The Apple Bias. Working on a Mac since 1985 — still going strong.

Every now and then, I read about people who are annoyed by the Mac — or Apple. They don’t like this or that, they hate iTunes, they tell us their switcher stories to the other sides of computing — Windows or Linux.
Well, when I started my carreer as a designer, computers in the advertising field were different or non-existent. You had to do your layouts the old way, then go to a photographer get the photographs as slides, do the layouts by glueing them together and finishing them by handing them over to the person who did the fine artwork with a typesetter, a lithographer and a specialist doing the print templates.
Then desktop publishing was introduced — and it was all Mac. In 1984/1985 with the dawn of the computer for the rest of us Illustrator and Pagemaker were the finest inventions you could get. Along with a laserwriter and a Mac you could do some very decent artwork (not to compare to now!). The professional designers were laughing at you, so were the professional typesetters and lithographers. But as we all know, everything changed dramatically in the next 10–15 years. The whole graphic industry changed — old jobs vanished, new jobs emerged.
My first Mac 1985 was a Mac 128 with a second floppy drive. The next one was a Plus with HD20 and since these times I bought about 40 or more Macs for the agency. And guess what? I only had 3 Macs that had problems. A Quadra 950 who had a broken mainboard after 5 days, a broken harddisk in a Mac II fx server, an iMac that wasn’t broken but repaired in advance by Apple, because of a bad HD series. I had several iPods, iPhones and iPads even since October ’16 an AppleWatch. And none of them made any problems either.
I don’t hate iTunes, cos I’m dealing with the interface even when it is a bit inconsistent. It is my software of choice for my private Linn amp. The Linn software kazoo server with iTunes does a phenomenal job and yes the usability of the remote software on iPad and iPhone is a bit odd. But it does the job: providing extraordinary sound.
Yes there are some things in the Apple package that are annoying but as a whole the platform for me is far superior to Windows or Linux. I couldn’t have founded my first design firm without the Mac. And in 1990 Windows wasn’t even capable to do the same things a 1984 Mac 128K could do.
From 1986 to 1990 I was Art Director at a Munich Agency that had clients like BOSCH-SIEMENS HAUSGERÄTE, COMPAREX, Computer2000 (Germanys biggest computer distributor at that time) and others. My task was also to introduce computing into the Agency. Macs for the designers, PCs for the others. The network was established by a technician from Computer2000. He never managed to integrate the Macs in the 3COM server achitecture. So we took plan B with an appleTalk network which was fine then (but awfully slow).
Since the 90s I’ve worked for every bigger IT-publishing house in Germany: IDG, WEKA, Bertelsmann you name it. When I was doing the covers for PC Magazine, DOS International or WINDOWS Konkret or others I had a very profound insight in the topics a DOS or Windows user was confronted with: „99 tricks to make Windows faster“, „ 10 hidden features in Windows 95“, „How to get your printer working“ and so on. Problems I never had with my Macs (even with the picky Mac II fx series …).
At that time the Mac wasn’t existent in Germany, it just was to become the workhorse for numerous advertising agencies after 1995 — before very few people in Germany had a clue how to work clever with that new tool.
Then Adobe decided to go Windows. It was the end of an era. We worked for Adobe in the mid 90s, did our ads fully in Xpress (yes, that was BEFORE InDesign, PageMaker was inferior and the Xpress company was bullshitting it’s clientele permanently, dongle anyone?) and Photoshop. Photoshop was then a really good package. Now its just a bloated something (I’m happy that Affinity is catching up with lightspeed).
In 1998 I was praying with the whole community — would Apple bite the big one? Alas Steve came back and Apple flourished from then in a way nobody would have believed in his weirdest dreams.
And again the PC would’t have done the trick better than a Mac. The PC had problems with color, with fonts and so on. And PC designers were discussing problems a Mac designer never thought of…
Maybe in 2018 working on a PC is nearly as convenient as on a Mac. But I’m not eager to find out, I don’t like the Microsoft approach — I’m good with the Apple canon. And if Tim doesn’t make a big mistake in the next 2 or 3 years I won’t think about switching at all.
