Ready, Aye, Ready

Link: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2006/december#mon-11-thomas_hawk

Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber lays into a recent Macintosh switcher saying:

What I take away from stories like this is not “Hey, it’s great to see another PC user switch to the Mac.” What I take away is that he ought to feel like a jerk for having mocked Macs and Mac users for 15 years, because he would have been just as happy if he’d switched earlier.

Keep in mind that those fifteen years include changes from Motorola 680x0 to PPC and then to Intel; it includes the changes in the operating system from System 7 through to OSX, including throwing away almost the entire code base; it includes the Mac Classic and the LC through the iMac to the Macbooks; it's from when Apple was haemmorrhaging money to making a lot of it. We're talking a very, very large number of significant changes here.

There's a very good reason I went from the Amiga to Wintel PCs rather than the Macintosh when the former collapsed. It had a lot to do with poor software, poor hardware, and very little future as far as the Macintosh was concerned. From the perspective on 2006 where the survival of the Macintosh and Apple looks very rosy indeed, the nineties were not kind to it.

I really like Daring Fireball but, wow, when something hits his hot button then the name becomes rather descriptive.