Let me just say, I have been very comfortable with computers since I was ten, which is half of my life. I can almost anything you need done on a computer, just because I enjoy playing around with computers. That is, until I had my first experience with a Mac.
I had never touched nor even seen a Mac in person until I came to college. Blame that on my rural education where sports were the only things that were consistently improved upon. Needless to say, we only had PC's in our school because they were cheaper.
So, when coming to college as a journalism major, I was shocked to see there were these foreign computers in my journalism labs. These monitors were quite large and white, unlike anything I had seen before. My first problem was trying to exit out of a window, where I had no clue where to go. Then, for the first time since my professor had begun teaching, I crashed a Mac. I pressed too many buttons, I guess, and the screen went black. So much for Macs being "reliable."
Then, three days later in an entirely different journalism lab with another professor, I crashed a Mac....again. This time, I was attempting to find something on "finder" and it froze, then the screen turned black. How does that even happen? I must have bad luck with Macs.
Since then, I have had nothing but problems adjusting to Macs. While working as the Online Editor for the Times-Delphic last year (shameless plug) I was required to copy and paste coding, without any knowledge of how to do so. I am a right-click kind of girl, who has trouble remembering keyboard shortcuts, so it took some investigation to figure out how to do things as PC as possible on the journalism Macs.
Today was no different. Though I have become used to using Macs, I definitely don't enjoy the experience. It's like that guy in class that nobody likes, but somehow, you constantly always get stuck in his group and must deal with him. This is the same concept.
So anyway, as the Times-Delphic Business Manager this year, I had hoped I would have less interaction with Macs, considering it is a business position. Wrong-o. Today, I attempted to print onto a 10 X 13 inch envelope from MacWord. Now this would typically be a 20 second process on a PC. Just type your words on a Word doc then hit "page setup," change the size to 10 X 13 and hit "print." Easy as pie.
On a Mac, you have to go through probably four or five steps just to get to "page setup" where you then must click aimlessly until you find the winning combination that will allow you to change the dimensions from the presets in the computer. But wait, there's more! Once you have the size set up correctly, you must manually direct the print to the bypass tray for your large envelope. Again, an easy task on a PC that is overly complicated on a Mac.
At the end of the day, the envelope printing incident lasted almost an hour and resulted in an impatient Kaila, ready to eat and see her Matt. That's all. Ugh....
Why on Earth would anyone purchase a device for more than twice the price of a PC that functions less than a PC? I am convinced people buy Macs for the image and not for practicality. That's with the whole Apple brand in general. I mean, what can you say about iPads now that there are so many alternatives? Nothing. No one would seriously purchase an iPad for twice the price of the competitor's tablet just for the name, would they? Oh wait, they would. That's America for ya, all for the image.
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