The first computer I ever got was a Mac, back the the D.A.Y. when all you had were 128K floppy discs and no hard drive to speak of. The emergency disk eject was a hole you had to insert the end of a paper clip into. It was a grey scale screen and the mouse looked like a beige plastic brick.
But to me, that computer was the BOMB. I still have it down in my basement somewhere.
Throughout college I used that mac to write my papers, and it still worked pretty good (back when you could still get printer catridges for pinfeed printers). When I started my IT career, I moved over to Windows and never really looked back. I became that PC purist type that thought there was no way anyone could ever top the sweetness of Windows and the versatility of the PC.
So, when my wife suggested we get a Mac, I was skeptical. I knew that the Apple computers were known for their image and media capabilities (features I was coming to realize my Dell couldn’t do very well… at all). So I gave in when she insisted, and pretty soon we had a brand new aluminum iMac sitting on the desk right next to my big black Dell.
It didn’t take me long to gravitate back to the computer that started it all for me. The thing ran like greased poop down a slide, (which means fast), and it did just about anything I asked it to. My wife started noticing me jumping on it to pull up a web page instead of waiting the requisite four minutes for my PC to come out of hibernate.
The thing I liked about it most was that, when I wanted to pull video off my digital camcorder, all I had to do was plug in the firewire cable and turn the camera on in VCR mode. The mac would immediately pull up iMovie, rewind the tape in the camera, and start burning. No drivers to load, no configuration to set up, and no real intervention on my part necessary.
I started envying her screen size when we would play World of Warcraft (so much so that I was compelled to buy a 24″ monitor just to keep up with her).
Eventually I used my Dell less and less, and when I discovered the beauty of PC virtualization on the Mac, I took the plunge and moved all my applications off the old Dell and put everything on the Mac. I packed up the big box PC and hooked it up to the flatscreen TV (where it is used infrequently when we want to see something on the internet incredibly large). Now the Mac has two 24″ displays (the monitor I originally bought for the PC hooked up beautifully with a little Mini-DV dongle) and we use it to do our photos, budget, internet, and just about anything else.
It was the perfect computer… key word: was.
Then we installed Leopard.
Now I can’t get my firewire to work. It won’t recognize the camera, even though I hooked it up to the old PC and everything worked fine (so I know it’s not the camera or the cable). I called Apple support and spent over an hour trying to fix it, with no success. Now I am faced with having to take it into a Mac service place and get it fixed. This, to IT professionals and computer enthusiasts like myself, is like accepting defeat. But I don’t know what else to do… I want my stupid camera to work!
So, yes, I love the Mac. It is very powerful, the applications are easy to use and the whole thing is very quick. But I was not thrilled at all with the upgrade from Tiger to Leopard. It didn’t make the computer worse, it just made stuff… stop working. And for a computer system that preaches how much better it is than a PC… well, that’s a very Windows move.
