My computer life, and why I switched from Mac back to PCs

 So, when I was very very young, my father worked for Apple computer, or a computer distributor selling Apple computers.  The computers of the day were the Apple II and its ilk.  My father would often try to show me the computer and all the cool stuff it could do, but I simply wasn't interested.  I was at the age where the sand box in the back yard was more interesting.  The only thing that really made any impression at all was the Koala Pad, which was a precursor to the Wacom tablets of today.  

I remember when I was late in middle school, someone brought home a Commodore Plus/4, which I suspect was already quite old at the time and had been gifted to us.  I read through the manual, though, and discovered that it could be programmed in BASIC.  That was amazing to me.  When you're a kid, nobody listens to you, but the computer would obey my every command.  Not only that, but by learning a little bit about it, I knew more than not only most of the kids my age, but also most of the adults I knew.  I remember programming it to display a happy birthday screen in different colors for someone's birthday.  The major problem with it was that it had no sort of mass storage, so when the power went out, whatever I had programmed into it would be gone.  

Later we would have a typing class in middle school where we used Apple IIc computers, and I would often be playing in the debugger to figure out how things worked.  

Later on, my father made friends with a guy who ran a computer shop, and I started getting older stuff he couldn't sell for free.  I remember having a number of IBM XTs with green and amber monochrome Hercules displays.  At some point, I got a hold of some Syquest removable drives, which were kind of like the Zip disks that came later - but unfortunately they were also similar to Zip drives in that they had abysmal reliability.  I remember finding a star trek type game written in QBASIC, and decoding how it worked, and expanding it in many ways.  

The Internet was still something that only government agencies and rich colleges could afford, but BBSs were a thing, and I got into them.  I remember meeting some people "on line", sending FidoMail across the country (and even to other countries!), and downloading files from far away BBSs using my modem.  I remember the bad old days of failed downloads, and annoying my family by racking up sky high long distance bills.  

Eventually I happened on the Atari 520ST, which I would keep through my high school years, until it was replaced with an Atari TT.  

In school, I started to take programming classes, but they used IBMs, and we learned using TurboPascal.  TurboPascal was amazing after using various forms of BASIC for so long.  It ran so much faster, and it could be *compiled*!  Before long, I found out that there was also something similar, called PurePascal for the Atari.  In school I got into all sorts of HiJinks by writing things like Password loggers and other TSR programs.  At home I wrote various small utilities, including a program that would beep and flash the screen when I received a call on my land line, and display the phone number of the person who was calling using CallerID.  What's more, it has a database where you would put in people's name, so it would show the name of whoever was calling.  I also had a spiffy feature where for certain numbers, it would pick up, wait one second, and then hang up - which could be used to effectively block telemarketers.  

We learned Borland TurboC and C++ as well, but I didn't take as much of a liking to those.  They were harder to use, without really offering much more power.  

I faced the decision that most high school kids face, should I go to college?  And what should I major in?  Computer science seemed to be the natural answer.  It was a promising career with high salary, high demand, and I was already arguably good at it.  

So when I got to college, I took computer programming.  

The school I went to, Drexel, was interesting in a number of ways, but one of those ways was that it was an "All Mac" school.  In fact it had been an all Mac school, but they had officially dropped that rule, while it remained in effect for practical purposes.  

I brought my Atari TT with me, and I was able to use Atari programs to do most of my school work (f.e. Papyrus Word Processor).  One of the main problems that I had in common with those who opted to buy PCs was that teachers would often share the homework assignments on AppleShare, which we didn't have access to.  That meant going to the computer lab and using one of the Quadros there to download files from AppleShare onto a floppy disk to take back to the dorm.  

Eventually I bought a MacBook 540c, one of the last non-PowerPC laptops.  PowerPC laptops were out at the time, but I wanted a 68k machine so I could run MagicMac, which was essentially the Atari operating system on a Mac.  At the time this ran very slowly on PowerPC Macs, and besides, I couldn't afford one anyway.  

