“You sound like an Apple salesperson!”
People often say that because I can go on and on about Apple and it’s computers. Ofcourse I have nothing to do with Apple Computers, I just like their products and the way they look at things. How did it come that far? Well, let me start at the beginning...
Commodore 64
My computer addiction started when my parents bought me a Commodore 64 home computer. It must have been around 1983. What a technical marvel that was. A 1Mhz processor and 64Kb of RAM! I really liked tinkering with it, besides playing with the massive amount of games I had on tape. On this computer I started learning how to write software, using Basic and assembler.
After that came a Commodore 128, which was basically a beefed up C64. Because of that, I sold the 64, which I would regret much later on... At the same time my father started a company and in 1986 I helped him a bit by writing some software to keep record of his customers and price offerings. He started using the C128 at his office, so I had to start looking for another computer. Lucky me: Commodore had just launched a geat new machine!
Amiga
Commodore had a real technological marvel with it's Amiga platform. The Amiga 500 I got was a real audiovisual monster. At that time the XT-PC was the standard, using MS-DOS with it's text-only software. Amiga blew this competition completely away and most of the time even for less money. Amiga's 7Mhz 68000 processor was quite fast, but the real difference was made by it's multiple co-processors for sound, graphics and IO.
After some years of fun I sold the A500 (yes, stupid me!) and got it’s bigger brother, the Amiga 2000 (which was actually a machine that was introduced before the A500). It was almost the same machine as the 500, but with more memory, an internal harddisk, two diskdrives and a BridgeBoard, which was in fact a complete IBM compatible XT PC.
After that, Commodore released the very compact, but fast Amiga 1200. It featured a new AGA chipset, that could produce more colors and a higher resolution. I bought that machine next to my A2000, but soon after that, it went downhill with Amiga's development, because Commodore went bankrupt. There weren't many games that used the improved chipset, so I used the old A2000 most of the time. After a while I needed to look for something else, since the Amiga scene was dying... Luckily I had the common sense of holding on to my A2000 and A1200, which I still have these days.
Windows PC
Somewhere around 1990 I had to make a decision to which computer platform I wanted to move with my hobby. I looked at Apple, but they were also going downhill very fast since Steve Jobs was kicked out. I did not want to invest in another dying system, so I decided to buy a PC. Boy, that was a bummer after working with Amiga's...
PC’s ran MS-DOS. Ofcourse there was something around called Windows 3.1, but that did everything but impress me. If you grew up on a decent machine from Amiga or Apple, you knew what could be done with less power and less code. Up until Windows ME there was still a substantial pile of crappy 16 bit code and MS-DOS in there, so Windows sucked big time. I also tried IBM's OS/2, which looked good but did not have any software and lacked good support.
The only positive thing the PC gave me was the possibility to really develop my programming skills. My father's company had also made the transition to PC and he had bought software from a local programmer, that did not work very well (lot’s of bugs). So I began writing my own business software for the company. By 1994 the company was completely back to my software again, which at that time had grown into a fully developed Customer Relations Management system avant la lettre. This system was written in (MS-DOS based) Clipper 5 and ran on a dBase III database system. The hardware consisted of a Lantastic network with a stand alone server and 6 network clients. We would use this software up until 2005. But first came 2004, the year I finally got fed up with Windows!
That year, my computerhobby was really turning into a love-hate relationship. I had to reinstall my expensive Canopus video editing software every six months because it wouldn't work anymore. The salesperson told me it was my own fault: I shouldn't use my 2500 Euro computersystem for anything else than video editing! I also got a really nasty virus and, on top of that, somebody hacked my system to steal my ICQ account (since I had a very low accountnumber). There also were the numerous crashes, blue screens and Windows reinstalls. The fact that the Micro$oft company housed three of the richest people on earth who got their money by selling this crap did not amuse me either. One night, after literally kicking my system for crashing on me and losing 3 hours' work, my wife told me to look for another hobby. I thought about it for a while, since computers are my biggest passion but firearms being another hobby, I would soon end up shooting my computer...
Apple and the Mac
Around the same time, in the summer of 2004, my mother asked me if I could look around for her: she wanted a simple computer to surf the Internet with. In my mind I saw her using a Windows PC, with all it's quirks and viruses, so I started looking for alternatives on the internet. I stumbled upon the Apple website and started reading on their fantastic new operating system, called "Mac OSX". It was based on Unix, was very stable and very user friendly, so I decided I should get her a Mac. It would also be a great opportunity to test this new system.
