I’ve got a site called AppleSwitcher, but I’ve never switched. Odd? Not really. I just never went down the PC road.
My first computer was a Commodore 64 (if you like C64 games, go here and start playing now). That was in 1984 or so, and I used it for a few years.
Fast forward over a few years of computerlessness until 1991, when I asked a college professor for advice on what type of computer to get to perform paper-writing duties. She asked me if I liked “graphics.” Of course I liked graphics. I was a college paper photographer, and as such had seen The Most Amazing Machine — in the school paper newsroom no less — in the form of a dedicated AP news photo PC with a screen that paged through the latest AP photos from around the globe. That machine was really exciting, heady stuff for pre-Web days.
The choice I asked the professor for help on, as if you need a clue on this, was of course between an Apple Mac and a PC. At the time I was using IBM PCs running Windows 3.1 in college computer labs. It wasn’t hard to have a violent dislike for the networked 16MHz PC clones. Much of the class time was spent getting students from point A to point B in the Windows OS… the cold, unforgiving 16-color Windows 3.1 world.
My professor recommended a Mac, and I immediately set to reading every Macuser and Macworld magazine in existence. I could feel that a Mac was far and away the best decision.
In the winter of 1991-92 I bought a Mac LC, matching Apple 12″ monitor, and original Stylewriter printer from Lewan and Associates on Colorado Boulevard in Denver, Colorado. It took a good 2-4 weeks for them to get it for some reason.
There wasn’t much I could do about the waiting; there were no alternatives like CompUSA or Apple Store. Macs — and any real computers back then — were just not nearly as popular as they are now, and thus places that sold them were few.
The several weeks of waiting felt like forever of course. When it was delivered I poured over it for weeks discovering this “System 7″ thing, and a long line of Macs has followed since.
Postscript
I owned a Dell laptop, but gave it to my dad about a year ago, so I don’t technically own a PC right now. But I use one at work, and have used them at my jobs more often than not in the last 6 years.