I had some friends who bought Macs as recommended, and the operating system they ran (Mac OS 7 or 8) would constantly crash when used for development, as there was no real memory protection.  These fancy multi-thousand dollar machines were worse than my old Atari.  Granted they could play MP3 files and Command & Conquer, neither of which I could use.  Most of our programming homework was to be done in CodeWarrier C compiler for Mac, but none of the professors really cared what compiler or computer you used.  I remember constantly hearing my roommate should "God damned it!" followed by the infamous Mac boot up sound, "booonnngg!", as his computer rebooted.  

My friends with Windows PCs fared even worse.  The campus was one massive file sharing network of Macs, and you could browse the other computers in the dorm and find anything you wanted.  If you had a PC, not so much.  The operating system of the time was Windows 3.11 or Windows 95 (maybe 98?), but all of these suffered from constant blue screens even more often than the Macs froze up.  They were slower and less convenient to boot.  Compare Finder with the Windows 3.1 program manager thing once...  common  brands at the time were Compaq and Gateway.  

Before I went to college, and even while in college, I had friends from back home who had PCs, but they had all been rich people.  One had a new PC every 6 months I swear, going from a 365 to a 486 to a 486 DX/2 to a 486 DX/4 to a Pentium, etc.  Another friend also had frequent upgrades and a fancy system called OS/2 on his computer.  OS/2 was so much better than Windows, that it was a real shame it didn't make it, and people had to live though all of the crashes of Windows.

In around the year 2000 my family back in Japan decided to buy a PC, and I went with them to Seiden, where they bought a NEC LaVie laptop with Windows ME.  I was by no means a PC expert, so I had no idea whether NEC made decent PCs, nor did I have any experience with Windows ME.  In fact, I really didn't have any experience using computers in Japanese.  This is because the Commodore Plus/4 did not support Japanese, most of the Atari software was in German, and once I went to college, I was using computers in English in the US.  By the way, Windows ME would literally crash every 5 minutes on that NEC laptop, and the batter died in short order.  

Back in college, I discovered that the "All Mac" school was only all Mac for the non-computer science people.  The computer science people all used the Sun Workstations in the computer science only computer labs.  (The Mac computer labs were for mere commoners, I found out later).  

After a certain amount of courses, we were to graduate from using CodeWarrier on Mac and Windows (or uhm.. Pure C on Atari!), and start using *real* machines.  We didn't have much choice, because we had to start programming for X-Windows.  

I was amazed by these Sun machines.  Firstly, they *never* crashed.  There was nothing you could do to crash one, although you could effectively lock some of them up by writing a fork bomb on purpose.  They were also very physically reliable, and pretty much never broke.  They were also very fast compared to the PCs, and handled multi user access and security quite well.  I was able to use these machines remotely from my dorm room as well, so my TT and MacBook soon became nothing more than a terminal to SunOS.  

One day I found they were throwing out some of the older machines, so I snagged them.  These were small almost cubic SparcStations, later I got some of the Pizza box machines too.  The school let me have the machines, but they wouldn't give me the passwords.   They told me I would have to reinstall Solaris.  In trying to figure out how to do that, some people suggested "Linux runs faster", and so I found out about Linux.  

In fact moved out of the dorms and into my own house, where I got DSL I ran a small hosting company off the books for a few years.  I didn't make much money, but it was enough to pay for the DSL at least!

It turns out SparcStations are expensive, and PCs just kept getting faster, so at some point I had my very own PC.  I loved my Atari to death, but Atari stopped making computers, and I had to use a SparcStation just to convert the Ethernet in my house to TCP/IP over serial using something like SLIP.  

My SparcStations were rock solid, but my PCs could run Gnome and graphical web browsers and play MP3s and even videos comfortably!  Yes, I ran Linux (Mainly Debian) in the early 2000s, as Windows NT was out then, but it was super expensive and super slow.. and.. it was Windows.. eww gross.  

I remember my my Co-Op job gave me an old Dell Latitude which I promptly installed RedHat on.  

I went back to visit home in Japan for vacation one year and discovered that my family had DSL too, just way faster and cheaper than mine - despite the fact that I lived in the middle of the city and they lived out in the countryside!  

In the meantime, Apple had also come out with OS X, but when it came out it was slow and buggy just like Windows NT, plus it had the added disadvantage that the machines that would run it came with astronomical price tags.  Every computer I had owned to date was comprised of a mishmash of parts I had received second-hand from a friend or purchased used.  (In fact, I remember taking a trip to New York just to meet with the seller to buy that PowerBook 540c - but that's another story for another time).  

