Why Macs Are Different

I recently interviewed my 8th grade class and found that the there were 20 PC users and 12 Mac users.

I wasn't surprised to find that there were so many PC users, but I was surprised to find out how well all of the Mac users knew their machine! They knew the speed, model, and version of the Mac OS. Most of the PC users put down "PC" or "PC-Win 98".

This article will not labour over the results of my interview, but simply talk about why Macs are different.

Macs have something PCs don't: style, class, and ease of use. Mac fans are almost like one big club. You know one Mac fan, you know them all. They all are similar in a way.

Then there is the Other Side (a.k.a. the Dark Side), which pulls unsuspecting users in, forcing them to become addicted to PCs. These are often tech oriented people, who, sadly, don't know all there is to know about Macs and the Mac OS, so they won't give it a chance. This is too bad, because Macs are great computers, as all Mac users know.

Macs have another thing: personality. One Mac is not like another. PCs are simply boxes whose owners pull out motherboards and stick in new ones. That is not an upgrade; that is replacement. PC users also freely pull out processors, video cards, sound cards, hard disks, and everything else for replacement. When you are done "upgrading" your PC, you have a new computer in an old case. It is common to find a Pentium-based PC inside a 386 class PC case.

With a Mac, you don't usually do that. Take my Quadra 610. It was originally sold with 8 MB of memory and a 230 MB hard disk. You can upgrade memory to 68 MB, add a Power Macintosh upgrade card, install a huge 4 GB hard disk, upgrade to Mac OS 8.1, add a DVD drive, and have a very functional PowerPC based computer (I chose to upgrade the RAM and OS, leaving the rest alone). Notice I didn't mention the words "replace motherboard" or "remove processor," or even "install video card." You are still keeping the "Mac Inside." This is why Macs are different.

Mac people know the case a Mac came in. Mention a Power Macintosh 6100/60, and you hear, "Oh, I remember those - the pizza boxes!" Mention a Pentium 100 MHz PC made by UpTech, and you hear (from an experienced PC person), "How much memory, what size/type of hard disk, what case style, what video card, etc." Assuming the person calling up knew nothing about their PC, I wonder how long it would take them to figure out any problems that we will assume they were calling about.

The average computer user doesn't know what "autoexec.bat" or "config.sys" is. It is all a foreign language. Have them look at a Mac. It's all in the GUI. They will see a happy face if the computer is working, a sad one if it isn't, a ? inside a disk if it can't find a disk, and a big X inside a disk if the disk is not a startup disk. You can't get any more straightforward than that. After it starts up, you will see "Welcome to Macintosh" with a sliding bar. The bar tells you how much more time there is before the computer is done starting up. Another straightforward thing.

Then you get to the desktop. On Windows 98, you see a bunch of icons for programs. Where is the hard disk? Where do I throw things out? On a Mac, it's easy. As you see in the above screen shot, there is the hard disk icon up in the left corner, and a Trash icon in the lower left corner. It's almost obvious from there. The menu bar at the top is so easy to use, you can't complain! In the screen shot below, you will see the hard disk and applications windows open. From there you can see that the applications don't have plain file like icons and names like "msword6.exe" or "waol.exe." Who knows what those could be! Instead you see "Microsoft Word 6.0" and "America Online." That is why Macs are different.