Windows Refugees – Welcome to the Happy Mac!
I have several colleagues who are making the big switch from Windows to Mac recently, and it got me thinking about when I made the move from my PC world back to Mac.
You know you wish you had one.
I had a Mac Classic in college – that baby was a powerhouse! It wasn’t my first brush with an Apple – my Dad had an Apple IIe with the sexy green and white screen and dual 5.25 floppies, but this was my own first Apple. Check out these amazing specs:
- A roomy black and white 9″ screen
- no modem because well…no internet.
- 1 whopping meg of RAM – slow down speed racer!
- 40 meg hard drive…yes MEG! – that wouldn’t even hold my Mail app now, let alone run an OS.
- single 3.5″ floppy drive – what’s USB?
- Processor speed: 8 mhz – you heard me right 8!
- This new thing called a mouse – interesting gadget
And all this power and speed was mine for the student super discount price of $1,700. You betcha. Now the great news was, well nothing was compatible with the “business” world. I had a word processor and Aldus Pagemaker. Excel? Well, no but the Mac didn’t worry its simple self with numbers and such. It was a creative type. And I loved him for it. Every time I woke him up, he greeted me with his Happy Mac smile.
And I made lots of fun things on that little guy. But the only way to get that stuff out of my machine at the time was my smokin hot dot matrix printer, faithful Okidata, or truck my disks down to Kinkos and pray that they had a machine that worked with what I had, then pray again that their printer wasn’t broken, then hope the output was even close to what was on the screen, and then pay through the nose for some laser prints.
But at work, I spent years in the PC world, first working with DOS, Windows 3.1, and I was a Windows girl through to XP where I had a good handle on how things were supposed to work. I got to a point where I’d say my Dell and I had an understanding – we learned to co-exist. I knew his noises, his quirks, and how to get him to do what I wanted for the most part. I can’t say we were ever a happy couple, but we stayed together for the sake of the business. He started getting angry though, passive-aggressively not handing me files when I asked for them, giving me the silent treatment, and quietly sabotaging me at the most hurtful times just to spite me.
All the while, Mac was calling to me quietly, its seeming compatibility, its charming good looks. A siren song of an easy carefree relationship. And then there were my memories of the good old Mac Classic. It was a simple creature but it made me happy. So one impetuous weekend, the temptation overtook me. I threw caution to the wind and took the plunge with a shiny new white Macbook. I never looked back. I’ve evolved from the white to the black to the mini and now to my current love, the 15″ Macbook Pro. Not too big, not too small, packed with elegant power and speed. (more…)
