After 15 years of loyalty to the PC, we move to the Mac. I still can’t believe we’re tossing the PCs out.
My husband’s 15” MacBook Pro arrived a couple of days ago – of course he will only start working to move to it once I’m all set up. It makes sense.
I remember when I got my first PC 15 years ago – it was at work in Malaysia. Actually I was the one who championed the introduction of PCs in the company then and I spent the following couple of years carrying the torch and running corporate-level programs and initiatives to encourage everyone in the company to accept the change and learn how to use the PC to increase personal productivity and efficiency.
Some people especially those at the senior level never really went for it at all because it meant doing stuff which our secretaries used to take care of for us.
I jumped into it of course, and when I got my first laptop, I irritated other senior management when I took it to meetings and did all my notes on it! I loved the PC because it made my life a lot simpler. It did then and it still does.
It wasn’t long after that when I got my own PC at home. I hated DOS and was quite relieved – jumping up and down actually – when Microsoft introduced Windows. I thought it was so cool. Although I had heard of the “Apple Macintosh” I did not know much about it. I know I didn’t like how it looked then!
Wikipedia has this to enlighten us about the Mac:
Macintosh, commonly shortened to Mac, is a brand name which covers several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The Macintosh was introduced on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface rather than a command-line interface.
Through the second half of the 1980s, the company built market share only to see it dissipate in the 1990s as the personal computer market shifted towards IBM PC compatible machines running MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. Apple consolidated multiple consumer-level desktop models into the 1998 iMac all-in-one, which was a sales success and saw the Macintosh brand revitalized.
Current Mac systems are mainly targeted at the home, education, and creative professional markets. They are: the aforementioned (though upgraded) iMac and the entry-level Mac Mini desktop models, the workstation-level Mac Pro tower, the MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops, and the Xserve server.
Production of the Mac is based on a vertical integration model in that Apple facilitates all aspects of its hardware and creates its own operating system that is pre-installed on all Macs.
This is in contrast to most IBM PC compatibles, where multiple vendors create hardware intended to run another company’s software. Apple exclusively produces Mac hardware, choosing internal systems, designs, and prices.
Apple does use third party components, however; current Macintosh CPUs use Intel’s x86 architecture. Previous models used the AIM alliance’s PowerPC and early models used Motorola’s 68k. Apple also develops the operating system for Macs, currently Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”. The modern Mac, like other personal computers, is capable of running alternative operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD, and Microsoft Windows; though other computers can not readily run Mac OS X.
And I would say that this is the biggest reason for moving to the Mac. The fact that Macs can now run Windows applications on a “virtual machine” thanks to VMWare Fusion means that, not only can we install Windows applications in the Mac, we can easily switch from Mac applications to Windows applications without re-booting! I think its totally amazing. Mind you – its not about loyalty to Windows or the PC, its about baggage! Its just that over the years we have become reliant on certain Windows applications that are not available for the Mac, or if they are, we haven’t found them yet.
It stopped us moving before but now we can have the both of both worlds, why not eh?
to get back from work so we could do the "unboxing" together.
