Travel and Fine Art Photography. Articles and Images by Krish Mandal, New York Photographer

A Matter of Perspective

When I got a job at a small design shop (my first "real" job), we used both Macs and PCs. That's when I learned that the Mac vs PC war was really a kind of perspective problem, though for years I knew it rationally, it was really made clear when I worked at that design shop because we had PageMaker and Quark XPress for both PCs and Macs. We had about 3 PCs, and 3 Macs (I think 2 were Quadras). The applications were necessary for both platforms because though we were a design shop, about half of our revenue resulted from doing "output" for clients who worked on different platforms. "Output" was the industry term back in the day, meaning a customer would bring a file to us so that it could be imaged onto resin-coated (RC) paper, or film, using the Agfa Imagesetter we had on premises. This was the intermediate stage of Desktop Publishing, where although you did a layout on a computer, commercial printers still did not have the ability to image the document straight to their Heidelberg (or whatever). It was necessary to send them RC paste-ups, or RRED ("right-reading, emulsion down") film, which they would use to create the printing plates. These days, many output houses have gone out of business because DTP these days means "direct to plate" not "desktop publishing."

But getting back to the perspective. The epiphany, if you will, came from using PageMaker and Quark on both the PC and the Mac: while using Quark on the Mac was very easy and intuitive, using it on a PC was near impossible because it was clunky, slow to respond, and the key combinations didn't make much sense when moved onto a PC. And it was the opposite for PageMaker. On the PC, PageMaker was a prince, but on a Mac it made you want to slit your wrists. Things moved slow, the machine just stopped (Mac's "dead" face icon), you had to reboot, or fonts were interfering with each other.

So here you had to world-class products, both of which were made to deliver professional results, yet the performance of each depended greatly on which platform you were using them on. Now I'm not talking here about the interface. That is a moot point now. Both programs had the same user menus regardless of platform, both had the same icons, and both worked pretty much the same way. It was really a matter of how the software was written, and how it performed based on what the programmers understood about the platform. Things like memory and page handling (what we now call virtual memory), and the connection to the graphic card's memory, these were things that were not working right. And that's what made the difference. Which platform was the software originally written for? That was the question you needed to ask before declaring that something didn't work right. And I could see that regardless of Mac's better interface for the OS, PageMaker was a complete failure on the Mac.

PCs at Stage 2 

It was at about this same time that the PC market was beginning to settle a bit. The early boutique shops were now getting thinned out due to price wars and competition, and companies like Gateway and Dell were beginning to produce PCs that didn't require intimate knowledge of hardware to buy computers. The PC market was also getting cheaper again, and Macs were becoming the more expensive machine, again. You could also see some of the super retail stores, like CompUSA begin to build a loyal following, and were attracting the attention of the less-savvy home computer users. Though they now sell Apple products too, that's been a more recent development.

In the mid-90s people were finally beginning to see that not having a computer in the house could be detrimental to their careers. It was necessary to be able to edit work documents at home, and besides it was useful when you had all this other software, like tax prep applications and home remodeling programs; computers could actually be fun and useful. So popular use of computers finally began to push prices down even further, and competition began to heat up among the major computer sellers more and more once computers got out of the office and into homes. Still, most were looking at PCs due to their being inexpensive, and the plethora of easily copyable programs for the platform which could be shared among friends.

One of the differences that Mac fans kept touting was that graphics were better on a Mac than on a PC. And it was true. For a while. But companies like NVidia changed all that, and PC users now had just as good a visual base as a Mac. Audio was also getting better, and PCs were able to output broadcast audio and video to rival the more expensive Mac. Cheaper.

Apple was taking a beating, though most analysts and fans would deny this. So, if they weren't taking a beating, my question is how come they asked Steve Jobs back?

Apple Comes Back

Fast forward into the internet years. As people spent their time doing email, and surfing the Net via AOL, another revolution was happening in the computer world. The hardware wars were over. Companies began to realize that advances in computing wouldn't come from better graphics. There are only a few companies which survive because they offer best bang for the buck: Dell, Compaq, HP, Gateway, and now Sony and Acer, among a few other minor ones. The boutique shops and custom builders realized that they couldn't really compete with the money these larger companies brought with them, so they either disappeared or went into the parts, repairs and aftermarket arena.

Meanwhile, Apple, newly infused with Jobs iron-handed mantra about making their products beautiful, springs into the minds of home users by doing what it's always done best: make it pretty, and people will want one. So they went back to their roots of creating things that are functional as well as beautiful. User Interface was the keyword. They innovated, not only with new offerings of computers at different levels which were at par with the pricing models established by PC makers, but they themselves started being PC makers, really owning the term "personal computer" to establish themselves in the minds and hearts of those people who wanted to do the cool things that the Internet Age brought, like media anywhere, anytime. They also branched out to making more consumer products like the now famous iPod, and really connecting everyday users with the "cool technology" that was once only the domain of network-savvy professionals and graphics gurus.

They created more than just computers. They brought computing power the household by sneaking it in the back door with the kids. They went from being the company that graphic artists think of when deciding on a computer, to what the world considers as a real choice when thinking of technology for their homes.

There's just one problem left: Microsoft.