Still, OS X was based on Unix, as they touted at the time.  To me this was amazing.  The commercial support of Mac OS with the stability of Unix?!  I'm in!

But I had started graduate school, and I wanted a thin and light laptop to take to class to take notes on, etc.  It didn't have to be powerful, but it had to be thin and light, and Apple didn't have anything like that.  In fact, nobody really did - in the US.  In Japan, though, it was a different story.  I found this machine called the Sharp Mebius Muramasa 20.  It was super super thin and lightweight, and ... well honestly super slow too.  It used the (at the time) new Transmeta Crusoe chip.  I also got a 2g (3g?) PCMCIA card from Xingular, and I would take this thing anywhere and use it anywhere.  But man it was slow.  Oh yeah, and it got stolen from my house one day.  Welcome to America, am I right?  

I needed a new laptop, and there had been rumors that Apple was going to be releasing a new model of PowerBook which ran OS X, had a Core 2 Duo processor, and also would be thin and light.  I had to wait for that, and so wait I did.  I saved and scrimped, and when they finally announced what came to be known as the MacBook Air, I picked one up at a shop in Philadelphia.  The thing was super fast, but it would freeze up if you tried to watch YouTube.  Well, nothing's perfect, right?  Anyway it was about 200,000x faster than my Mebius, and still thin and light enough.  (Though Apple's "World's thinnest" claims were a bunch of BS.. my Mebius was for sure).  Still, the screen was decent, the keyboard felt good to type on and wasn't too cramped, the processing power was great, and generally it was a monster compared to what I was using.  This was the first computer I had actually bought new at retail (even the Mebius was used), so I babied it.  

I brought it with me when I moved to Tokyo, and it started having problems about 6 months later.  First the HDD started getting unreliable.  More than once the machine would die, and I might be able to run some HDD utilities to fix it, but it would die again.  Luckily I was using DropBox to Sync all my files, so when it would have an issue, I would reinstall OS X and re-sync my files.  One day the drive completely died, so I had to get it replaced.  Then one day I opened the machine and it made a crunching sound.  Turned out it was the infamous hinge defect.   Not only did the hinge fail, but it meant that the ribben cable for the screen yanked on the motherboard hard enough to destroy it.  Whoops!  Luckily, the Apple Ginza store replaced it for me for free since it was a "known issue".  

One day I was at the Labi store in Shinbashi and I saw an 11 inch Macbook Air with *SSD*.  I was playing with it and decided to reboot it.  It rebooted in 5 seconds flat.  "That can't be right", I thought, so I shut it down fully, waited about 10 seconds, and then powered it on.  Sure enough, it booted right back up in well under 10 seconds.  I knew then that SSD was the wave of the future.  One thing I know about Japanese people is that a lot of people with too much money just have to have the latest thing for fashion, so I waited until these machines started to filter down into the used market, and picked one up used on the cheap.  

Sadly, it wasn't long before I cracked the screen, and Apple wanted $800 to replace it.  You could buy this entire laptop used for $500 at the time, and they wanted $800 for just the screen.  No thank you.  I found a lower spec model (64GB SSD) for around $300, and bought that.  I swapped the screen and sold the remains of the lower end model for $200, so the cost for me to replace the screen was about $100 plus some of my time.  

In the meantime I had a friend with a second generation MacBook Air which randomly stopped working.  I was called in to consult, and it turned out that the memory was bad.  Not much you can do about that, given that it's soldered to the motherboard.  

I picked up a Macbook Pro 2011, which didn't last long, as it has GPU issues.  Apple Harajuku Fixed that for free (again, known issue).  I sold it as soon as I got it back.  

I traded up to a 13 inch i7 Macbook Air (which I got used again), which I kept for quite a number of years.  

When Apple came out with the 15 inch Macbook Pro with the i9 processor and up to 64gb of RAM, I had to have it.  Here was a machine powerful enough to run the VMs I use without struggling, and with a huge amount of memory and storage.  It was super expensive, but with 64GB of RAM, 4TB of SSD, a retina screen and an i9 processor, I told myself that I would make it last at least 5 years.  

