Wednesday, May 28, 2014

My Apple Product Review

Apple Guy Since 1986

image - blogmidia8

This, (above), was my first Mac computer experience. It was my 3rd marriage. Vicki and her business partner were doing graphic design the old fashioned way with big layouts, typesetters, paste ups, halftones, line photography, and a whole lot of paper. A 20 page newsletter would take 3 weeks to produce that way.

One of the clients insisted that their newsletter be produced on a computer. Vicki had a client that was a computer company, but they had DOS computers. They were crap to use, especially for anything artistic. So that was no solution when they offered one.

Then the planets aligned. The cosmos burped and jostled Steve Jobs. He introduced his new Apple Mac computer with a graphic user interface and Adobe Page Maker software. It was perfect for graphic design. You, or at this point in the story, Vicki, could see the image of the newsletter right there on the screen while you worked on it just as it would look when printed.

Her learning process on the Mac was as long as it took to see the cursor move when she wiggled the mouse. Easy falls short as a description for her first Mac experience. It was more like friendly magic.

Vicki produced an 18 page newsletter in 3 days using the new Mac+. It was astounding. When the Mac SE was introduced with built in 20mb hard drive, we got 2. Vicki and I went our separate ways, but Apple computers and I are still together.

se30-4.jpg
Mac SE - Google images

When I found true love at last with Chris Sauer, she wanted a computer for email and letters. 

We got a Sears PC from our neighbor. She was not impressed. Chrissy’s mother got a windows computer from her son and sent it. It was too technically involved for Chris to enjoy, so it gathered dust and took up space. 

The cosmos cleared its throat. Steve Jobs came back to Apple and introduced the iMac.

apple_imac_400.jpg
iMac G3 - Google images

Chrissy’s mother, (Marian), got Chris an iMac for her birthday. She was smiling as she learned emailing, letter writing and instant messaging within a day or two of plugging it in. I still have our iMac, (souped up with 1GB of RAM, woohoo), and working as good as ever.

I have added a few more modern Apple products in the last 6 years. A Late 2008 Aluminum MacBook, a 4th gen iPod Touch, a 3rd gen Apple TV unit, a Mid 2012 MacBook Pro, and an iPhone 5c.

MacBook.jpg
iPhone photo of MacBook Pro while I write this


All the Apple products, including the 2000 iMac, are in use today. There are audio projects, video projects, research projects, photography and design projects, print, CD, and DVD projects, blogs. websites, beta testing, and more creative projects going on at all times than just one computer can handle. Which brings us to some reviews based on my experiences;

All of the hardware is still functioning like new, no matter how many years I have been using it daily. Each uses the last operating system upgrade that worked on that hardware, with one exception: The MacBook Pro.

It was sure to happen after Steve Jobs died. There would be someone that thought he knew a better way of computing than that silly magical user experience that made Apple the successful company it is. Gone now is the enchantment, the smooth cursor motion, the friendly graphics, and the tools that creative professionals in all fields have been using to design new sophisticated ideas in disciplines from music to mathematics, from games to gamma ray detectors. All eliminated with the introduction of an industrial piece of crap called Mavericks.

They even took away the endearing qualities of the iPod/iPad/iPhone interface and gave it generic looking icons and hard to see controls with the ‘new and improved’ iOS 7. This is not as devastating as Mavericks is to full scale computing, but if iOS 8 goes any farther toward chicken scratches for controls and ugly icons, I won’t be putting it on my iPhone.

I did install Mavericks on my MacBook Pro just to give it a try. It slowed my computer to a crawl. The cursor movement was too jerky for painting, drawing, shading or carefully moving objects, (definitely a bummer for artists and architects). When I would mix and convert music, it would take way too long to complete processes that had been instant with the previous operating system.

If my MacBook Pro was to be efficient and fun to use, I had to get that Mavericks junk off the hard drive. The best way, to be sure there were no bits and pieces of that garbage stuck to anything, would be to replace it with a new hard drive. I got OS-X Mountain Lion from the App store and installed it onto the new MacBook Pro hard drive.

Pre-Mavericks Apple Apps, like Pages and GarageBand were easily reinstalled and the magic was back on the MacBook Pro. It is once more the efficient and pleasing experience that I associate with Apple products. Another benefit is not needing expensive new computers.

So there you have it. In my experience there is no better computer, tablet, pod or phone product than Apple. There are dozens of imitations, but none that have the quality, durability, or balanced user friendly design of Apple.

If elegance, sophistication, and a friendly interface makes using a computer fun and exciting, then get a Mac, Macbook, iPad, iPod, iPod Touch, and Apple TV. They all do different things well, and they can share information, images, music, art, controls, email, and when they are wirelessly together it becomes a new experience.

Just make sure you install OS-X 10.8.5, add Pages 4.3, GarageBand 6.0.5, plus the other iLife pre- Mavericks Apps on your Mac, MacBook or MacBook Pro if you want the Steve Jobs magic user interface experience.

Plus you won't be bothered with endless updates interrupting you in the middle of projects.

Well now, that didn’t take too long.

( I should mention that through the years, I have built, serviced, sold, and provided tech support for computers using DOS, Windows, and Unix based operating systems.)

Today’s Video;


No Step 3

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