Smug Mac Guy gets his comeuppance.

Smug Mac Guy gets his comeuppance.

I'm a Mac Bigot.  There – I said it. Most of you already knew this, but it's nice to publicly admit it.

I've used Macs for about 10 years; I was converted back in the awful days of Windows 98 – the infamous days of "Plug and Pray" connectivity.  The mac actually had Plug and Play; I was sold.  These were dark days for the Mac Faithful, the time before Steve Jobs returned and before the iMac and iPod.  We watched media reports that pegged Apple's market share at 3%, and rationalized our superior platform with the concept of "Lower Total Operating Cost" -- in short, people tend to keep and use their macs much longer than PCs.  My newest mac is rapidly approaching its fourth birthday, and I have a couple that I still use that are 7 and 8 years old.  Half or more of Bethel Lutheran School's computer lab is made up of 350 and 400 Mhz iMacs – all of them vintage 2000 and 2001.  They are actually still quite usable.

Show of hands out there:  How many of you have a PC that is even four years old?  How about 6, 7, 8 years old?  Now, keep your hands up if you are still actually using them.   That's what I thought.

Smug Mac Guy calls this Exhibit A as to the superiority of the Mac platform.

Imagine his shock and horror to discover what the Maasae Girls Lutheran Secondary School is using for computers.  PCs, of course – the mac is still scarce in Africa, especially Poor Africa. The newest machines here are 900 Mhz AMDs. The next best systems are 366 Mhz IBM PCs, and then there are the 166 Mhz systems.  And finally, the 75 Mhz Pentiums.

Wow.  So much for Smug Mac Guy's Lower TOC.  These machines were made while Bill Clinton was President. Ponder that for a moment.

One of our tasks here at MGLSS is to help fix their computers.  We brought a bunch of hardware along, mostly disk drives and memory and power supplies.  I had a tough time even finding AT-style power supplies – I finally found an adapter cable that makes an (easy to find and buy) ATX power supply plug in to the AT style motherboard.  All the Memory and Disks were donated – all the disks and mot of the memory came from a surplus place in San Jose called "New-Tec", and the rest came from family & friends.

More next time...