How've Mac's changed your life?

[Reality]

I can use a computer now. A real computer. While everyone else is pulling their hair out from the PCs at college.

[Danny_Pulsar]

While macs are nice computers, I would choose a pc so the system administrator can support my computer at work. Using QuarkXPress most of the time, I see no difference between pc and mac (software-wise). Right now, being a sole mac user in a sea of windows I'm completely on my own and I don't like that. I do regret going to the macintosh, especially since the HD died after only 3 yrs. (G4 came with a el cheapo IBM deskstar with a 2 yr. warr.). I want my pc back. But I'm stuck with the macintosh until who knows. And I DREAD going to QuarkXPress in OSX. Don't take offense folks. It's only a computer.

[Viro]

Originally Posted by Danny_Pulsar

I do regret going to the macintosh, especially since the HD died after only 3 yrs. (G4 came with a el cheapo IBM deskstar with a 2 yr. warr.). I want my pc back.

Hard drives die. Having a hard drive that lasts 3 years is pretty good, IMHO. I've had hard drives die on me much sooner. It all depends on how you use your machine, and pure luck sometimes. Blaming the hard drive failure on the Mac is disingenuous.

It is difficult to be a lone mac user in the work place where everything is Windows. I'm surprised you actually were allowed a Mac in the first place. Perhaps you could persuade the IT guys to get your a PC?

[nixgeek]

Shouldn't IBM be to blame for the faulty drive?? Would that also make it the fault of various other PC manufacturers that included this drive according to your logic?? Let's lay blame where it rightfully belongs please. At least that G4 isn't like the ASUS P4S800 fiasco I'm currently dealing with now. BSODs everywhere.

[arkanoid]

LOL - ive got booth a mac mini and a PC so I benefit from booth of them. Mac are very good systems and dont usally crash, no viruses and no spyware so you cant complain.

PC's get clogged up very easily, you add one piece of software and it all builds up, the only thing i dont like about the MAC is how apple have monoplized all of there brand, eg. MAC mouse, keyboard, ect.

[symphonix]

Before, I used to spend hours every week fixing computers, both for myself and my family. The maintenance on 4 or 5 PCs was awfully annoying and time consuming.
Switching a digital camera, a scanner or a printer meant at least a half hour of mucking around. And if anyone opened a virus email, it was just a pain in the neck.

Now, I have my time back. I ended up giving away the last few bits of PC junk I had floating around, and I've never looked back.

[Veljo]

Panther onwards I love my Mac and the way it works. I can now finally sit down, open up something, do what I want to and finish without crashes or annoying interruptions.

I bought my first Mac in 1993, a Macintosh LC 575. It was absolutely fantastic for me, and I can say it changed my life in that it gave me direction. Only being 8 years old, I began programming in HyperCard and doing a lot of other things, and now I'm interested in computers and pretty good at them too.

I bought a Macintosh Classic II later on from school which I used to play games here and there which was also quite good.

I crossed to the dark side in 1999 with my first PC. So many of my friends were playing games that I thought I needed to join in, and for a very long time the thought of the Macintosh never crossed my mind as I was enjoying gaming too much. As this computer aged I started losing interest in games, and realized the best games still came out on video game consoles and I should go back to the Mac.

So in 2002 I bought my current iMac. Three years later it still does everything I need it to do bar games, but I have a PlayStation 2 for that. Overall after using a PC for so many years I don't think (for me anyway) you can go past a Mac.

[gropenn]

My first experiance with a computer was with the grand design of The TI/99 the computer could be purchased for $99.00. The draw back is that everything had to be programmed in basic. Data was stowed on a CD which was put in a portaple CD player. The monitor was your TV screen.
I got tired of programming and bought a Mac Plus in 1986 (I still have it and it still runs) it had 256 k of ram, a 3 1/4 floppy drive which ran 800K floppies and no internal drive. At that time the system and a word processing program could fit on 1 800k disk. They then upgraded to the 1.4meg floppy disk. Some programs took up to 8 disks, which caused endless disk swapping. This was tough unless you purchases a SCSI Interface hard drive there were to versions available 20 meg for $400 a 40 meg for $700 (who would ever use that much memory?). The Mac Plus had a small b/w screen and ran WISIWIG which would not allow you to see a whole page without scrolling. I upgraded my RAM to 1 MEG it was a simms chip and cost $135. A special hex driver was required to open the case and a resister had to be cut
Durind this time we (at work, USN) had an apple IIe which had 2, 5 1/2 inch floppy disk drives. This was different from the Mac which ran on "Pro DOS" and The apple IIe was a good word processor for the time, also software was fairly inexpensive. If you think todays computers are slow, imagine 20 second boot time for an 800k disk. I had a 2.8 kbs modem which was ok for the time. Every thing at the time was text messaging. much like the text messangers of today.

I then owned a mac II se a good computer but systems and software were growing so fast that it was old news in less than 6 months. The newest software required more and more RAM and hard drive space. 60 meg hard drive. The OS and Browser were bigger than that.
I the bought a Performa 6360 with a 1 gig harddrive and an internal 56 kbs modem. I could the surf the dial-up network. (Like a snail)

I miss the simplicity of the older systems and software. The monster software such as word is great but the average person will use less than 10% of its rescources.

I now own 2 powerbook G4's and a US and the closeset Store that handles Macintosh products is 120 miles away.