You see the cute commercial on T.V. where the handsome young man says he's MAC and the beaurocratic and officious looking middle-aged man says he's PC. They would have you believe that MAC is the wave of the future and that you're stuffy and old for wanting to use PC. The differences between the two are myriad but their similarities make the debate of which one's better one of very narrow margins. The original difference begins with the men who made them, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Bill Gates didn't create the platform like Steve Jobs did, he just created an operating system that was more convenient than hacking in Binary for days and hoping. Steve Jobs originated the idea of the Graphical User Interface that Windows is known for and even started proprietary hardware standards. The two started out working together and eventually had differences that caused a rift, resulting in Microsoft and Apple Computers becoming two distinct entities. The discussion does not really begin and end with them though since their intellectual children have become decidedly different entities with their own vivid personalities. It begins with the user.
My best friend John in High School had much wealthier parents than I did, so he always had the cool toys. He had a Commodore 128 and a new MacIntosh computer. The Commodore wasn't really very good for anything but video games unless you were a hacker, but the MacIntosh was so easy to use it invited even the most mechanically challenged person to sit and play. It had a one button mouse that the PC world had yet to embrace and a host of applications that were years ahead of their time. P.C. at this point had yet to evolve into anything impressive, monochromatic screens (That's one color for the non-geek) and only a keyboard with a boring interface that only accepted B.A.S.I.C. commands. If you don't know what B.A.S.I.C. is then count yourself fortunate. It was the nasty first langauge of PC that caused the untimely death of many PC's at the hands of too frustrated uber-geeks with baseball bats everywhere. Then D.O.S. was released and some really cool stuff started to happen with your computer, you could custom order the parts and have it designed to your own needs, unlike the MacIntosh which came simply as it came. Then Window's 3.1 came out giving P.C.s hardware compatibility with everything from a mouse to a printer with ease, and the age old debate between which was better, P.C. or Mac was born. Of course we all know which one is better, or do we?
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Two different approaches, both working well. I can't see any advantage of one over the other. Possibly the Gates vs Jobs material might be part of a closer--or do you want to use graf 5 to berate yourself for not buying that block of Microsoft stock in 1986?
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