[mdurrie]

Wow, there's a lot of long-winded know-it-alls here, many of whom have seemingly failed to comprehend this article. It's an interesting piece, and I (professional Mac user since 1987) agree with just about all of it.

[brbinabit]

Quote

Let's have a bit of an Apple history lesson here and the prevailing attitude of "real" people towards the Mac back in the 80's and thereafter. The Apple Macintosh (now just Mac) in the mid-80's was the only desktop computer capable of displaying more than just "figures" (1,2,3 etc.) or" figures" (line diagrams, pie charts etc.) and of course, type. In 1987 came the first truly useful Mac, the Mac II. It featured the first colour display capable of displaying colour photos, motion capability, 4-wave table stereo synthesis, 6 expansion slots for greater memory, colour capability up to millions of colours and/or greater resolution or more speed. It also had multiple input/output ports for various peripherals. This at a time when non-Mac computers usually had only MS-DOS. Windows hadn't even been invented yet and was until the late 90's only a poor imitation of the Mac OS. Also, the MAC had large third party B&W screens, bigger than any on the IBM PC side, although only one 13" MAC colour screen. At the time I was an art director at a Toronto area hi-tech Manufacturer. The engineers in the research department drooled over it with comments like "How come the art department gets this and the R&D department has to make do with our crummy computers? The necessary engineering software for the Mac didn't exist (by the way, do they have it now?) On the office side, although one marketing department had even earlier on an Apple Plus, every one else needed to use MS-DOS computers for the sake of compatibility with the rest of the business world and the mainframe computer. Apple realized the problem early on and worked on it. Adobe, whose software had originally been developed for the Mac, came up with the definitive answer in the 90's: Adobe Acrobat. After that, the doors really opened for Macs in the office environment. Still, for a long time the Mac was regarded as a "toy" by those who didn't understand that powerful computing applications could be used without a degree in computer sciences. Apropos the Mac was for "old people": Unless you were one of the early retired (MS-DOS) programmers, computers of any kind were perceived as "to complicated to learn at our age". That changed only with the advent of iMacs, usually first used by school age children who then taught their parents and/or grandparents. Re reliability: MACs extremely seldom need maintenance/repairs. Non-Macs spawned an entire Mom-and-Pop industry of computer service shops for Windows machines with one in every shopping plaza until after the year 2000 (remember Y2K?) Macs had no such problems. That opened up many people's eyes to the inferior computers they had been buying and made them have a serious look at Apple. A final word re design: Apple was early on at the leading edge of design. Some of its products are in the Museum of Modern Art in N.Y.C. Other manufacturers had to catch up when MAC products became very popular with consumers in the 21st century.

What the hell are you referring to by using the term MAC?

Media Access Control has nothing to do with an Apple Macintosh...