Heads up, people; the Father of the Macintosh is getting all crotchety again. Actually, we take that back; Jef Raskin's always crotchety, and we can't remember ever seeing him quoted anywhere in the past half-decade when he wasn't trash-talking the modern Mac. So it's really just the status quo that he's mouthing off to The Guardian (as noted by faithful viewer David Poves) about how "the Mac is now a mess" and "there is only a little difference between using a Mac and a Windows machine." While the gulf between the original Mac's point-and-click interface and the DOS command line has narrowed considerably with Mac OS X and Windows XP, we personally would never have thought to classify the difference between "elegant and empowering computing experience" and "wanting to shoot oneself in the head" as "little," but hey, to each his own.

Jef, for the uninitiated, is commonly attributed as the "Father of the Macintosh" because it was he who started the original Macintosh project to create what the marketing folks would eventually call "a computer for the rest of us"-- easy for non-techies to use, and more like a household appliance than a computer in the traditional sense. For that the Mac community certainly owes him a debt of gratitude, but before you get too deeply into the hero worship, it's worth noting that what Jef wanted to be the Macintosh was nothing at all like the Mac turned out to be. For instance, according to Apple old-timer Andy Hertzfeld at Folklore, Jef was "dead set against the mouse" and wanted to ditch it in favor of "dedicated meta-keys called 'leap keys' to do the pointing." (Think a one-button mouse is restrictive? Try playing Quake with "leap keys" sometime.) Because of idea clashes like that one, Jef left the project completely by the middle of 1981, before the team had even really started, so from a Mac-shaping perspective, he's not exactly all that and a bag of chips.

At least he has the sense to admit that his "original vision is outdated and irrelevant," and it's nice that he still feels that "the principles of putting people first and designing from the interface to the software and hardware are as vital today as they were then," but then he goes bagging on the iMac G5 for being "the unfoldable portable-shaped box on a stalk" (you can get a foldable one without the stalk, Jef-- it's called an iBook) and actually claims that "some programs [he] wrote in Basic on an Apple II ran faster than when written in a modern language on a G4 dual-processor Mac with hardware 1,000 times faster." So he's either stoned, nuts, or exaggerating, and if he's exaggerating, someone should tell him that anyone who sounds as pompous as he does really can't pull off hyperbole.

But hey, the world just wouldn't be the same without Grumpy Uncle Jef complaining endlessly about how the Mac isn't living up to its potential without ever offering a single concrete suggestion to make it better. And please don't tell him to "put up or shut up," because if he does the latter we'll be forever deprived of his pearls of unspecific wisdom-- and if he does the former all we'll have is a sequel to the Canon Cat.