The first computers I ever encountered were big mainframe monoliths way back in the early 70s. At the time I worked for Honeywell Information Systems, who were known then as the ‘other computer company’ – what an amazing evolution has taken place from then to now!

 

By the time I was running my own business in the 80s, computing had become ‘personal’ and we were early adopters of the IBM PC with 256K of memory.

 

Since then I have stuck religiously with the PC, and subsequently Windows format. For our business it has made absolute sense, as our customers exclusively employ this platform and the tools we use all perform perfectly on it.

 

All through the 25 years I’ve been in business though I have constantly had the "PCs are crap, Macs are wonderful" argument thrown at me. And I have robustly defended the PC.

 

Then late last year I decided that I wanted to digitise my library of home videos and realised that my home PC, though perfectly adequate as a home-business machine, would need serious updating or replacing to deal with the kind of processing demands that this would entail. After some research and good advice I finally succumbed and decided to purchase an iMac.

 

This was on the basis that:

• It came with some very good tools for the video amateur (me).
• It was going to sit in my front room, not my home-office, so look/design was important.

I haven’t been disappointed and after a little initial alienation I’ve got used to the Mac OS. Also it’s doing the job I bought it for very well and it is definitely a design statement in my house.

 

However, what’s been very interesting is that now I am a user on both sides of the camp and can argue my case even more effectively than before. All the rubbish about how user friendly the Mac is, how much faster, how it never crashes, how it works out of the box etc etc is all just propaganda (very good propaganda of course – the ads are very amusing).

 

I’ve had some inexplicable issues with everything freezing, lots of annoying wizzy things happening as a result of a mouse click that I could really do without, huge frustration with its file management, and as far as how fast it is, it’s no different from the high-spec PCs we use in the studio.

 

All in all, they are both just personal computers, the result of 30 odd years of development by extremely clever people, but both are at pretty much the same stage of sophistication.

 

Signals will certainly be sticking to the PC platform for the foreseeable future.

 

The Mac does look good though!