Took this photo outside the Covent Garden Apple Store in London on Thursday afternoon. Big crowds had gathered outside to pay tribute to the man. I’m not a mac fan myself but you can’t argue with the success Steve brought to Apple when he returned to the company he founded in the mid-90’s. He left the company as one of the biggest in the world when it eclipsed Exxon in August (but then lost some ground) having already succeeded Microsoft and Dell.
OK, so I was using Apple Macs before they were cool. I even had my very own Performa 630. I grinned and beared when my mates were playing the latest, coolest games and I had, umm, snake? For a few years I was the typical mac fan boy, before anyone had even heard of macs and way before it was ‘cool’ to like them. We’re talking the mid-90’s here.
Anyways. I grew up. I moved on. The Performa was retired to the rubbish tip (33 MHz and 8mb RAM only cuts it for so long, and besides, Snake II was out and needed more power). I got a PC.
And guess what? It did everything that the Mac did. And it played Half Life, Championship Manager and FIFA.
So, it left me thinking, what can a Mac do that a PC can’t.
Fast forward to 2008. My boss is where I was 10 years back. A Mac fanboy, blinded by Steve Job’s polo neck jumpers. He uses a Mac because, well, it’s just cool, isn’t it? With absolutely no logical reason to use a Mac, he insists it can do things that the PC can’t.
Like the ability to be used for…business?
At the weekend we had a large business meeting at the hotel. Aravind was waxing lyrical about his presentation that he was producing in Keynote and how it blew the pants off my Power Point Presentation.
Long story short. What happened when we got to the meeting? The ‘business ready’ Mac was unable to connect to the projector because it didn’t have the right cable port!
PC – 1
Mac’s – 0
(my fullest apologies to the site I ripped the image from. Google Images. What an inspired idea!)