible to control volume by dragging the mouse near the thumbwheel in a vertical motion; it works better, but not well, and the only way to come upon this trick is by trial and error. (Don’t even bother clicking on the speaker icon as you used to — that, for some reason, turns the sound off.)

QT4′s other controls, including such basics as the “play” button, are at least as confusing. I’ve been using Macs for over a decade, but the QT4 “play” button has become a continual source of bafflement for me. Traditionally in the Mac OS, buttons have three states, all with distinct visual features: normal, pressed (highlighted) and disabled (grayed out). The buttons in the QT4 player hew so strongly to the high-tech color scheme that all the buttons appear disabled. Open the player without a file loaded, and the “play” button looks the same as when a movie is ready to go. What’s more, if you press “play,” it highlights (as a Mac user would expect), but then stays highlighted, and thus looks enabled. I can’t count the times I clicked away uselessly before sussing this out.

There’s more, far more — enough to not only place QT4 at the top of the Interface Hall of Shame, but to engender criticism by Bruce Tognazzini, the founder of Apple’s original Human Interface Group and publisher of the free webzine In a review of the new QuickTime, he writes: “In the hands of an amateur, slavish fidelity to the way a real-world artifact would act is often carried way too far. For example, in QuickTime 4.0, you cannot click on the little drag bar in the bottom center to open the ‘drawer.’ Instead, you must physically drag the bar down the screen. You cannot pass over the weird little buttons, like the one that looks like a shirt button on the right, and find out what they do. I guess since tooltips don’t exist in the real world, the designers have eschewed them in their fake world. Another big mistake.”

Finally, he adds: “I suspect you will see a lot more ego-driven design before things get better. I would suggest you do what I did, which was to move to a company that still prizes usability.”

Apple declined to comment on the changes in the QuickTime 4.0 interface or what they may mean for the future of other Apple interfaces. But design and usability are hardly trivial concerns: Look no further than the tremendous sales of Apple’s iMac, which was marketed on the merits of its sleek exterior and ease of use. As Tognazzini puts it: “Apple’s claim to fame is that you can plug the machine in and use it.” He adds, “a forgiving and supportive interface provides a smooth road to entry — as these anomalous interfaces [such as QT4's] come in, the road gets bumpy.”

Roy McDonald, the president and CEO of Casady & Greene, which produces and publishes software for both PCs and the Mac, agrees, saying, “The homogeneity of the interface standards is one of the things that sells the Mac.”

A cautionary example is the interface overhaul Adobe Systems gave Version 7 of Illustrator, its industry-standard drawing application. In the Mac version, long-standing keyboard and tool shortcuts were altered or eliminated. The changes were so unpopular with long-time users that there was a “huge backlash,” says Adobe’s Illustrator product manager, Ted Alspach; many disgruntled users decided against upgrading, which cost Adobe a significant chunk of expected revenue.

The Mac’s “easy-to-use” design has long been one of Apple’s strongest selling points. Schelley Olhava, an analyst at the market research firm International Data Corp., says innovative product design has been key to Apple’s financial resurrection; she points to the iMac, with its art-school profile, as “the turnaround for Apple.” Friendly design proved such a selling point, in fact, that it sparked a scramble among other PC builders who are now desperate to build more appealing-looking computers. (At Intel’s recent Developers’ Showcase, CEO Craig Barrett showed off an “Ottoman PC,” complete with leopard-skin upholstery.)

Just as good design can entice, poor design (especially in the interface) can dissuade would-be buyers — and worse, application developers, whose allegiance to the Mac is crucial to Apple’s continued health. “Stable interfaces are necessary for the development community,” says Tognazzini, who adds that when application designers can’t count on the OS interface behaving a certain way, they have to reinvent the most basic processes with each product as well as risk increased support costs. Though some deep-pocketed companies such as Adobe and Macromedia can devote time and money to such efforts, the majority of developers, especially those in Apple’s core markets of education and graphics, simply don’t have the resources.

Andrew Welch, president of Ambrosia Software, makers of the screen capture utility Snapz Pro as well as other productivity tools and games, says Apple’s “crown jewel” is the usability of the Mac OS. “Absolutely, if usability goes down, it’ll affect [Apple's] market share, and that’ll affect us,” he says. His own company might even reconsider new projects for the Mac platform if this happens: “If Apple no longer conforms to its own interface guidelines, why bother?”

Adobe’s Alspach also foresees trouble if Apple has eased up on its commitment to the Human Interface Guidelines. He says that designing an application is “tough when [the interface] is inconsistent between operating systems,” but inconsistencies within an OS make it tougher — that is to say, more time- and money-consuming. “In Windows, you don’t even know what controls do what,” he says, offering the example of quitting an application. In the Mac OS, the “Quit” command is always under the “File” menu at the top of the screen, and can always be invoked by pressing the Command-Q key combination. On Windows, Alspach says, the “Quit” command’s location in any given program is anybody’s guess, and keystrokes from Alt-X to Alt-Q to Esc might suddenly dump you out of a program. Such confusion was alien to Mac users, but should the QT4 inconsistencies crop up in other Apple products, it may become familiar.

Apple has made no secret that it (mainly, interim CEO Steve Jobs) wants to transform the company from a traditional computer manufacturer to the maker of consumer items. In a February 1999 interview in Japan’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper, Jobs himself has said that his goal is to follow Sony’s example of establishing a strong brand image as well as achieving integration with consumer appliances. And so the iMac — which changed the image of personal computers from foreboding technical monsters to cute consumer items. But hardware isn’t all Apple makes.

Apple is as much a software developer as a hardware company. And just as Apple has poured a lot of time and energy into creating a distinct identity for its physical products, it seems to be doing the same with its software. QuickTime is one of Apple’s most popular products, installed on almost all Macs and many PCs. Now, QT4 has streaming capabilities that give it a chance of displacing RealNetworks’ RealPlayer in the streaming market much as earlier versions of QuickTime trumped Microsoft’s Media Player. But before Version 4 arrived, QuickTime had virtually no interface, and certainly no distinct image. So, how would users identify QuickTime?

QT4 was given a “look” — one squarely within the Sony/consumer product language, and one that follows the unsuccessful example of IBM’s RealThings project, which attempted to graft onto computer applications interfaces that mimicked real-world devices. (A CD player utility looked like a CD player, a fax application sported a telephone keypad, for example.) Though critics can debate whether the RealThings paradigm was simply botched or misguided from the start, it’s clear that QT4 designers paid it more heed than the original Human Interface Guideline’s warning that marketing pressures can compromise usable design.

Does anyone at Apple still care about the Human Interface Guidelines, or the ideas of usability and elegance that underlie them?

The Human Interface Group, which originally drew up the Human Interface Guidelines, still exists, according to an Apple spokesman, though he refused to supply any details on its composition or place in the company. However, sources both inside and outside of Apple say that the HI Group has been cut from over 30 people two years ago to fewer than 10. “There may be a handful of people left,” said a former Apple employee. Of this handful, none are versed in interaction design — the key to the Human Interface Guidelines — and none are involved in specifying any of Apple’s current products, say others familiar with the group.

Some say this state of affairs is a direct reflection on Steve Jobs, who has a “definite antipathy for interface designers,” says Tognazzini, who worked with Jobs on the original Macintosh and Lisa projects. In fact, some at Apple say that Jobs was closely involved with the QT4 design, even dictating the overall look, though Apple spokesman Matt Hutchinson refused to comment. “Jobs refuses to acknowledge and realize the importance of interaction research,” says Tognazzini.

Before Apple, user design was an afterthought to technology companies, if it was thought of at all. There was little need, after all — technology wasn’t supposed to be fun and easy; it was the exclusive domain of buzz-cut, white-jacketed lords of the lab. It’s not too much to say that the 1984 introduction of the Macintosh (“The computer for the rest of us”) changed that for good, making the interface a notable and salable item. As Tognazzini says, “The rampant copying of the Mac interface testified to the bottom-line effectiveness of good UI design.” Do you honestly think there would have been a Windows 1.0, let alone 95/98, without the Mac?

Apple is now posting a profit and products such as the iMac and iBook have become minor cultural icons, so it seems strange to talk of the company as in trouble. However, when a brand jettisons the core of its identity, the thing that distinguishes it as it alone, the brand becomes just an empty name — New Coke without Old Coke, Disney without Mickey. And there’s no doubt that the Mac’s friendly identity is what gets people onto the Mac platform and keeps them there.

But that ease of use, based on a 20-year-old document that has apparently become as much samizdat as scripture in Jobs’ Apple, is not what the Mac OS will offer in the future, if QT4, Sherlock 2 or other recently proposed OS elements are the wave of the future. (At this summer’s Macworld Expo in New York, Jobs demonstrated a Unix-like “File Browser” he said would replace the Mac’s familiar Finder, which provides the virtual space where you place and organize folders and files. The crowd sat silent.)

The faithful, the true believers, are hard to alienate — but if you mess with the very foundation of their faith, expect some disaffection. New users, too — once they get over the initial rush of having an orange clamshell for a computer — may find little refuge from the frustration and confusion of other platforms if the Mac of the future follows the QT4 precedent.

Apple deserves great praise for making computers fun and friendly — on both the inside and the outside. Now, if it could only learn from the New Coke story, and the benefits of sticking by its original formula.