How I Came To Love the Mac

Today is the 25th birthday of the original Macintosh. It was a quarter of a decade ago that Apple aired their famous 1984 commercial during the Super Bowl and Steve Jobs announced the first successful line of computers to use a mouse.

I was seven years old at the time and didn't know anything about it. My father had an original IBM PC in our house that he bought in 1982 and I would play Friendlyware games on it. He did eventually bring a Macintosh home in 1987, and I thought that machine was pretty cool. I did the tutorial and remember clicking on the windows of a virtual building to open them up and reveal the people inside. Then there was this dog training game where I would use the mouse to hand the dog a biscuit whenever he'd do something right or I'd use it to swat him on the butt if he did something wrong (seems harsh to me in retrospect).

When I was a sophomore in high school my father gave me his old 286 laptop and I learned how to use WordPerfect 5.1 to write papers on it, which was a huge improvement over using my mother's old typewriter.

When my father offered to split the cost of a new desktop computer with me after in 1996 after I had just finished my freshman year of college, there was no question that I would get a Windows PC. I had taken a computer science course at WSU that taught me how to use MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, and the various Office programs so I was very comfortable in the Microsoft world. Macintoshes were much more of a niche computer and hardly anyone used them.

One notable exception was a good friend of mine whom I'd known since first grade, and who became my roommate when we were seniors. The first time I ever wrote a "Hello, World" program was in C with his help in my dorm room, and we were oblivious to the fact that the famous WSU riots of 1998 had just started a few blocks away. I remember making fun of him for being such a devoted loyalist to what was by that time a dying platform. We didn't yet know that the Mac had just started it's comeback, but I do remember that in my first MIS class a year earlier the instructor mentioned excitedly that Apple had just purchased NeXT, which meant the return of Steve Jobs and convinced him that Apple had turned the corner. I also remember the same guy telling us about how Java was going to be a big threat to Microsoft's desktop monopoly, so he wasn't always prescient.

In 2000, I decided I would build my own PC. By that time everyone was talking about Linux and how it was the next great threat to Microsoft, so by the end of that year I was triple-booting Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Red Hat Linux 6.2. It became common for technical people to develop a loathing for Microsoft, which had released a number of number of mockable products around that time (Windows ME, Visual Basic, etc) while a general fear of it's monopoly power grew.

I tried to switch completely to Linux, even rebuilding my employer-issued laptop with it, which was actually pretty natural because I worked in Unix environments. I think Becky gave it a week or two of really trying to see if she could switch with me, but the additional struggle to get anything to work like it did on Windows frustrated her and eventually she became accustomed to rebooting the home PC into Windows whenever she needed to use it.

By 2004 my love affair with Linux as a desktop platform was basically over. I had started using Eclipse to write Java code with, and it was far more stable on Windows, plus Linux couldn't manage to put my laptop to sleep when I'd close the lid. I never really grew to like Windows, but I used tools like Cygwin that helped me not to hate it. When I built my second PC I just set it up exclusively with XP.

I still was a big fan (and remain so) of Linux as a server platform. When I built my own website when Kyla was born I used my old desktop running Fedora to host it.

In 2000 I remember seeing some screenshots of the new Mac OS X online and being blown away by just how pretty everything looked compared to the drab grayness of Windows. When some of my coworkers and I went to Comp USA in 2001 and played with new computers running Windows XP and OS X, there was no question which operating system was more impressive to us. Later I had a couple of coworkers who brought their Powerbooks to the office and I was drooling when they'd show me even little things like Expose. At one point I borrowed one of them to make Becky a photo book for Valentine's Day using iPhoto.

But in the end, what made me decide that I just had to have a Mac was becoming a parent. When Becky was pregnant I bought a digital camcorder and the Roxio Easy Media Creator software suite. I took some footage of my brother's high school graduation and used the software to edit it into a cute little movie, though the process was long and the software felt pretty unstable. I also tried to add a song to it that I had purchased legally but that didn't work so I downloaded the same song using Kazaa, which gave me the additional gift of spyware.

Then in 2005 I decided it was time for me to buy an iPod, which I eventually did, but while I was in the Apple Store I was checking out iMovie on one of the Macs... and was totally blown away. It had a far more intuitive interface then anything I had used before and much better features like adding still photos and panning over them (known as the Ken Burns effect).

Becky and I had just started living on one income and the last computer I built was only a year old, but she quickly realized that this was something I just had to have, and green-lit the purchase.

Since then I've stopped using Windows completely, except for within a virtual machine. The Mac just feels so much more elegant and powerful that Windows just irritates me. In the interest of full disclosure I must admit that I've never spent more than five minutes with Vista, but nothing I've heard suggests to me that it's going to change my mind.

I don't know if my enthusiasm has rubbed off on others or if it's just the trend, but many of my family and friends have switched recently as well and no one has been disappointed. I've become the tech support guy for many of these switchers, but the ability to control someone else's desktop via iChat makes it far less of a hassle.

I think that Apple's resurgence is proving to be good for Microsoft because some of the new features of Windows 7 appear to have been inspired by OS X and the early reviews of the beta have been very positive, but I doubt they'll ever get me to come back.