dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

This is really the heart of the difference. Just as many PC people bring out the "PCs are cheaper" thing, many Apple fans will tout the "Mac is more intuitive" trope. But, as you point out, intuitive is a rather personal thing. I have tried Macs numerous times and find them awkward. I got into computers with punch cards. I got a Think-A-Tron for Christmas in the early 60's, which used punch cards and later programmed on punch cards in college. My first word processor was a thing called Scribe. The whole tree structure logic was drilled into me and, I think, made the logic of DOS easy for me. If Macs work for you and you do not mind the extra cost, go for it.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

👍👍 I agree. I was building simple computers in the late 50s from telephone dials, 12AT7 dual triode vacuum tubes for flip flops and Nixie tubes for readouts and started with IBM on the 360 system in 1965. Whatever computer that runs your application to your satisfaction, has an interface that is intuitive for YOU and you can afford is the correct one.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

A rambling, off-topic bit of personal history here:

I learned Fortran 77 in college (1974). We had an awful NCR Century 100 with 64K of memory. It ran all of Davidson College's programs. There were no CRTs... just line printers and a couple of constantly malfunctioning card readers (Do I have a program bug, or did the reader misread my cards?). Every time I walked into that room, I was just astounded that someone would think of making a machine with such a ridiculous interface.

I'm a firm believer in using the right tools for the job. Sometimes, you need a hammer. Sometimes you need a screwdriver...

Imagine my joy, when I first got my hands on an Apple IIe a decade later, to do multi-image, multi-projector slide show programming for a school portrait and yearbook company! It truly was easy to use. We bought the system to run a ClearLight Superstar, which was a control system for up to 15 slide projectors and 11 auxiliary devices, all driven from an extra audio track on a 3- or 4-track tape recorder. AMPL/M ran on Apple DOS 3.3. It was the highly specialized slide show programming language. I was in slide show heaven.

Apple DOS 3.3 was a Microsoft product, but ProDOS was Apple's answer to that, and it made decent sense. With it, I built a startup disk that would go straight into AppleWorks, which had a bare bones word processor, a spreadsheet, and a flat file "database". I could write scripts and project proposals, do a departmental budget or a show budget, and track all my AV equipment and slide libraries. It was wonderful not to have to dip into ProDOS more than occasionally.

A few years later, in a project management role, I had a Mac and a generic PC. In 1990, I set up an on-demand printing department to produce over a million customized portrait package inserts each month... It used a few Macs running Aldus PageMaker, plugged into a Kodak 1392 LED page printer (92 ppm).

The PC also made sense, because it worked much like the Apple IIe. In 1991, I did my documentation in Word for a large Windows 3.0 database software project on the PC.

But the Mac was magnetically fun. I still did all my reporting, page layout, forms design, and other work on the Mac. So next, also in '91, I set up a Linotype HELL laser imagesetter to make titles for group photos and class composites. We drove it with three Macs running PageMaker.

Some five years later, the lab ran Kodak's 3570 film scanners with Mac G3s. We ran their 5" CRT printers and 11" Digital Multiprinter with Mac G3s. From '98-2001, we had a room full of 35 Macs scanning candid photos and driving PageMaker with a FoxPro database that automated portrait panel layout for elementary school memory books — "baby yearbooks".

From '96 on, I did FileMaker Pro database development on a Mac, first for printing long roll film camera ID system cards and Polaroid ID cards. We deployed the solution all over the country, on both Macs and PCs. In 1998 to 2001, we used FMP for production tracking of memory books. Until 2005, we used it for tracking production of other specialty items, and for production of millions of holiday greeting cards. FileMaker Pro development was easier and faster on a Mac, but deployment worked much better on PCs. Go figure... Claris (now FileMaker) is a subsidiary of Apple.

When we bought an Epson 9600 in 2003 to do all our large format printing, we powered it with an old Mac G4. That same computer sits behind me as I type this, and it still works! The company gave it to me when they replaced it with a PC running DP2 in 2005.

In 1998, Kodak rewrote their Mac-based KPIS lab software for Windows NT. When we bought our high resolution Bremson HR500 scanners, and Noritsu mini-labs, we drove them with the new DP-2 software and our own proprietary databases running on PCs. The operators howled at the switch from KPIS to DP2, but Kodak eventually got it fleshed out into an elegant solution.

In 2002, we leased two Canon color copier/printers, and drove them with four PCs running high speed raster image processors, DP2, and Planet Press pagination software... for printing portrait proofs. By the time I left production in 2005, we had over 70 computers driving various processes, 16 ID card printers, 15 mini-labs, and nine scanners. Two years later, the scanners were gone, and all production was digital.

Our worst nightmare happened in 2002 or 2003. Our IT department hired a smart-ass kid who talked them into building our own PC servers and high speed image rendering computers, to save money and run things faster than HP or Dell boxes. After six of eight image rendering PCs overheated and the motherboards melted or caught fire in a couple of instances, we were in deep poop. When we discovered the home brew servers were destroying data as it was sent to them (and not producing any error messages!), that was the last straw. He had assembled the servers in a hurry, jamming cards in card slots, not screwing them down, bending pins, etc. ASAP, we installed HP servers and the beefiest Dell boxes we could find for image rendering... NO more problems. The kid, of course lost his job.

I moved into a training role in 2005, to create videos, manuals, and other training aids, and to train operations managers and school portrait photographers. Ultimately, I used a Mac to create everything. It ran Windows in Parallels Desktop, so I could use a Mac video screen recorder to demonstrate our proprietary PC software. On the road, I used the Mac to run the PC software for demonstrations during training.

Yeah, I'm a firm believer in using the right tools for the job...