Slightly off topic, but hey ho. I've been using Macs since 1984 when they first came out. I've used Windows extensively too.
I'm amazed at your comment that Windoze is far superior for "professionals". The Mac OS, has and always will be far superior in every way. It never breaks, it's fast. The architecture of a Mac has always been quality and was banned for export to certain countries when the G4 came out as it was classed as a weapon because it was so fast.
Windoze will always be a poor copy of the Mac OS.
Meanwhile - hopefully you spotted my post
#11 about the cables, which was 'on-topic'
Computers are just tools these days. There isn't the romance that there once was - well, maybe Macs invoke that kind of passion in some people, but for most of us, getting work done means switching on a PC laptop and putting up with Windows, in the same way that driving into a city means putting up with a traffic jam.
Back in the days of the Sinclair Spectrum, the Amiga 500, etc. the computer experience was equivalent to Toad of Toad Hall taking a joyride in his early motoring contraptions - little practical use, but a whole lot more fun.
I'm writing this on an iPhone (as usual), but recently I bought a MacBook, having never had a Mac before and having not used one for 20 years. I had the opposite experience to Mick with the menus - the one menu bar at the top of the screen, in black and white (what happened to the colour Apple introduced in 1992 with the LC, lol) and because there's only one menu bar, you have to select the right window first. If there are no windows open, sometimes the menu bar is still active for a particular program. It's all very confusing
Macs seem to avoid displaying error messages. For example if you use iTunes to sync files to an iPad, the files (PDF files in this case) might or might not appear. Same with Photo Stream - photos might be there, or they might not be. There is never any message to offer any reasons as to why not! Things either happen automatically or they don't happen at all.
I was surprised at how clumsy it was to scroll through thousands of photos over and over again (it never remembers the last place used), but eventually I suppose I'll get things better organised. There's also a dearth of progress bars - such as, when uploading photos to this forum (in the attachment window) - no feedback at all except the Upload button staying stuck down. If a busy pointer ever appears, it seems to mean that it's crashed
I think System 7 was excellent by the standards of the day (umm, 1994) - it was slick and effective. I used Photoshop 2.5 and Premiere 1.0 on a Quadra 605 or LC475. That was the year QuickTime came out and I used to take my video tapes (from the school VHS camera) to the Apple dealer, where I'd spend hours capturing the video onto a Quadra 840 with DSP card, compressing with Cinepak codec (320x240, 15fps) and storing the clips onto 88MB Syquest discs. Those huge discs were equivalent to a hundred floppy discs for my own computer (an Amiga 600). Then I'd write the final result to a CD at Double Speed (only half a hour!) with the CD writer that was worth nearly $2000.
Other 14-year-olds in Hamilton had paper rounds, I spent all my free time using any spare Macs I could find to edit and publish videos of science topics... think I was probably a bit before my time on that one, as the Internet was yet to feature in most people's lives. I was posting CDs to other schools, uploading files to BBSs...
Those Mac applications (Photoshop and Premiere) were truly something amazing - compared to my previous experience with Deluxe Paint IV - I mean, video editing! at a time when the PC struggled to insert a clip art image of a duck smashing a computer. Then there was HyperCard/HyperTalk, which was an event-based object-oriented programming environment - awesome stuff. Two years before, I'd almost mastered BASIC on my Commodore 64. This felt like one week repairing a lawnmower engine and the next week building a jet engine.
There's been a lot of water under the bridge since then. I gave up doing 'media' stuff and became an electronics engineer. Then I was made redundant and became a trainer for spreadsheet skills. Now it's gone full circle, as I make training videos (as well as presenting courses online and in person).
I'm not sure if OS X is 'better' than Windows, but the hardware is certainly beautiful. It's a bit like having a kitchen made of marble, with huge counter tops and a single sink. Windows is knocked together from MDF but you do get double sinks plus a load of cupboard space. You can cook the same meals in either kitchen - if you can cook (or be bothered cooking).
-Alex
