Mac Attack

2008-05-02T23:39:00.000-07:00

Mumbo Media recently switched to using Apple Macs for the majority of its work. And now that we have, I am wondering why we didn't do it sooner!

The Mac experience is overall much more rewarding than using a PC. I can remember when I purchased my first PC - a Compaq Presario in 1996. It ran Windows 95, and I remember the amazement at how much it could do, but more than that, the amazement that it could do some things, but was apparently incapable of other (seemingly similar) tasks. I wondered why I needed to endure so much drama just to plug a printer in and get it to work. When I decided I no longer wanted an application (every little piece of my 600mb hard drive was precious!), I naively thought I should just delete the program and that would be it - oh, how I was wrong!

Over time I taught myself how to do things the PC way. I figured out I must use the "Add/Remove Programs" interface if I wanted to uninstall a program, and even then there would probably be some files left over I would need to manually delete. I learned to install peripheral devices and if I didn't want to repeat the process over and over again, I learned to make sure the device was turned on before I turned the computer on.

And I learned about freezing and crashes. Oh how I learned about freezing and crashes.

With each new version of Windows, I hoped some of these basics might have improved. They hadn't, and the only thing that really improved was the lower frequency of freezing and crashes. I've had over half a dozen PCs since that original Compaq, and they all served me well.

Then, late last year, I pulled the trigger and bought an Apple iMac. It is a brilliant machine, and so much more enjoyable and efficient to use than anything I have ever used before. When I plugged my printer in, it was instantly available for me to use. And then when I did print, the icon was actually a photo-realistic image of my printer! The first time I went to uninstall a program, I spent an hour looking for the "Add/Remove Programs" utility. After finally consulting the internet, I learned that I could just drag the application I wanted to get rid of to the trash!

It's not perfect, but it's damn close, and so many of the features are things I could never quite figure out why they were missing from Windows.