Who do I think I am?

Living, breathing and using the Macintosh platform can be a strange experience. The way in which you get treated by others can at times be unbelievable when they find out you use Macintosh.

A Windows PC-users response can fall into many catagories, depending on their age and experience, but generally it spans from the genuinely stupid:

“Oh Macintosh, what version of Windows does that use then?”

through to the sarcastic, but generally misinformed:

“Macintosh, you need to rebuild desktops all the time don’t you?”

and straight on to the sarcastic, totally missing the point, blinkered IT manager:

“Hah, hah! Macintosh – overpriced, underpowered, toy computers!”

You’ve all probably experienced one of the above, but it’s best to ignore it, and I follow the rule, “don’t get involved in an argument you know you can’t win.”

Mac users however are generally much more calm and open-minded.

My first experience of the Macintosh was in the late 80’s at college. The ‘design studio’ hadn’t at that point become completely computerised, and this lone Mac (I don’t remember the model) was used as a typesetting machine, running out copy that would later be pasted to board.

I didn’t spend much time with it then, but even I realised that this was the future of my job and I enthusiastically followed this aspect of my career. However I didn’t realise that the Mac was fundamentally different from other computers.

One of my first jobs was working in an Advertising Agency, which had invested a large sum of money (£50,000+) in bringing typesetting equipment ‘in-house’. The equipment used wasn’t Mac-based, it was a PC computer system from Agfa. The screen itself was split into two areas. The left hand side was a white area which showed you what the typeset page would look like, the right hand side was the place where you type in the code which described the page to your left. Sounds familiar? It’s a lot like HTML editors of today such as Dreamweaver, and in fact the code language was similar to HTML.

Working this way was very slow and time-consuming as you can imagine, but back then, I didn’t know any different. Mac’s were around at this time, but they were ignored because of an attitude that ran through the company I was working for (an attitude that still pervades throughout business today) that Mac’s, and the graphical user interface they use, weren’t serious computers – they were merely toys.

The £10,000+ spent on these machines wasn’t the only outlay. Initial training took weeks and the support costs must have been astronomical. Instaling a font for instance needed a support call and a visit by an engineer, and periodically, say once every few months, the equipment needed a systems overhaul, because otherwise it would slow down and become unusable. I struggled with this Agfa machine for more than a year, until thankfully, the company fell on hard times and was taken over by another agency. This agency was originally set up by creative designers, and used Mac’s extensively.

When I was first put on a Mac, a short while later, I was initially dubious. The initial Agfa training I had took over a month, it was that complicated (and expensive). On the Mac however, I didn’t need any. Everything was so intuitive, easy to follow and simple to use, that within a week, I was producing all the company’s adverts on this Mac (a IIci I think). I didn’t need to be told what or how to do these things, you simply thought for example, “I need to place this image and then tint it to 20% black, how do I do that?” and within a few mouse clicks, it was done. A new word entered my vocabulary – intuitive.

Over the next few months I became a ‘Mac expert’, and started to learn about how the Mac’s worked, investigating the System Folder, and seeing how unbelievably simple it all was. We had around 4 Mac’s in total, all networked, with a scanner, imagesetter, printer etc. and it all worked beautifully and reliably.

But the most important thing was, that the two areas that are the most expensive part of any computer system, 1) the training needed for staff, and 2) computer support costs, DID NOT APPLY TO A MACINTOSH STUDIO.

I firmly believe this is one of the reasons why the first design agency failed (because it used expensive Agfa systems) and the second is still in business and using Mac’s today.
Since then, I have had numerous jobs in the design and print industry, all using the Macintosh platform. At the moment I am a studio manager for a similar Mac-based studio to the one I started in. This department is very profitable and this stems from the rock-bottom training and support costs that a Mac studio enjoys.

I am forever grateful to the Apple Macintosh and the people that created it. What they’ve achieved since 1984 seems impossible, taking the computer away from the geeks and giving it to the rest of us, allowing us the freedom to use it as a creative tool, leaving the nerds with nothing to do except scoff at how ‘childish’ it all was.

The rest of us, of course, know better.