No, not politically correct – I’ve never really been that kind of PC, despite being equality officer for the NUJ for a while. I mean personal computer. I’ve never been a Mac, I’ve always been PC.
Anyway – ooh, heck. This is a longish one…grab a cuppa and pull up a chair.
Back in the day when I started work, we used computer terminals connected by hard-wired cables to mainframes the size of double-decker buses. The first ever personal computer I used was a dual-floppy with a big, fat screen that was green and very un-health & safety, we later discovered. Who remembers those?
The old dual floppies booted from one disk (A drive) and you worked off the other (B drive), until the boot disk was replaced with a hard drive (C drive). Slowly, computers got smaller, floppy disks got bigger for a while, then they got smaller again, and then we only needed one floppy, and were enclosed in a hard case, because we had our own C (hard) drive now inside the computer.
One day, when I worked in an editorial office, can’t remember which one, an Apple computer suddenly arrived and it was supposed to be a game changer. To me it looked just like a great big orange (why it was orange when it was an Apple, not one of us could understand), and only ‘special’ employees were allowed to use it.
It was a flash in the pan, everyone said, and it would never take off…and now everything is generally designed for Apple first with Windows coming in as a poor second.
But I stuck to my Windows computers. I learned how to use a word processor, first WordStar and then WordPerfect. I thought WordPerfect had gone the way of WordStar until I recently saw a complete WordPerfect package for sale for something like £300.
I used to be a Lotus girl too. I was working at the National Grid by then and our department nerd was singing the praises of the Microsoft suite of word processor (Word), spreadsheet (Excel), database (Access – ho, ho, ho, who remembers *that*?), and desktop publisher (Publisher).
Our nerd said this MS thing was the future. We dug our feet in, continuing to use our Lotus Notes and our Lotus Spreadsheet despite Nerd telling us we could still use formulae in Excel, just like we did in Lotus, etc, etc, etc, blah-di-blah-di-blah.
Oh, how we scoffed.
But MS did indeed get bigger. And bigger, and BIGGER. Didn’t it? And then it started to take over our computers, spy on our lives, force us to do things we really didn’t want it to do. And then they started to charge us extra for the privilege, and every year!
If I could have afforded one when they came out, I would have bought an Apple Macbook in a heartbeat. Because I didn’t like one conglomerate knowing everything about us and tying us to its products until we were scared to leave them behind. I certainly didn’t like them charging us every year for it either.
But I couldn’t afford one. And when I could, I’d heard that Apple were doing the exact same thing, but making us UPGRADE (i.e. buy more Apple products) every 3 years or so.
When virus after worm after trojan after malware was invading my PERSONAL computer, I was already gnashing my teeth. I paid for premium virus protection and firewall, but MS hackers still managed to get through. So I stopped paying extra for protection and started backing everything up instead. Everything. Every single thing.
Last year, MS sneaked AI into one of its updates. I found out how to get rid of it, but they did it again and again with every single update. Some updates completely crashed my system and I had to go out and buy another computer. Then another update forced Cloud storage onto me and it made all of my MS products default to there. I found out how to remove that too. But they did it again, and again, and again.
I stopped using the printer on wi-fi because HP could see what I was doing and how many printouts I’ve made. And I have real trust issues with having all of my stuff in the Cloud where it can be hacked and my identity stolen and phishing emails I haven’t sent looking like I did send them.
Last week, there was another Windows update. I don’t have updates on auto on my computer. (Hands up everyone who’s surprised…) I have to schedule them or set them to update on close down or reboot. I didn’t set them to do anything.
And then on Monday, when I went and got my laptop to work on away from my desk, I opened it to see that THE WINDOWS UPDATE WAS RUNNING ANYWAY! I hadn’t told it to, I hadn’t said it could. But IT DID IT ANYWAY.
And then? Then IT KILLED THE INTERNAL DISPLAY ON MY LAPTOP!
HOW DARE IT? HOW FUCKING DARE IT?
Fortunately, we could still link it to the standalone monitor and do some research. And it seems that brands such as Lenovo (i.e. mine) will flash their BIOS through Windows to see if there are any updates waiting, and if there are…THEY DO IT ANYWAY!
Furious does not come close to how I felt.
I’d looked at Linux machines but decided the learning curve was too great at my time of life, and all of my products would have to be run through some kind of portal. So I researched the Macs. And then we decided to go out to Curry’s and have a chat with someone there.
Only when we got to Curry’s, they’d had a theft of all the display Macbooks apart from one. And the Curry’s in Rotherham had had a theft of the same too. They suggested we try the Apple store at Meadowhall, and that’s where we went next. In the meantime, I asked the Oracle (aka Facebook) what my friends thought.
The salesman who looked after us was absolutely brilliant. He patiently asked what I was looking to use the machine for and why I’d finally, after nearly 40 years, decided to cast-off my PC stance and even consider Mac. He did convince me to do precisely that, though, andmost of my friends on FB did too.
We went in there for a MacBookPro, but after a good 30 or 40 minutes, we came out with a Mac Mini and a MacAir for almost the same price. The only reason it was a few pounds more was because we also bought a new USB hub as my old one is dying.
And that’s what I spent the rest of my holiday weekend doing. Setting up the laptop first and then the desktop, grabbing all of the products that are important to me (Scrivener, TickTick, Affinity), and I even downloaded Word too but was able to kick their aggressive update and OneDrive behaviour to the kerb.
And then MS sent me notification of a new agreement in which we apparently license MS to use our own IP for anything we have created using their products in whichever way they see fit without any royalty, payment, further permission, prior notification or anything.
So that’s Word gone from my toolbox as well.
I’m going to have a play with Apple Pages and see if I can do everything I do in Word there, and I’ll see if my complicated spreadsheets work in their Numbers too. Otherwise, I might be going back to LibreOffice and Word can shove itself where the sun doesn’t shine.
Apart from that, we had a nice weekend. Shopping on Saturday and gigging on Sunday. We should have gone into the garden on Monday, but we ran out of daylight and it was midnight by the time I was happy to step away from the Mac.
Tomorrow, we’ll find out how I got on with my heavy schedule not only using an unfamiliar computer but an unfamiliar operating system. Will this long-in-the-tooth PC actually turn into a Mac?
(Note: the ‘I’m a PC’ or ‘I’m a Mac’ are from an advert on the telly.)
I would not have been able to transition to full time freelancing without my Macbook. The PCs are built to fail. If I could have afforded one when I had to replace mine (I still use it offline sometimes), I would have. Until I”m on better financial footing, I’m stuck with PCs, but you can be sure I’ll go back over to Mac as soon as possible.
I loved Pages until the last couple of updates; now it’s got a lot of the clunkiest of word features. I invested in Word For Mac, which I found worthwhile at the time; I THINK you might be able to save files as .docx now in Pages. I know you can in .rtf, which works well across both systems.
When I first got my Mac, the Apple store offered a month’s worth of free workshops to learn how to use it, and I needed a lot of them. Once I understood the differences, I find the system works more the way my brain does than windows.
Even though my Macbook can’t go online anymore, it works fine offline, and I still sometimes use it for wordprocessing or photos. I had it for, I think, ten or twelve years and it only needed to be repaired once or twice.
I think they are making them now to last a shorter time, but they are still more stable than PCs.
I think Pages saves to all formats, same as Libre Open Office. A friend said her publisher still insists on Word doc files, but how they can tell the difference is anybody’s guess. Scrivener also exports doc and rtf files too. Ian has family MS Office, so I still have it if I want/need it. No way am I using the online version.