It had.. issues, though.  First of all, it was laptop in form factor, but you wouldn't want to put it on your lap with how how it could get.  I mean who puts a laptop on their lap anyway, right?  It goes on the desk or table.  Fine, I could overlook that.  When you actually did load it down though, it would sound like a 747 jet taking off.  I could even live with that.  The battery life, though?  Well, it could be measured in minutes instead of hours.  It's a small wonder the thing didn't self combust the way it went through the huge battery in less than an hour.  

So when Apple announced the 16 inch MacBook Pro, I ponied up again!  Don't get me wrong, I was able to sell the old one for quite a lot, so the net amount I paid was only around $1000, but still!  This time the battery actually lasted a lot longer, though.  This was due to the somewhat more efficient i9 chip, and also to the larger battery.  

And again I told myself "I will use this for at least 5 years for sure, this time!"  I had confidence in this because to my mind processor technology wasn't advancing that rapidly, at least in the PC space.  Maybe in Mobile.  Then Apple came out with the M1 machines.  They were not only faster than my machine, but also cheaper and lasted way longer on battery.  

What to do?  Well I figured I could get an M1 Macbook Air as the small and portable machine to take with me everywhere, but keep my MacBook Pro 16 inch for "real work" - but my laptop had other plans.  It died almost exactly 2 years after I purchased it.  

I took it to Apple Harajuku, and they said it was a memory failure.  Again, with the RAM being soldered onto the motherboard.  If RAM never failed, it would be one thing - but this was 2 RAM failures in MacBooks that I know of in my small circle of friends in just a few years.  If the RAM had been replaceable, it would have been as easy as swapping out a 32GB SODIMM, which would have cost less than $200 at least.  Instead, it meant an $850 motherboard replacement, losing all the data on my SSD, and being without me computer for over a week.  And of course, no guarantee that it wouldn't happen again.  

Meanwhile I know other people who bought the Low End M1 Macbook Air or Macbook Pro and before long said "Hmm I really should have gotten 16gb, I am always getting memory warnings asking me to close things", or "Hmm I really should have gotten a bigger SSD, I constantly have to go searching for things to erase and it is a huge pain" - but of course you can't just upgrade those things.  

On my MacBook Pro 2011, you could.  In fact, I know you can, because I did upgrade the RAM and the HDD (into an SSD).  Not anymore, though...

So here's the thing, I like the Apple hardware (aside from everything being soldered in), and I like the Apple Software (OS X, anyway), but enough is enough.  

I paid the $850 to get my MacBook Pro fixed, and then I turned around and sold it for around $3000 while I still could.  

I used that money and bought *two* PCs:

1. A Framework Laptop with an 11th Gen i5

2. An Intel NUC Extreme 12 with a 12th Gen i9.  

Now I have a laptop and a desktop, and both are upgradable and repairable!  

The Memory and SSD on both are standard components that can be swapped out for repair or upgrade as needed.  For example, I gut 16gb on the laptop and 32gb on the desktop for now, but as prices drop, I may upgrade them.  Likewise, I got 500GB SSD drives on both machines, but in the future I will probably upgrade them - you know, because I can.  

Not only that, but Framework actually sells screens, so if I ever crack it, I can just order a new panel and change it out for more like $200, not $800.  

Even the processor can be changed.  The motherboard on the Framework can be ordered separately and swapped out if needed, and the "Compute unit" on the NUC can be swapped, or you can just replace the *socketed* processor.  

And they both run Linux.  I can run Windows in a VM way, way faster than Windows runs on my Work laptop, so that's not an issue either.  

If I really want a machine that I can use to sit at the coffee shop for hours on end without plugging in, the M1 is the clear winner, but for everything else, I am voting for hardware that isn't disposable.  

I *will* for sure keep this NUC and Framework for at least 5 years, and more importantly, if they break, I will fix them.  I can hand them down to people in need instead of them being sent to the landfill.  

Don't get me wrong, not all PC laptops are upgradable.  Many, such as the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 my employer hands out, have the RAM soldered down just like the Macbooks do, but most at least have upgradable SSDs.  If battery life isn't your only concern, then look for machines with upgradable RAM so you can buy what you need now and upgrade at a reasonable price later.