My MacBook died last Thursday. Its logic board failed. I asked the techies at the Wasilla MacHaus if that might have had to do with the logic board's dealings with Progressive Alaska. No comments.The photo at the top is of my first iBook G4, my new MacBook Pro, and the remnants of my MacBook. The MacHaus tech people removed the hard drive from the dead laptop and inserted it into a $60.00 unit that is now a backup hard drive, and includes all the stuff from the old laptop. They helped me migrate all the data and applications from the dead laptop to the new MacBook Pro. I was impressed.
This is our 14th Macintosh computer in 20 years. That's if you count the Motorola-built Mac clone I got for Judy in 1996. And that includes all of the kids' Macs, two of which they now use. Right now, our greater household - including the kids - uses eight of those 14. The only one to actually die was the MacBook I just replaced. But even that machine's innards and memory live on. The MacHaus people will put the unit's screen into another unit. For one of the employee's own machine. It is an organ donor.
Macs are remarkable. Over the past week, since the MacBook died, bringing up laptops and home computers with people in Anchorage and the Valley, I've gotten a lot of comments from people who have PCs and wish they had Macs, none from people about to switch away from Macs.
10 comments:
I started on a Mac and went to PC. (The final straw was when I couldn't make an online reservation for a rental car with Alamo on my Mac.) 12 years later, I'm still using PCs. No regrets.
Congrats on the new laptop, tho! It's sure pretty!
PCs only, really because i've been doing a lot of autocad drafting for a long time and it doesn't run on macintosh. all my artist friends and teacher friends have mac, and swear by them. but i don't know if they really think they work better, or if they just think microsoft is an evil empire? apple products cost a lot more, so hopefully they're worth it.
Mona, the problem you had with Alamo was due to Alamo.
And Clark, ArchiCad would solve that dependence on autocad, and you could draw in 3D.
Hands down, Mac outperforms PC on all fronts.
Anon: And it matters whose fault it was? No.
What mattered was that I couldn't make a reservation with Alamo on my Mac.
I started in computing in the '70s - building an Altair. It's interesting to google up - if you were a decent programmer, you could get the lights on the front to flash in sequence and that's about all it did.
After Vic-20s, Commodore 64s, and the estimable TRS-80, I was delighted to upgrade to a PC.
My wife used Macs since the beginning and was horrified by the problems I had with my PC, especially since - if there were such thing a a PC expert - I was it. Her business as an online publisher depended on her Macs, which never seemed to fail. I noticed that she spent her time actually USING her computer and I spent my time FIDDLING WITH mine.
Then came the viruses. I thought she was just lucky, since she never ran any antiviral software...then a frantic phone call from one of her authors - a hairdresser who had just lost six months' work to a virus on her brand-new PC. I can quote my wife verbatim: "I cannot understand, in this modern day and time, why ANYONE would own a PC."
That did it for me. After my ten year-old snuck up to my office one late night to download some games and downloaded 72 - no, not virgins - viruses onto my business PC, I kicked the last PC in the house down the back stairs to the trash bin. Fortunately, I had all my business files backed up to a Linux server or I would have been in deep - well, you know.
I've never looked back. I'm not in the least worried about Alamo reservations; I make them on my Mac all the time. I don't worry about some Russian kid hacking my computer or stealing my banking passwords. I just work. I don't fiddle with my computer.
My wife, the great sage, again said it perfectly:
"People USE their PCs; they LOVE their Macs."
Well, I had a lot of business supporting PCs and PC networks over the past 20 years, and hardly ever got any requests for assistance from Mac owners unless they were relatives. I was finally able to help them once Apple adopted a real operating system with System X, which is really BSD Unix with a Mac shell.
I still support Linux and Windoze on PCs for a few clients, although I make my living doing something entirely different. I have 3 Windoze PCs, one Windoze laptop, and 2 Linux boxes on my network now.
I don't spent a lot of time "fiddling" with Windoze software much any more, it mostly seems to run just fine after downloading or out of the box. The only problems are when I can't find XP device drivers for older peripherals like scanners.
Linux software requires a lot more tweaking for desktop stuff, but the servers I have running just keep running forever and ever. Until a recent power and UPS failure, I had a linux SQL server that had been up and running for almost 3 years with no downtime.
You can now run windows on your mac, so problem solved regarding the Autocad issue.
I made the switch over 10 years ago and have never looked back.
I still run my dual 1.8 ghz G5 which I purchased in 2003, runs flawlessly without the security issues that a windows machine would have.
at 10:56, 5:43... yeah, i was aware of all that. we are transitioning from autocad to revit in the next couple years. and already doing a lot of work with sketchup, which i assume runs equally well on macintosh. i think i'll make the switchover someday. i just wish macintosh was less expensive. i've never had any virus problems... just lucky, i guess.
I've been an Apple user since we got a IIe "for the kids." My wife needs a PC for her embroidery sewing machine, and I'm the one she comes to when things get screwed up. I can't tell you how many times I have taken Bill Gates name in vain....
I have always been told by Mac users that they are far better and last longer. Probably why they cost so much more.
But you get what you pay for.
My PC is a hand me down from my artist nephew who went to Mac. He likes the Mac a lot better.
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