Apples with everything

This blog is brought to you with very significant inputs from Apple Inc. The computer on which I am writing right now is an iMac. On my travels, I carry with me an Apple MacBook Pro; and at home I privately own a Mac Mini. In my pocket is my iPhone, and my car is wired to play (and display) my iPod. All three members of my family have iPods, and two of them also own an Apple Macintosh.

I first migrated to Apple in 1987, just as the Irish Government was negotiating the Programme for National Recovery (well, there is probably no direct causal relationship between these, but you can’t be sure). Back then I persuaded my Head of Department to let me have a Mac Plus. I then spent almost all of my personal savings on buying an Apple LaserWiter – one of the early laser printers, costing about the same as a medium size car back then, a purchase I felt I could not ask the College to make for me. I then went through a succession of Macs until 1995, when I felt that the company had lost its way. Its computers now looked like PCs, and didn’t behave as well (and of course, Steve Jobs had gone). So when Windows 95 came out, I migrated to the PC world. A colleague of mine built PCs from individual parts, and for five years I worked on his home-made computers (including one laptop which always overheated and once caused a small fire on a plane, but that’s another story).

At that time, in the late 1990s, I was Dean of a Faculty in the University of Hull. There was a pocket in the Faculty of Mac users, and with the zeal of Saul of Tarsus I persecuted them mercilessly, forcing them eventually to migrate to PCs to ensure compatibility in the Faculty’s technology. I repent of that now!

I continued on PCs in DCU from 2000, but began to look again at Macs after the arrival of OS X (and Steve Jobs was back, Hallelujah). I began to realise how much I missed Apple, and how the quality of my thinking and writing had deteriorated while I was on PCs. So in 2004 I returned to the fold, on my knees, and with the promise never to leave again. And as Umberto Eco noted when writing about the theology of the Macintosh, ‘everyone has the right to salvation’.

 

PS. This is not an anti-Microsoft rant – much of the software on my Macintosh is by Microsoft…

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Tags: Apple, Macintosh, PCs

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