I bought her an iMac G4 "lamp model", like the picture above. As I was installing it for her, I noticed how easy and consistent everything was and how pretty and solid the Mac OSX operating system was! So a few months later I decided my Pentium4 system should make place for something new: a beautiful 20" iMac G5, like the one below. That was a choice that completely changed my computer hobby!
Why is a Mac so great?
In 2008, the Windows Vista operating system still contains program code which is more than 17 years old! This is because XP and Vista are based on Windows NT and development of the Windows NT code started in 1990! NT was released in 1993 and computers were totally different back then. Vista still has lot’s of NT code in it.
Mac OSX was developed in 2001, brand new from the ground up, as a multi threading OS, designed for multi core processors and running on a small Mach Unix kernel (which is the only existing part of code they used). This made it very small and flexible and also very robust. For instance: a core version of Mac OSX contains one million lines of code, while a core version of Vista Basic contains one BILLION lines of code, 1000 times bigger. Besides that: Apple does not only make the operating software but also the hardware it runs on, resulting in a very fast and stable computer system.
When you first make the switch from Windows to Mac OSX, there is a period of getting used to the differences. You're used to doing things the Windows way and some things are a bit different on OSX. During your transition, you can happily use Windows on your Mac next to OSX, since any Intel based Mac computer will run that too, even in a window in the OSX environment. And yes: this is as fast as on a native Windows machine, since it is not an emulation but a virtualisation on the new Intel Core Duo processor. After a few weeks or months using the Mac and OSX (depending on how much you use your computer) you are fully used to OSX and ready to experience the full joy of using a computer without crashes, viruses, security issues or inconsistent software designs. With it, all of the frustrations will dissappear also!
I can tell you over and over how great all Mac's look, but the user experience is the most important feature. Since the Mac got it's OSX operating system, it took a giant technological leap ahead and exceeded Windows in stability, security and user friendlyness. A simple example: when you want to remove a program from a Mac, you just dump it in the trashcan, that’s all. When you want to remove a program from Windows, you need to deinstall it and you risk deleting commonly used DLL files (used by Windows), making Windows unstable. Besides that, the deleted program often leaves a lot of stuff behind in the Registry, slowing Windows down and eventually forcing you to reinstall Windows from scratch every now and then.
The first year I had my iMac, I had 2 serious crashes, my Windows PC had a serious crash every week. My Mac runs almost 24 hours a day, sometimes for weeks, getting in and out of Sleep Mode without problems, unlike my Windows machines. Shure, you can use Windows without crashing it, but it's a lot easier to screw it up than you would with a Mac.
I can seriously recommend anyone to try the Mac, especially if you're getting frustrated with your computer hobby, as I was. Since 2005 the Mac is really taking back a considerable part of the computer market, even in business environments. Because of that, the big software companies are developing software for the Mac again. Photoshop, Microsoft Office, Adobe Premiere Video software, etc.: it's all available for the Mac! And as of 2008, Apple is in the top 3 of best selling computer manufacturers in the world, so no more ”obscurity”!
Mac in a business environment
During 2004 I realised I had anoter computer problem I finally had to deal with. Our company Comatherm BV was still running on 15 year old MS-DOS based administrative software and we did not have a replacement yet. Since I just got "married to Mac", I wanted to try to put Apple in the mix.
During my search I came across a very nice rapid application development environment, called "Realbasic". It's name suggests a dated, simple system, but in fact it was a very state-of-the-art and complete Object Oriented environment, similar to Visual Basic. Besides that, it was completely cross platform! This allows you to write a program and (with 1 press of a button) compile it to run on Mac OSX, Windows and Linux. I bought an Apple PowerBook laptop as a development system, installed Realbasic on it and 4 months after I started learning Realbasic, the first version of "Comos" was completed: we could switch over to our new software! Everything now had a graphical interface and we could start adding new features, like drawing window frames, integrating photo’s, PDF, Word and Excel documents and more exciting stuff. I could also start looking into another wish I had: using Mac's in our company.
In the end of 2006, I replaced the Windows XP PC on my work with an iMac G5 (this was my old home iMac which I replaced with a 24" Intel iMac). After a few months of testing, the verdict was clear: a Mac was very useable at our office, in fact it made me work better, since my Windows PC locked up sometimes! There was much less maintenance, no need for an anti-virus program that slows your system down and nags about updates all the time. It worked perfectly. We only had a few applications that did not run on Mac, but that could be overcome. A year later, two of these applications were obsolete and another program had become available for Mac, so it only get's better. During the coming time, all 10 of our pc's will be replaced by Mac's. In 2008 we already had 3 Mac’s in our office.