You know, it’s funny; Back in the day I used to despise Apple. I was a PC guy. After my first computer (TRS-80 CoCo) I bought an IBM 5150. Had to take out a damn loan to buy it too. But after the MAC came out, no command line. It wasn’t a real computer.
Was a PC guy up until 2009, although I was getting tired of MS around 1998. Win 2000 was the last MS I used. (Had Vista that came on a ThinkPad for a couple of weeks before wiping it and installing Linux.
Then the iPhone came out. Finally, in 08/09 I bought my first MAC. It fit in my pocket! After many issues getting it to sync properly and consistently with iTunes running on W2K in a VirtualBox on my Linux ThinkPad, I bought an iMac.
Now here I am all these years later with an iMac, 2 Mac Minis, an original iPad, 3rd Gen iPad, IPad Air 2, two Apple TVs (3 & 4) and an iPhone 6.
I still have the iPhone 3GS that started me down this road. My GF lost the iPhone 5 I handed down to her when I upgraded to the 6.
She had to go out and get her own 6s. :-)
I’m happy with Apple. They work. And they do take pains to make them secure. And I think, in addition to all the engineering they put into the devices themselves, that their commitment to keeping things secure and private under the hood speak volumes.
Android is google. I don’t use google anymore. I’m not their damn product.
My first PC was the Commodore 64k back in 1978. Couldn’t afford a PC in college, so I took my programming and Engineering courses on a big IBM mainframe. Got my “own” PC when I worked for NASA. A 66 MHZ 486DX fully loaded. Back then I was investigating AI and neural network computing. Got some nice toys and advanced training.
From there I went to Austin and Motorola, who made the 68000 processors for Apple. There I designed testers for Motorola to test the 68xxx, RISC and advanced micro controller division. Got my first Mac issued to me there. Did my design (using MacPaint) drawing D sized drawings (yeah, 3 by 3 sheets of paper glued and taped together) with schematics covering the whole mess. No simulation. No emulation. Just draw the circuits on the Mac and hope they work as designed. Then debug the prototype. Did that for 9 years. Got to know the Mac very well. Even was one of the first to bring on the PowerPC Macs online.
Then off to the world of Intel R&D and PC design for 20 years. I bought my first Mac Mini in 2012 after seeing the mess Win8 was. I now manage engineers for the DoD and NASA. The DoD world still does the daily battle trying to make Win10 run the legacy software that they depend upon. Meanwhile, the SMART folks at NASA all use Apple MacBook Pros.
I get a kick of the idiots who “hate” Apple and have no clue as what one even is. They mock Apple users, yet my knowledge of Windows will dwarf what they know, and I use my Mac at home because it is so dependable. I can run, and do run WinXP, Win7 Pro and Win10 on my Mac with Parallels; while also running OSX.
The computer is a tool. It allows my brain accomplish more than it can without a computer. Whether that tool runs OSX, Windows, Linux, Chrome or even Ubuntu - I think I am better equipped to make that decision. Not some anti-Apple hater.