Anti-Mac zealot (idea)

My beginning was a humble one. I was raised on Macs. My father purchased one of the first Fat Macs back in late 1984 for $3500, which was the same as what he paid for our brand new car 4 years earlier. I'm guessing that he had a really hard time convincing my mother that it would be a good thing seeing that $3500 was probably more than 15% of my dad's gross annual income at the time.

This thing was cool. It had life like sound, and had an amazing interface where you could move files around using the mouse. We had our standard programs that we would show people to impress them. We had MacWrite to do word processing. We had MacPaint to draw pretty pictures, and to top it off, we had Airborne and Dark Castle to show off the amazing sound effects and nifty games for the Mac.

After the Fat Mac, we upgraded to a Mac SE, then a Mac SE 30 with a 20 MB hard drive (woo hoo!). After that, it gets a bit fuzzy for me, but we had Mac LC's, a Mac Cent-something 630, a Power Mac 601, then a Power Mac 7200. So, up until the time I went to college my house always had a Mac in it.

However, during my sophomore year in high school, one of my friends got an Amiga. This thing rocked! It blew PCs out of the water, it had a similar mouse point and click interface as the Mac and better sound too. But FUCKING A! The thing had glorious color that made professional graphics stations bow their heads in shame!

So, I broke my piggy bank from all the money I had saved from being a paper boy and candy store clerk (don't laugh, I *will* hate you) and purchased a used Amiga 500. As I used my Amiga more and more, I found that I had access to a command prompt and could do scripting to automate things. I could hack on a it a little and write some programs. The one down side was that I didn't have a printer for my Amiga. So, when I needed to write papers for school, I needed to go back to the family Mac.

Going back to the Mac felt bland. Kind of like using the technics legos and then going back to the Duplo blocks (you know, the big ass "legos" for really young children). It felt like I was strapped down and couldn't do anything interesting. This was when I started losing feelings for the beloved Mac. As soon as I was done writing my papaer, I would quickly go back to my Amiga to continue my hacking and 3D model rendering bliss.

When I went to college, I thought I wanted to be a 3D animator, or special effects artist. But after the first few classes of computer science, my destiny was set. I am a programmer. This is where my feelings for the Mac took a really big tumble.

Looking under the hood of a Mac made me realize what total piece of technological shit it is. The programming interface is arcane at best. It offers very little protection in the way even Windoze does. In my professional opinion, MacOS is about 8 years behind Windows. This is not to say that Windows is good by any means (I give windows a 6 out of 10... at least its somewhat standard in terms of programming interfaces), it is just that MacOS sucks more than anything I can possibly imagine. I can write a program in 5 minutes that, doing nothing but legal operations (yes, operations that are 100% correct and allowed), will corrupt your entire Mac desktop leaving you with no option other than a reboot to clear the problem (if you can even find the menu to shut the machine down).

The reason that Apple is doing as well as they are today is because they finally realized the fact that their OS sucks for anything but the most simplistic uses and chose to market their machines towards people that will never do anything that would touch on the glaring problems with the OS. Hence, the color and look of the machines were marketed rather than the performance and abilities of the machine. Sure, they publish performance specs, but what are they always showing the performance of? Photoshop!! The largest percentage of "power" Mac users are Photoshop users. Why they feel that they can work faster on a Mac, I don't know.

I've sat next to 3 different graphics artists that use Photoshop on a Mac. The day usually consisted of lots of swear words from over the cube wall immediately followed by the infamous Mac "I am rebooting" bong sound. This happened a minimum of 4 times per day. Through all of this frustration, all 3 of the graphic artists swore that they worked faster and more efficient on their Mac. I honestly think the only reason they feel this way is because they know all the Mac keyboard shortcuts and don't know the Windows ones and don't want to learn.

To top it off, 1 year ago my dad called me and told me he had enough of his crappy Macs and decided to buy a PC. I was elated. I no longer had to play Mac tech support.

I am an anti-Mac Zealot. If people wish to use a Mac that is their choice. However, if you come to me asking my opinion as to what to get, I will always recommend a PC due to it simply having more and better software. Yes, the ease of use of the Mac was superior to Windows 10 years ago, but the difference now is merely academic. The way I see it, there is no logical reason to own a Mac. If you own a Mac it is probably due to emotional reasons and that is why the recent Apple marketing inititive has been so effective.

I use Unix (BSD, Linux, Solaris, etc) to do my work. I use Windows to manage my finances and play games. Maybe things will change when MacOS X comes out (so far it looks promising to me). But currently, in my universe, there is no need for a Mac. Well, that old Mac SE does make a cool door stop...