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I remember that, it's why I didn't get a Mac. Although it was a few years later for me. The only computer that I'd used up until then was an Apple II that had
by Falkon1313 3y ago
I remember that, it's why I didn't get a Mac. Although it was a few years later for me.
The only computer that I'd used up until then was an Apple II that had been donated to our school. I managed to talk my parents into buying one, and they took me to the store but I couldn't find one. Asked the salesman and he said they didn't sell them anymore but now they had these new Macintosh computers.
I looked at the rinkydink black and white screen with a mostly-blank desktop with just a few icons you could drag around or click on it. Couldn't even figure out how to get to the command line, let alone into BASIC. When I asked the salesman he said that you couldn't and seemed utterly baffled that someone would actually want to use their computer.
So I left and went and bought a PC clone instead. Plugged it in and booted it up and I was coding immediately. PCs just worked, and let you do whatever you wanted. Macs were kind of toy computers at the time.
That philosophy still kind of holds to this day, though less so now. I use a Mac for work, and luckily they did finally make it possible to get to a command line and to program on it. At some point, they realized they had to give some power to it or else become utterly irrelevant. But you can tell that it's still not intended for power users. It still can't run most software, and what it does have is limited and simplified, from the OS on up, and still defaults to making things difficult except for the simplest use cases.