Our analyst looks back on 25 years of switching between the Mac and the PC.
By Joel Santo Domingo, PC Magazine, 23 January 2009
The Mac vs. PC "war" has been going on since many of us were still in grade school. As for me, I've been torn between the two for about that long. But switching back and forth for me was in large part a combination of necessity and desire. Let me explain.
I learned to run PC-DOS, program BASIC, and write Pascal programs on the original IBM PC in 1982. In those days, you got text with a text graphics card and bare-bones color graphics with a CGA adapter, and I thought it was the height of cool that I could play Microsoft Flight Simulator during downtime. I was so smitten with the new tech that when the ill-fated PCjr came out, I almost convinced my parents to get us one.
Soon after that, my buddy John showed me an article in Creative Computing magazine about an upcoming computer called Macintosh from the company that produced our "ancient" Apple II computers. I didn't think much about it, since Apple was obviously yesterday's news, and the future of the PC was all in IBM's hands. Apple II was a dying, closed-off system, while the IBM PC was the system that both businesses and consumers thought of when they thought of computers.
Then I got a summer job at a local Computer Depot, and consequently got some hands-on time with the Macintosh. The first-generation 128K Mac was underpowered, to be sure, but the new graphics interface sure beat having to type DOS commands just to get to the word processor and modem terminal program. Call me fickle, but when I "got it," the way was clear: Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) were the wave of the future. For college, I chose a brand-new Apple Macintosh Plus. It had the power the original Mac lacked, and by that time there were enough software packages to make it useful. I mean, MacPaint and MacWrite were cool, but you need to do other things like connect with CompuServe, right? That
Mac saw me through college, with an 800K floppy disk drive, a 20GB SCSI hard drive, various modems, Apple ImageWriter printer, and 4MB memory upgrades along the way. I upgraded to a Mac Performa 400 while in grad school. But, alas, the real world waited.
My first job out of college was as an IT dude at a major record label, where I serviced the art department, which, of course, worked with Macs. I got a crash course in Lotus Notes and saw how a mixed PC/Mac environment worked, which wasn't too well in those days. The lines were drawn between the creatives (Macs) and the corporate side (PCs). I still liked the Mac as a platform, but the incompatibilities were maddening.
You couldn't reliably get a PC-written Word document to read right on a Mac if you'd done any formatting on it. Even keyboards and monitors were on different, noninterchangeable standards (PS2 versus ADB keyboards, VGA versus DB15 monitors, and the like), leading to walled gardens where the Macs played with each other and the PCs did the same. Networking was just starting to bridge the gap, but the gatekeepers (network managers) absolutely hated that work, so it got done only when necessary.
My next job was converting a whole major news organization from an old MicroVAX to Windows NT Server. That was hardly fun, but I finally saw how the real world worked (or so I thought), and I started carrying around a Toshiba Satellite notebook with a Windows NT and 95 dual boot and a dongle that let me use a Motorola StarTAC as a modem. The PC world was simply better connected than the Mac world: The only way I could connect to my office from the road without a landline was with a PC. Aside from the technical compatibility issues, I found that on the whole, Mac users were walled off by the corporation that headed the news organization. Unless you were a powerful household-name "talent" or high-ranking executive, you couldn't get a Mac onto the corporation's computer network.
At my next job, which was at a graphics-intensive (read: Mac-loving) business, my work and home systems were a "reasonably priced" PowerMac 7300 and a PowerBook 2400c. I kept a few PCs running just so files could be exchanged reliably with the "outside world." It was fun (not!), transferring files on floppy disks between Macs and PCs, then e-mailing them from the PCs over our Mac- and IP-based network. After that company was acquired, I was back to Windows, this time with another Toshiba Satellite Pro and supporting Windows 2000 in the office, and I had to give up my Macs. This migration was less happy than one from the MicroVAX to Windows, since Mac users of the mid-1990s were even more rabid about "their" operating system than they are today. The entire staff rebelled, from the art department to the administrative folk. The in-house Mac database guys and our head of IT went off to start their own companies in the salad days of the dot-com era. There is always turnover in any business, but for many at that company, the Mac-to-PC conversion was even more of a reason to resign than the regime change or the acquisition. I was fine with the change, since PC developers and IT folk are easier to find and hire than Mac folk. For the time being, however, I was (again) a PC guy killing off the local Macs.
Finally, in 2001, I came to PC Magazine, where at the time Apple coverage was an afterthought. Mac knowledge on staff was limited to the art department, and those guys didn't write articles for the magazine. We had an Apple expert freelancer who wrote about all things Apple from his own walled-off garden. I didn't try to evangelize the staff, even though that was the only way to get Macs into a business at that point. I accepted that I was a PC guy in a PC-based environment. Homebuilt PCs and trusty ThinkPads (first a 600x, then a T40) were my rides of choice.
Then in 2002 , my wife got me my first iPod. It "worked" with my homebuilt PCs with FireWire cards, but there was something…lacking. I had to reformat the iPod way too often, and iTunes was a resource hog on the PC. I had to get a Mac so that I could have some stability in my music player. I was back to an Aluminum PowerBook G4, first a 12-inch then a 15-inch. The Intel transition of Macs happened in 2005, and now I carry both operating systems everywhere I go: a MacBook Pro that runs both Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard. Strangely enough, it's a working synergy: I use the Mac side for some tasks and the Windows side for others. I still have the ThinkPad, but it's relegated to e-mails that don't come through on Microsoft Entourage.
There are no more walled-off gardens: Using Parallels Desktop, I can even drag info back and forth from the Windows side to the Mac side on the MacBook. The future is Web-based, and all the popular Web sites look and act identically in a Firefox browser window. My iPod is now an iPhone, and even that works well with PCMag's Microsoft Exchange–based e-mail. It seems as if every time I switched from the Mac to the PC it was because I was forced to, while every time I switched back it was by choice. It's been a long road with many detours along the way, but in this case the two paths that diverged came back together, and that has made all the difference.
Related Articles:
Computer Review: It's bigger, but it's still a mini: The Dell Inspiron Mini
Smartphone From Dell? Just Maybe
Dell to Make Google and Microsoft Phones -- Really?
Dell Prepares To Dial Into Smartphone Marketplace
Android OS running on netbooks
No comments:
Post a Comment