How--and why--one of TV's most charismatic geeks has used Macs for years, can't live without his iPhone, and has never regretted it.

 

Case Study: Adam Savage

Occupation: Cohost of the Discovery Channel's MythBusters

Gear: 17-inch MacBook Pro, 2.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4GB RAM, OS X's Stickies app for capturing creative ideas and notes, Adobe Bridge for managing thousands of image files

 

It’s funny and a little embarrassing how easily we’re influenced by advertising and stereotypes.

When Adam Savage, cohost with fellow special effects veteran Jamie Hyneman of MythBusters, the Discovery Channel’s geek cult hit, tells us why he’s been an unapologetic Mac user for over 15 years, his explanation defies our expectations. We’re sheepish to admit that we’ve got Apple’s "Get a Mac" ad characters burned into our psyche.

So for someone like Savage (who started his career as a model maker and special effects tech, working over the years for a variety of big-name outfits, including George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic) to say that he prefers the simple elegance of the Mac and its OS to flexing his engineering muscles building any kind of computer he could possibly want from the ground up (i.e., a PC), we have to admit, we’re a tad surprised.

After all, PC geeks are quick to trot out the argument that “you can build a PC from scratch and customize it ad infinitum” to support their affinity for the platform. Savage, on the other hand, favors a more pragmatic, surprisingly nontechie explanation. He doesn’t even mention OS X’s Unix underpinnings.

“It comes down to totally agreeing with Steve Jobs’s core philosophy, with his central tenet that successful interactions with objects that you use should get simpler, not more complex--that you don’t need to be watching the car’s engine running in order to drive it, that the experience should be intuitive,” Savage says. “Whatever you’re comfortable with is the thing you should use,” he adds diplomatically. “I’ve consistently found that the Macintosh works the way I think it ought to work.”

Once you've swam in syrup, broken the sound barrier, and fondled tarantulas, donning a giant space helmet and goofing for the camera is cake. Follow Savage on Twitter at twitter.com/donttrythis.

Having used a Mac laptop since 1993, when he bought a PowerBook 170 with proceeds from the sale of a sculpture, Savage has seen the Mac OS through many iterations. “Hook, line, and sinker, I love Jobs’s core philosophy of everything.”

Well, maybe not everything--particularly when Apple tinkered with iMovie by radically redesigning it with the iLife ’08 update.

Savage has no beef with the reasons Apple undertook iMovie’s makeover. “The problem is they removed functionality that I need.” He says features like splitting audio tracks and manually editing transitions are key to how he’s become accustomed to editing video on his 17-inch MacBook Pro. In April 2002, after Hyneman contacted him to gauge his interest in the venture, Savage used iMovie to make the demo reel of MythBusters on a Pismo-based PowerBook, the last G3-based PowerBook Apple made.

Busted--Usually.

MythBusters, if you’re among the few we’ve asked who haven’t heard of it, is a show for people who like to see how things work firsthand, primarily so they can win arguments based on demonstrated scientific fact, rather than reliance on conventional wisdom.

The show’s core aim is to shatter such myths as whether a person can swim as fast in syrup as in water, or if the only way to clean out the barrel of a cement truck is with dynamite. But myth busters Savage, Hyneman, Tory Belleci, Kari Byron, and Grant Imahara are often just as happy to confirm a myth’s veracity. The point is to investigate and to devise experiments--many of which involve blowing things up, putting hand-built robots or Buster the crash-test dummy in harm’s way, and doing other things geeks the world over dream idly of making a living at. This is all in the name of busting, confirming, or proving a myth to be plausible.

Savage Apple Technolust.

Savage’s MacBook Pro, which he plans to upgrade as soon as possible to a unibody model, goes with him everywhere and serves as a repository for show ideas, creative project ideas, and a library of video presentations he and Hyneman show at frequent university and corporate speaking engagements. Ditto his iPhone, which helps him stay a hero among the good-food-loving MythBusters crew when they travel around the country for shoots.

The GPS chip in his iPhone 3G (which he recently upgraded to a 3GS after an unfortunate show-related mishap left his 3G’s screen shattered) combined with the Yelp app, makes short work of scoring decent eats in Middle of Nowhere, USA. As tech tools go, Savage’s iPhone is “completely indispensable.” He’s even “gotten several notes from the producers saying, ‘Please stop using it on camera.’” When we first interviewed him for this story, the iPhone 3.0 OS update wasn’t out yet, but Savage was looking forward to the cut, copy, and paste feature.


Just another Bay Area hipster in ripped jeans working on his Mac—from the comfort of an ejection seat.

"I have nothing to say to my friends with BlackBerries, who say, ‘Where the f** is copy and paste on the iPhone?’” he says. "I have been so well served by Steve Jobs’s unwillingness to add dumb features--that it’s so elegant and simple. It’s OK for me to wait two years for copy and paste. The iPhone is a beautiful, beautiful machine."

Savage’s appreciation of the iPhone isn’t surprising, but we were intrigued by his go-to Mac apps, which are…wait for it…Stickies (yes, Stickies) and Adobe Bridge, the media manager built into Adobe’s Creative Suite.

Savage uses Stickies to keep track of lots of things, not least of which are future show ideas--"It’s the longest Stickie I’ve ever had. It’s constantly being updated and it’s always open."

Bridge, which Savage calls "crazy useful," helps him manage the tens of thousands of images on his Mac, both those he’s acquired from other sources to squirrel away for later reference and those he’s shot with his Canon 5D Mark II. He’s up to Adobe CS4 and wouldn’t give up Bridge without a serious fight. "I hated the first version of it, because it was choking up blood on my computer. With 40,000 photos, start asking something to look at them all, it starts dying. The functionality has improved so much since then."

NEXT: Q & A with Adam and a behind the scenes photo gallery