I've ended my boycott of Apple Computer.
I purchased my first PC about 30 years ago. It was an Apple II+. I coded my first programs on it. It was a hands on PC- you could open the top
and add and remove cards at will. My
first add-on was a 16K card that brought my internal RAM up to a whopping 64K!
I was so happy with my Apple that I upgraded to the Apple
IIe and then to the Apple IIGS. My Apple
IIGS was personally signed by Woz himself.
I was one of Apple's most loyal customers.
Apple was not content with success. They introduced the Macintosh and did away
with the cards. You were expected to buy
a PC that you couldn't upgrade. The
straw that broke the camel's back for me was a 10 megabyte hard drive call the
Apple Sider. While it was an unbelievable
amount of storage, it had a steep price tag - $695. For the same amount of money, I could buy a 40
megabyte hard drive that would work in an IBM PC. The PC had horrible graphics compared to the
Apple IIGS or the Macintosh. At about
this time, a guy at Apple named Steve Jobs decided to sacrifice the Apple II
line to save the struggling Macintosh. Enough
was enough and I moved to a PC with 2 forty megabyte hard drives.
I made the correct decision.
PCs improved faster than the Apple and soon the majority of software on the
shelves was for the PC. It was easy to
boycott Apple because the most creative developers wrote software for the PC. If the Apple users were lucky, the software
was released later in an Apple version.
Fast forward to 2011.
I'm in a little Italian village and something about me caused a lady to
realize that I'm an American. I try to
blend in, but it's difficult when you carry 30 pounds of camera gear and cannot
speak a word of Italian. The lady came
over and said, "They just announced that Steve Jobs is dead."
It's 2012 and a revitalized Apple announces the iPad3. It retains some of the worst Apple features,
no user replaceable anything and you can't even plug it into a hard drive. It
reminds me of my Apple II+ which didn't have a hard drive either. It's moved up a few letters - 64K has been
replaced by 64G. The programs for it are
small and often as useless as some of the original Apple software. It has excellent color Graphics and sound
like the Apple IIGS - but better. You
can add and remove apps instead of adding a removing cards. It's compact to continue the tradition of the
Apple IIc.
I purchased the Apple iPad3 last week. It's a born again Apple II. It's taken over 20 years for Apple to upgrade
the Apple II line. This is a definite improvement
and this time Steve Jobs isn't around to screw things up. I wonder if I can convince Woz to sign it.
