I am guilty - I recently purchased an iMac - mostly because it has great industrial design, and fit into the space I had available. I confess - I almost fell for the great lie - Macs work better than Windows PCs. Subsequent posts will explain what problems I have had with the iMac - not worse than a PC, but clearly not better. Before I start on those, some of my Apple history is worth recounting - to establish that I am neither a Windowsphile nor a Macophobe.
I first used Apple computers in the early 1980s, some twenty years after I learned to program. I had an Apple II, packaged up in a large plywood box, with monitor and external disk drives, that I used to schlepp around airports to client sites all around the USA. VisiCalc and VisiPlot were my world.
I went off to Japan for a year, working on planning for big iron, just as the IBM PC was introduced. I used a Wang word processor in Japan the produce our reports.
On my return from Japan, I bought a Commodore 64 for home use. My objective was to understand these little machines at a deeper level. I coded a bunch of stuff in assembler, and got the hardware understanding I was seeking.
At work, I moved on to an Apple III, and build a large model of the operations of an insurance company that predicted staffing levels in various deployment scenarios. The moment of truth came when I had to save the spreadsheet on a 5 1/4" floppy drive, and it would not fit. Main memory was larger than external storage. Great planning, Apple.
Time passed, and my employer standardized on Macs for report production, and on Compaq for spreadsheets, etc. I used both - I was an equal opportunity geek. The Mac was good enough, but the monitor was so small that I could hardly read anything on the screen. And I could crash the Mac as often as my PC, if I installed enough new software -- which of course I did.
I moved on to a new job, new town, no Macs in sight. My eyes could not justify another of the little screens. My mind could not see why I would want to try to do so. As a "user" I left the Apple world for a while.
In the course of my then new working life I regularly met with senior folk in the technology world - many of them my kind of people - geeks with a need to earn a living. One of these was Steve Jobs. He was pitching his view of his operating system and its "object-orientedness". He made the assertion that his version of the OS itself was much more efficient in an object oriented world than any other operating system. I asked why that should be so. He looked at me with disgust, and replied "You just don't understand". I said: "Of course I don't understand. If I did, I would not have asked the question." He also seemed not to understand because he changed the subject and we moved on to other topics.
After the meeting, I heard him commenting to one of his aides "I don't do well with non-technical people". Yeah - right - I am non-technical - I wrote an operating system for the IBM 704; I was one of a team of four that built a time-sharing system that supported 30 simultaneous users on an IBM/360 Model 50 in 1 Meg of "core storage" (now called "Memory") - a machine that was orders of magnitude less powerful than the iMac on which I am now writing this post. I guess I am more technical than most.
Which leads up the my first iMac problem - why does it lose network connectivity every time it goes to sleep? I searched the web for an answer - I was heartened at first when I found a discussion of the problem and a suggested solution. I lost heart when I found dozens of discussions, each with different solutions. I have tried a few of the solutions - none of them worked.
I have been MacSuckered. Thank Turing that this is not my primary computer.
On the other hand, I think that Apple will emerge as a major player in the PC world if Windows will run on their new Intel based computers. They do have great industrial design, even if the software has a way to go. In the interest of full disclosure -- I own Apple stock :-)
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