The Mac Attack!!

Whew! It's been awhile since I've made a new blog post... errr like 9 month or so... but hey! I've been busy... and lazy... and dealing with real life... and avoiding real life.... and.. and....

Anyways... I was thinking about Apples... you know... the cult not the fruit. I've had a sort of love/hate relationship with Apple for awhile now and figured I'd spout off a little about it. This is going to take awhile so I'll probably end up splitting it up into a couple/few posts. So here it goes.

The history:

A few years ago, I was able to convince the bean counters that I needed a Mac for graphic/video editing when the company I work for decided to start working with professional printers, graphic artists, and website designers a lot more who always seemed to be asking if we had "that" (whatever vector art/video/logo we were working with at the time) in a Mac compatible format. I was going to just get G5 tower, but at the time my office space was very cramped, so I went for a laptop due to space restrictions. (plus I figured with the laptop I could take it home with me while figuring out how to use the sucker)

The last time I had touched a "Macintosh" was a horrible 6 months working for Apple doing phone tech support during the "Bondi Blue.. what color is your Mac?" era, and let me tell you... Apple spends a lot of money on public relations trying to show that it's not just a heartless company multi-billion dollar company like Microsoft, but at the time I was working there the only thing that mattered was money. Someone has a problem one day out of warranty, sell them a new Apple-care contract at hundreds of dollars or blame the problem on some other company.

(You use an aftermarket logitech mouse? That's why your computer isn't starting up! No, I'm sorry replacing it with your original mouse isn't going to help. I'm sure we can take care of that problem for you quick and easy as soon as you give me a credit card number)

Back then, nothing was really compatible between Macs and PCs. Oh sure there were ways of getting around that (just purchase this $49.99 program that will allow you to save in a Windows friendly format), but in general if you were on a Mac, you did Mac stuff with other Mac users. Then when you went to work and used an IBM, Dell or (God forbid) a Packard Bell running Windows 95 or NT. (ahhh to be able to friggin right click again!!)

And I'm sorry... (this goes out to all those Mac fanatics out there who used to tell me that Macs didn't have any problems compared to Windows) when you work in Tech support you get to hear about a million problems that the iMac had that were NOT caused by the user being... well a user. Sure I got the supreme idiots calling (My dial-up modem isn't working when I make a phone call with my single phone line), but there were a ton of calls like "I clicked print and the screen went black". So bite me!

Needless to say after six agonizing months I was able to find a random dish washing job that paid me a buck less an hour, and let me look at myself in the mirror again.

Fast forward 12 years or so....When I had the opportunity to purchase a new Mac on the Company dime, I of course went with the laptop with the most bells and whistles Apple had. The just released new Intel Macbook Pro topped out with memory (2 Gigs.. holy moly), the fastest processor and the largest harddrive. Cost around $3500! Yikes! When my boss at the time started to flip out, I reminded them that Macs are always twice as much as PC computers, and this was a laptop, which are usually twice as much as desktops. LOL at the time it was pretty much true... well mostly... hey Apple is expensive!!.... Anyways, it was one sweet machine. Definitely the most well crafted laptop I had ever seen. With the brand new OS X operating system and running on an Intel Duo Processor.

Boy had things changed. I hardly recognized the OS and had hardly a clue how to use the damn thing, but I figured it wouldn't take long to figure out. Boy was I wrong. Oh sure, some things were pretty straight forward. Installing programs was mostly simple. Just drag and drop an icon into your applications folder and Poof, it's installed. Of course at that time the switch to Intel processors caused 95% of any free or inexpensive programs for the Mac to break, so if you actually wanted a program to install you had to pay top dollar, but since I hardly new what I was doing and had a company willing to fork out money for software it wasn't that big of a deal.

So I installed a bunch of incredibly expensive programs that I was used to running on my PC. Photoshop, Acrobat, Dreamweaver, etc... And in general was able to open up and work on whatever graphic/video (Final Cut) was needed and save it in a format that the publishers needed. Then within the next year and a half it seemed like all the programs/formats that used to have issues between Macs and PCs were worked out and I found myself hardly touching the sharp looking laptop. Mostly I just got very frustrated trying to do the simplest things that I had no issues with when in the Windows world. Example, renaming multiple files in multiple folders without resorting to a complicated command line routine, or finding free programs that actually worked well. Half the programs I downloaded at the time just plain wouldn't do anything and since Apple have always tried to make things transparent for the user, there was no error messages or easy ways of figuring out what was wrong. Slowly but surely I found myself using the Macbook less and less out of pure frustration. I'd spend more time trying to figure out doing something simple than actually creating or playing.

But most of those perceptions I had about Macs has changed recently.... I'll tell you about it in the next post.