Let me clarify something: I am not “one of those Mac people.” I have been a user and owner of a Microsoft/Intel-based PC since 1984, when they were called “IBM-compatibles”. And, truth be told, I do not yet personally own a Mac myself unless you count the iPhone (although I use a couple of Macs that are owned by my roommate on an almost daily basis now).
The first computer I owned was (and is… it still works) an IBM PCjr. Yes, that’s right, the much maligned “failure” that was the PCjr, IBM’s first attempt at a true “home” computer. And I learned a lot from that computer, using and relying on it for longer than any other computer I have owned. I even upgraded its memory by soldering new memory chips onto a memory card’s board! I learned to look for details on system requirements and what programs really did in order to be sure they’d run on the not-quite-100-percent-IBM-compatible PCjr.
And I actually worked as a cooperative education engineering student for IBM from 1984 to 1986. As an IBM employee, I used to bristle at Steve Jobs public comments about IBM as “the enemy” and “Big Brother.” I knew IBM to be just like any other company: a collection of people, bad and good – but mostly good, just trying to make a living. I thought Jobs was an arrogant a$$.
But throughout that time, I recognized the Macintosh as a very nice little machine. It just didn’t make sense for me to own one at the time. The incompatibilities between the Mac OS of the 80s and 90s and DOS/Windows of the same timeframe were much greater than they are now. Heck, the two systems couldn’t even read each other’s floppy diskettes. Now there is no need or use for floppy diskettes. They have been replaced by CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DVD-Rs, DVD-RWs, and flash drives and flash cards, all of which use fairly universal file systems (ironically based on FAT32, an extension of the old MS-DOS FAT structure). So it is now much easier to go back and forth between Macs and PCs.
And that’s what I do. I use my PCs for some things (at work and for games) and Macs for others (video, iTunes, and development).
Steve Jobs may still be arrogant, but I also recognize that he is just a person, mostly good, much like those at IBM, who is trying to make a living and do something he finds meaningful. And he has become something of a visionary at Apple in the last decade or so. Apple’s products seem to stand apart because of it. As Steve Jobs and Apple like to say, “They just work.”
srhawk.com 