Still Using Macs

Years ago the kind of computer you used could stir some serious passions. The world was in two camps DOS/Windows and Macintosh. There were people who were afraid of the Macintosh and the ease of use that it represented. Computers were supposed to be difficult. Taking away the hard work meant that anyone could do it, not just those who had invested years in learning how to make computers work for them. In the early days, people believed that knowing what to do with a DOS command prompt made them superior.

Apple lost the hardware desktop war for a myriad of reasons which are beyond the scope of my article. Even the resounding success of the iPhone did not matter a lot. Only 41% of iPhone users also use Mac. A lot more use iPads but that is a different story. While DOS users did not all end up on Macs, Microsoft to its credit came banging on Windows until on the surface it looks enough like a Mac that there are no longer religious wars about computer operating systems. The Mac user interface one, even if the plumbing under the Windows version is a lot more complicated.

The difference between a Mac and Windows machine is still huge but it is not something that you can explain in a sentence. Unfortunately, most people have decided Windows is good enough for them. However, among those of us who still really need desktops to churn out serious work, the Mac enjoys a serious and dedicated following.

While I did work for Apple for nearly twenty years selling Mac in some of the toughest markets, anyone who has read some of my writing or my book about my Apple sales career, The Pomme Company, would agree that at times I have been one of their toughest critics. I like to think that I have seen far more Macs than the average person and just maybe I have a better idea of where Apple needs to apply resources to make the Mac experience even better.

I am still not particularly excited about Apple, the company. While they arguably have some of the best computers, their products are marketed as elite products with only those living close to Apple Stores really getting the kind of support that users sometimes need and certainly pay for in Apple’s case.

There is a case to be made that We Are Lucky to Still Have Macs, because Mac revenue is dwarfed by other parts of the company. It’s not the Mac’s fault that they are not on more desks. It has a lot to do with Apple, the company, and the decisions made over the years to not grow their share of the desktop. At times it was like, we have a great product but we really need to keep it a secret. We don’t want it to sell in the enterprise because Steve would be unhappy.

I hesitate to call it poorly-conceived marketing that focuses on just one part of the country but that is close to the truth. If you are near a blue-voting metropolitan area, you likely have an Apple Store close enough by to be practical. If like me you have lived near Roanoke, Virginia, the North Carolina coast, or west of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, you likely have rarely seen the inside of an Apple Store except on visits to the big city.  I hate to think the kind of support people in the fly-over states get.

I have suggested Apple hire Apple user group coordinators across the country where it does not make sense to have a store, but given that Apple would have to part company with some of its pile of money to make that happen, I think the chances are close to nil. The money would hardly register a blip on Apple’s horde of cash, but I am not going to worry around it very much because those of us who have been using Macs for years know how to get by the challenges that Apple throws in front of its non-metropolitan users.

About the only place that I get to see Macs is in our local Costco twenty-five minutes away. Unfortunately choices there are usually limited to lower-end configurations with minimal storage or RAM options. Either one of those limitations would keep me from buying there since Apple like other manufacturers has been on the no-upgrade path for years. While I call myself a rural user because there is a twenty-acre soybean field across from our subdivision and lots of other farming nearby, there is a two GB fiber connection to our house which my Mac Studio could handle if Calix could deliver a router with 2GB output ports. There is no shortage of computers and technology in the house. I even have a 12 TB Network Attached Storage device (NAS) next to my desk. My home office is better equipped than the Reston, Virginia, Apple office I had when I was director of federal sales for the company.

It is fair question as to why I am still using Macs. Would you still drive a Ford if Ford threw you out the window after 20 years? Apple defenestrated me in July 2004. I bought an aluminum PowerBook G4 the next month- it died thirteen months later. Fortunately, I also bought a Dual G5 tower that December. It lasted from December 2004 until January 2023, an admirable run for any computer. I started using Linux in 2004 when I also started using Windows.

I have seen plenty of Windows computers over the years and my dalliance with real estate means that I ended up using a Windows machine for most of that job. I still use Windows because my current job requires the use of ArcGIS Pro and it will only run on Windows. For a good ten years, I did most of my photo work almost exclusively on Windows.  It is only in the last six months that I have switched back to the Mac for my photo work. Apple finally decided to no longer tie your data to a single Mac and I got tired of Lightroom on Windows being unable to figure out two monitors being used at once, Windows has also become something of a pest.  It wants Teams to launch anytime it isn’t running and it is also quick to try to get me to do something I have no interest in doing. The first rule of operating systems is to not get in the way of the user. Windows has never done that and certainly does not do that in its most recent incarnation.

Besides photos, I maintain a number of websites. I got used to Mac web tools at the dawn of the Internet.  They have continued to mature and get better. They kept me using a Mac when I was doing most of my work on Windows

I have been using Microsoft Excel since it was Multiplan. That means I have a lot of years with it and it is still but default spreadsheet but I have grown to appreciate what you can do with Apple’s Numbers. Most of my books have been written in MS Word, but the number of pages composed and complexity pale in comparison to the reports that I have done with Pages in the last twelve years.

Perhaps the straw that broke any loyalty that I had to Word is Word’s propensity to screw up its own mail merge documents. It is tremendously frustrating and time-consuming to have to go looking for dropped addresses in a list of one hundred twenty addresses. I have wasted a lot of time recovering from those Word errors. While Apple’s Pages does not do mail merge address labels, LibreOffice which runs on the Mac does them flawlessly without dropping any. Apple’s Pages is a pretty good page layout program.

I recently wrote an article, The Best Mac Ever. In it I declare the reason the Mac Studio Pro is the best Mac ever because it just works. I doubt anyone is going to switch to a Mac because of this article or my experiences. However, remember the Mac has to be a pretty dang good computer for someone like me to keep using it.

I don’t remember serious computer user switching over to the Mac ever going make to Windows. The only thing that is better on Windows is search. If you are like me, you probably have a Windows machine doing little or nothing that can run a search for you while you keep working on your Mac.