Mac users are not necessarily "less technical"
"A novice computer user could care less whether you call something an installation problem or not. Those problems are getting in the way of his USING the machine. So ease-of-installation issues are very much ease-of-use issues. And when it takes an expert 2 days to unwind an installation problem, then there is something drastically wrong with the usability of the machine."
"So I don't agree with you that the differences between Wintel and Mac platforms are not compelling anymore. These things get more and more compelling as the user base becomes less technical. "
Dave, I _know_ you are very technical, being that you were a designer on the 432 and then the 960 (and chips before the 432). And I know Saturn V is technical. And I know I am technical.
I followed the IBM PC world closely. I even built an S-100 machine prior to the IBM PC (an 8080A-based SOL PC by Processor Technology, in 1978). I used to go to the Homebrew Computer Club meetings, circa 1977-78.
I bought an IBM PC in 1983, which I played with and even used for some papers at Intel (on my own dime).
However, after working with a Symbolics LISP machine (tagged architecure, you probably know), the plain and simple fact was that I was hooked on the Xerox (and hence MIT LISP machine, and hence Symbolics) WYSIWYG interface. In fact, I remember having long conversations in 1980-82 with John Wipfli and Steve Dominik and Justin Rattner about WYSIWYG work happening at PARC with the Alto. Bill Oldham told me this was the Biggest Thing Since Slice Bread, in 1980, and I saw that he was right. So did the world.
So I followed the Lisa and then the Mac from the gitgo.
When I left Intel in 1986, the closest thing to the WYSIWYG environment I'd been using, for a price a retiring engineer could afford, was a Mac. I bought a Mac Plus and have never looked back.
My good friend Paul Engel was a PC user, then as now, but he can attest to the cool things the Mac was able to do back then that PCs were only able to do years later (like copy an image from MacPaint or MacDraw and drop it into Microsoft Word...simple stuff, but utterly impossible in DOS for a long, long time). Or using multiple monitors, transparently and easily. (I had two monitors, circa 1990: a color monitor and a Radius Pivot black-and-white. The Mac OS at the time (6, I believe) let me use both monitors as if they were part of the same desktop...the monitors could be placed "virtually" in any configuration. Very impressive, and applications didn't even have to have been programmed with this in mind.)
Anyway, the point is that I've been following cutting-edge software stuff for at least 20 years. I'm no novice.
The Macs I own allow me to concentrate on what I _want_ to concentrate on.
--Tim May |
