I started with Macs in early '86 because the PC just was not capable of doing the job. Over time the gap started to narrow but for many years PC's were at least a step behind if not several when it came to graphic applications. In the beginning the PC was viewed as a business machine that could do graphics if it had to and the Mac a graphics machine that could do some business apps if it had to. Macs always did graphics better, easier and with much more elegance.
From the very beginning Macs were very user friendly, plug and play was the name of the game, plug in a new printer and the Mac new it was there and all you needed was to load the driver and select it to make it go.
Years passed and as the general public embraced the technology we were forced to put in PC's to use customers disks with fewer problems (mostly fonts). I hated the PC (Piece o Crap) with a passion, they didn't do anything with ease or elegance. I actually had to work at making the damn thing send a file to a printer... IP's... Yes the more I drink's the more IP's!
I actually had to learn how to work with these Pieces o Crap...Clunky, finicky, inelegant PC's, Nothing was ever plug and play with this junk no matter what the marketing hype said, you had to dick with them to make anything work! Not so with the Mac.
As the gap between the platforms continued to narrow and when I bought a top of the line PC with XP it finally started to become a lower case piece o crap. XP was the first operating system that started to make sense as well as actually work in my environment without hair ripping stress. Now that Win 7 has replaced the previous couple iterations I must say that the two platforms are on nearly equal footing. I still have to give the Mac a slight edge in connecting to peripherals on the network, they just have fewer problems.
As far as which machine costs the most, it really seems to be a toss up, of all of the PC’s and Macs I have owned over the years the Macs don’t seem to need to be replaced as often due to inadequate performance partly due to the extra overhead required by the virus protection needed on the PC I’m sure. Since I don’t do any of the graphics production any longer I get to use the hand me down computers. Until last December I had been using an 8-9 year old mac that was previously the star of the graphics dept! It ran fine for what I do... mostly surfing the net! But compared to some of the PC’s after about 5 years it’s time for the scrap heap. So yea the Mac may cost more up front but it pays dividends on the back end, at least to some extent that makes up for the higher buy in.
Speaking of Macs and viruses I have had one on the Mac platform, about 14 or 15 years ago my graphics Mac began running pitifully slow all of a sudden, went to the local Mac store and the guy there said he heard something was going around. He gave me a floppy said to come from apple that was supposed to check for some kind of worm that had hit some machines, bingo It found the problem and fixed it. For those that like to create havoc with viruses I guess they get the most bang for their buck on the PC side since there are so many more of them to infect.
A few months ago I tripped over my first mac, A 1986 bug eye Mac SE with a whopping 20 MB hard drive. I pulled it out of the bag plugged it in and it fired right up! The floppy drive died long ago but I was amazed it still works. For that Mac, a Laserwriter Plus and QuarkXpress 2.0.a I paid just over $9,000.00 it lasted for just over a year before the software outran it. Those were the good old days when you had to buy a new machine every year and a half or so because the software kept growing so fast, plus the machines cost a lot more!
Bottom line is the PC’s and Macs now are both great machines and one can replace the other in most environments without much problem other than the nut that holds on the mouse!
