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Look How Far We've Come... |
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 You can call me a double switcher. Go ahead, do it. I grew up in a household that was pure Mac from the day I can remember. An Apple IIGS was the first Mac I remember using. My dad, who is a high school music teacher, was hardcore Mac since the first day. To this day he still is, but is severely oppressed by a school district that is stuck on Windows. When I got to Middle School, I started doing more with Macs, games, Internet, etc. Finally, once I got into High School, I got frustrated. All my friends had Windows machines. I can even narrow it down to one thing that made me turn against my Mac based heritage. Command and Conquer.
My friend got this game, and had a PC network (before such things existed in households as regularly as they do today) and I would go over there to play with him, and suddenly my mind was opened to all sorts of games that the Mac world was closed to. I started working more and more with PC's and got away from Macs. For graduation, I got a Gateway 2000 P3 350. I got it a year early through my High School who got computers through a special program. Using this PC is what really got me working and geeked with computers. Sure I used the Mac before, but with this PC I got into the Internet, email, chatting, etc. From there, I upgraded to a whopping P3 550 that held me over my first 3 years in college. Gaming was my thing then, and it ran all the best games and I didn't have to worry about any of the hardware problems.
Along comes junior year when I knew my system wasn't handling the latest applications and was getting dated, so I talked to my friend Max about building a new PC. I got the money together and slowly but surely built a PC my own. P4 1.6. Nice machine, it's still what I'm using for PC stuff now, games run well on it, it has a gig of RAM, but that is where I've grown stagnant with PC's. I started to really hate Windows. Crashing, badly written apps, spyware, viruses, etc...it just got to be a pain. Now, for the 4 years I had been in college, while I had dabbled in Mac stuff where I worked, I had never really seen a big advantage. My dad was still into them and we talked from time to time. I also talked to my friend Maury about them too. It was there that I saw the OS X Public Beta, and was really intrigued. Being a college student, it was realy easy for me to talk myself into paying the $500-700 that it costs to build a PC, but to get the cash for a Mac at that time was pretty difficult working part-time making slightly higher then minimum wage. Once I got a high-paying internship, I decided I wanted to get a laptop for mobile computing at school. I did research and research and research. I finally found the laptop I wanted.
Titanium Powerbook.
I got the loan, and got the laptop. That's when it all started. Using OS X was such a nice change from Windows XP, simplicity, interoperability as well as interfacing with ANYTHING. I worked for a major corporation doing server solutions all day, and after staring at Windows 2000 all day, to come home to see OS X really made things relaxing. It rarely crashes, has great apps and great support. Since then I've not only totally switched over to using my Mac for everything except gaming. I'm a Mac specialist here at ITS at Bowing Green State Univerisity and love every aspect of computing on a Macintosh. Looking at Safari, the G5's, etc...I just think...
Look how far we've come...
So now I sit, filling out my applications for Apple...thinking about working for them in their new Lyndhurst, Ohio store. Being a Mac Genius sounds like a great job.
It's a great time to be a Mac user, everyone. Don't Forget it.
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August 5 2003, 8:49 AM EDT, by |
Comments:
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| Squirrel Master |
8/5/03, 10:02 AM EDT |
BG Rocks......Oww Oww Oww!!!
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| iKen |
8/5/03, 10:22 AM EDT |
It is a good time to be a Mac user, better than any time I can remember in the 13 years I have been a mac head.
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| Jonahan |
8/5/03, 11:07 AM EDT |
Great article...and I also agree that it's the best time to be a Mac user!
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| Wasabe |
8/5/03, 12:34 PM EDT |
I think thats the problem with alot of people who say macs suck. It's because they are thinking about the old OS's. They probably have never seen OSx. That would change their mind if they used OSx for even an hour.
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| Macinsider |
8/5/03, 6:03 PM EDT |
Thanks for the great response guys!
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| ZackMac |
8/5/03, 8:59 PM EDT |
With all that Apple is doing new... Panther, G5s, year-of-the-laptop, it is indeed a great time to be a Mac user.
Example: I just bought an iBook 900 over the weekend. Its' my first new Mac since my trusty (and still speedy, I might ad) PowerMac G4 400. It's been nearly three years since I've been this excited about a new computer. This thing is my baby... my friend... my companion. Already I've loaded it's 40GB HD with apps, music, and stuff from my G4. And I can't wait for Panther!
You just don't get the same feeling with a PC. An Apple Macintosh is truly in touch with emotion. For the past several months I've been using a Sony Vaio laptop from my job. It took only 10 mins playing with my iBook to realize how much that Sony Vaio sux0rs! The only thing I was using the laptop for from home was Outlook support. Now that Entourage supports Outlook, it's bye-bye Sony Vaio WinXP laptop. Good riddens!
Now if they'd only let me plug in my iBook to the network at work, I'd be even happier.
Great article MacInsider.
-Zack
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| Mr T |
8/8/03, 10:25 PM EDT |
Dude, the //GS wasn't a Mac... I started with a ][+, than ][e and up from there. To call the 2gs a Mac is a travesty. Fun machine, tho.
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| DoggerBlue |
8/13/03, 7:48 PM EDT |
Yeah, that's right the //gs was not a Mac, but when it came out, it was the next best thing. Great colour graphics, vivid monitor, and the best sound chip on the market even for years after it was discontinued. Thanks for the step into nostalgia ... I started with the ][+, switched to //e, then IIgs (passed thru the whole evolution of the conventions for writing '2'), then Mac Classic, then PowerBook 145, then PowerMac 7500 (probably the best workhorse computer with longevity that has ever been made, and which I have now upgraded to a G3 and I'm running Jaguar quite acceptably on it thank you), then iMac G4. And what the other dude said was true: there is not a time (in the last 20 years!) that I can remember being more excited by what's coming out of Apple, and more motivated to make some cash to upgrade.
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