Once upon a time, (bare with me here) a long time ago, I was given a spectrum 48k & a bag of cassettes. (one of them, incidentally, was Elite 1!)
These days it's hard to imagine the frustration of 20min load up times, only to find out that yet again it hasn't worked. A slight tweak of the volume control, and try again.
All these frustrations only emphasized the 'WOW!' factor, when you actually get it working.
Then many years passed in a fairly computer free sort of way, then one day, a bit more settled down, I ended up with a fairly cheap PC.
Yet more frustrations of "you need to install additional software to run this program' and 'This program won't run on your computer' and 'Error - something has gone wrong' etc etc
Then I got a job with a network of fairly ok PCs running a stock control system in a manufacturing company. Same old rubbish, of errors, 'this program cannot be saved' 'this computer failed to shut down properly' etc etc. constantly having to refer to backups, re-do 3 days of stock counting etc.
PC's seemed to constantly fill themselves up with garbage, until they stop working. Constantly having to install updates, then various programs wouldn't work any more.
Computers, basically, were a nightmare.
Then my brother gave me his old mac. (one of those ones with the handles on the corners)
It looked cool, it was much more QUIET!!! and everything 'just worked,' fairly faultlessly, for years.
Eventually, it was getting a bit out of date, so I bought a 2nd hand aluminium imac (core2duo) for about £500.
This was totally silent, the sound was amazing, the picture amazing, it was tidy - no wires, apart from a power lead, and everything just worked, all the time, with no constant 'software updates', no anti-virus needed, & no unexplained crashes.
The only times anything did go wrong, it was generally with 'MS office for mac' or something to do with microsoft.
That computer is still working now.
So now I've got a 2011 27" imac, i7, SSD, with windows on bootcamp (just for ED4, really) which I bought for £600 2nd hand. It's great. I can carry it under one arm with the keyboard & mouse in the other, it does everything I ever want faultlessly. All the programs sync together well, & it runs ED4 on medium settings with 60FPS, with the GPU never getting hotter than 64 degrees.
I'm probably not your average mac user, and I won't be buying another one for a long time to come, I hope, as this one has all the connectivity I need. It appears to me that they may have gone backwards in some respects, since the 2011 models. no more CD drive, no more optical S/Pdif in/out audio, no more firewire 800 (I use all of these things).
I'm not a particular fan of Apple. In fact, I've never paid them a penny for anything, and my entire spend on computing, over 25 yrs, is less than £1300.
I'm kind of glad that there's a large bunch of apple fanboys, who always want the latest & greatest, because there's a constant stream of pretty good hardware available, that's just a couple of years old, which rubbishes the idea that macs are too expensive. You can still get a pretty awesome mac mini for about £300
I get it, that modern PCs are 'better' than macs, especially for gaming, but in terms of hassle free life, my imac is way out in front.
I also get it that decent PCs are probably much more reliable than the one's I've had the displeasure to meet.
I also get it that macs can & do go wrong too, but generally, in a sentence, I buy mac (2nd hand) because basically, everything just works.
I know I won't be converting you, but hopefully that explains a bit
o7
