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Chapter 1: Why Switch? Demystifying the Mac Mantra
world. (“You bought a what? Are they still making those?”) Few other choices
we make in life can be as self-defining — perhaps religion, political party, and
sports team to cheer for. People who move from New York City to Boston, for
example, invariably suffer mental scars inflicted by changing their baseball
allegiance from the New York Yankees to the Boston Red Sox. (Some of them
never recover and have to live the rest of their lives eking out a living writing
books for technology novices.)
This kind of psychological trauma doesn’t have to happen to you just
because you switch computer platforms. Think of it this way: The PC won the
great war. Apple was forced to abandon the Motorola processor family and
convert to Intel. Macs are now just PCs in more stylish packages with better
software. You’re not abandoning your mother’s cooking — just sampling a
different cuisine.
No matter what I say, you probably won’t completely escape the emotional
side of switching to a Mac. When you feel the shame of betrayal and the
pangs of guilt coming on, repeat this mantra: “It’s just a computer. It’s just a
computer. It’s just a computer.”
An optional brief history of Apple
You don’t need to read this sidebar to make
your decisions, but no book on switching to
the Mac would be complete without a little his-
tory of how Apple got where it is today. None
of the science-fiction magazines that warped
our formative minds dared to predict the level
of computing power that we have beneath our
fingertips or in our shirt pockets today. Further,
no high-tech story is as compelling as the
legend of Steve and Bill, two kids from the West
Coast of the United States who revolutionized
the world.
Apple Computer was founded on April Fools’
Day, 1976, by three young men: Steve Jobs,
Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne. Their
original mission: Sell low-cost circuit boards on
which hobbyists would build their own comput-
ers, based on the newly invented microproces-
sor. That mission quickly changed when Jobs
found that a local electronics shop wanted
more fully assembled systems and gave him an
order for several dozen of them. The price of
the first Apple product, the Apple I, was $666.66,
more than the price of today’s far more capable
Mac mini. Adjusted for inflation, the Apple I
would cost about $2,600 in 2011 dollars — more
than enough for a Mac Pro, or a top-of-the-line
27-inch iMac plus an iPad.
The Apple I used a 6502 microprocessor, which
was considered to be easier to program than
the early groundbreaking devices from Intel
and Zilog, and featured a BASIC interpreter.
BASIC is a particularly simple computer lan-
guage invented by Dartmouth professor John
Kemeny to help teach programming. A young
programmer named Bill Gates dropped out of
Harvard — horrifying his parents — to start
a business selling software to the fledgling
microcomputer industry. He chose the imagi-
native name Microsoft for his venture. A BASIC
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