Backstory....
I'm not tech savvy. If ever abducted by aliens and asked questions about our technology, I'd fail to provide useful information. Internal combustion engine? I don't know how it works. I step on the gas and the vehicle moves. Step on the brake, it stops.
The same could be said about computers. I understand the basis of binary code, but as far as why things happen when I press a combination of keys, it might as well be magic.
In the late 80's, I was fortunate enough to work for a printing company that transitioned to desktop publishing and I was one of the first to be trained. I was scared to death that I wouldn't be smart enough to thrive in the obvious direction that industry was heading. My brain was mush at the end of each day of training due to the intense concentration I thought was necessary.
Boy, was I wrong! The Macintosh interface was made for dummies like me. Within a very short period of time, I not only mastered the OS and prepress software, but I could diagnose and repair software conflicts as well as most hardware issues of the time. This held true for several years until they eventually transitioned to the OS X, UNIX-like platform (what the hell is a kernel?!!). While the user interface was still very simple, I lost my edge with troubleshooting.
In 1989, I bought my first home computer - an SE-30 that had a little 9" B&W screen. I installed a video card that allowed me to use a 14" color monitor in 24 bit depth. No modem, just a floppy drive. After several years, I transitioned to the new iMac all-in-one models with the CRT and network card. That lasted several years before updating to the newer flat-screen iMac model. And that computer lasted almost a decade before the drive failed, necessitating the need to buy the least expensive option at the time, the Mac Mini I'm currently using.
The one thing all the Macs I've ever used have in common - home or work - is that they last. I've used probably 2 dozen different Macs in the last 30 years at work and only one of those was buggy to point of being close to unusable. In that same 30 year span, I've owned only 4 Macs. The interface had always been intuitive, and they weren't as prone to malicious attacks. The "more bang for the buck" argument PC enthusiasts often used I felt was not entirely true as many of the Macs came standard with state-of-the-art components and some decent software (GarageBand for example) at no additional cost. The bottom line is that I bought Macs because I was familiar with OS and believed they were reasonably priced.
But it seems to me things have changed.
To the point of the topic...
Macintosh now offers two types of computers - 1) those for the budget conscious, and 2) high-end workstations. Don't get me wrong, I still believe they produce a quality computer and the workstations are powerful. But when I look at systems that will adequately run Adobe software, Fusion 360, and games like The Golf Club (a PC-only game), Macs are just too far outside my price range.
This morning, my wife ordered an HP desktop with a decent 9th generation i7F processor, adequate 16gb of memory (I'll probably upgrade to 32gb), a sufficient graphics card (Nvidia GTX 1660) and a solid state drive for faster restarting on all those Microsoft updates
.
So why did my wife order a PC for me you might ask? Because I was too chickens!t to do it myself.
For tech savvy THP'ers on either side of the debate, did I make a mistake?
I'm not tech savvy. If ever abducted by aliens and asked questions about our technology, I'd fail to provide useful information. Internal combustion engine? I don't know how it works. I step on the gas and the vehicle moves. Step on the brake, it stops.
The same could be said about computers. I understand the basis of binary code, but as far as why things happen when I press a combination of keys, it might as well be magic.
In the late 80's, I was fortunate enough to work for a printing company that transitioned to desktop publishing and I was one of the first to be trained. I was scared to death that I wouldn't be smart enough to thrive in the obvious direction that industry was heading. My brain was mush at the end of each day of training due to the intense concentration I thought was necessary.
Boy, was I wrong! The Macintosh interface was made for dummies like me. Within a very short period of time, I not only mastered the OS and prepress software, but I could diagnose and repair software conflicts as well as most hardware issues of the time. This held true for several years until they eventually transitioned to the OS X, UNIX-like platform (what the hell is a kernel?!!). While the user interface was still very simple, I lost my edge with troubleshooting.
In 1989, I bought my first home computer - an SE-30 that had a little 9" B&W screen. I installed a video card that allowed me to use a 14" color monitor in 24 bit depth. No modem, just a floppy drive. After several years, I transitioned to the new iMac all-in-one models with the CRT and network card. That lasted several years before updating to the newer flat-screen iMac model. And that computer lasted almost a decade before the drive failed, necessitating the need to buy the least expensive option at the time, the Mac Mini I'm currently using.
The one thing all the Macs I've ever used have in common - home or work - is that they last. I've used probably 2 dozen different Macs in the last 30 years at work and only one of those was buggy to point of being close to unusable. In that same 30 year span, I've owned only 4 Macs. The interface had always been intuitive, and they weren't as prone to malicious attacks. The "more bang for the buck" argument PC enthusiasts often used I felt was not entirely true as many of the Macs came standard with state-of-the-art components and some decent software (GarageBand for example) at no additional cost. The bottom line is that I bought Macs because I was familiar with OS and believed they were reasonably priced.
But it seems to me things have changed.
To the point of the topic...
Macintosh now offers two types of computers - 1) those for the budget conscious, and 2) high-end workstations. Don't get me wrong, I still believe they produce a quality computer and the workstations are powerful. But when I look at systems that will adequately run Adobe software, Fusion 360, and games like The Golf Club (a PC-only game), Macs are just too far outside my price range.
This morning, my wife ordered an HP desktop with a decent 9th generation i7F processor, adequate 16gb of memory (I'll probably upgrade to 32gb), a sufficient graphics card (Nvidia GTX 1660) and a solid state drive for faster restarting on all those Microsoft updates
.So why did my wife order a PC for me you might ask? Because I was too chickens!t to do it myself.
For tech savvy THP'ers on either side of the debate, did I make a mistake?
:laughing:
