Apples, not Oranges...

This blog post is a tribute the Apple, or Macintosh and how they are the superior computer. First some history describing Apple's rise to personal computer greatness.

Macintosh was the first company to produce a personal computer for home use that was easy to use and affordable.
Macintosh was the first to produce an operating system that was not code based, but used a visual interface that was used friendly.
Macintosh developed the use of the modern computer mouse.
Macintosh made considerable increases in the way that laptops were developed.
Macintosh revolutionized the music industry.
Macintosh continues to innovate and personalize technology.

So those are some good things that are noteable. Now it is fair to say that Macintosh is also expenive, cliquey, and sometimes inaccessable. But now the real reason that I love Apple.

This weekend, my girlfriend's iMac computer, fell on the floor. It wasn't working right after that fall. It would take forever to boot up and you wouldn't be able to pull up any of the windows or anything. It seemed that it was doomed. Knowing full well Apple's commitment to high quality, yet expensive repairs, we were both pretty scared. We ended up taking it up to SLC on Monday to take it to the Mac Store and see what it would cost. We waited in line for about an hour and got our appointment with the arranged Mac specialist. They took the computer and ran some diagnostics on it and tried to get it to work. This was semi-effective but didn't solve any problems. The specialist told us that they would have to keep it and run some more tests to try to recover the memory before they replaced the harddrive. I was running up a total in my head. 30$ for an hour or "specialist help". 20$ for a diognostic. 150$ for a new harddrive. And probably at least 50$ for work. She gave us the paper tallying up all of the different things that they were going to do and thier cost and the total, beyond what I believed to be possible was 0$. 0$! There was no total. Now understand that her computer was old. It wasn't under warranty. It was not Apple's fault that it was broken. But yet they still charge her nothing to not only try to fix it, but give her a new harddrive, recover her memory from the old harddrive, and then fix other things that we hadn't even mentioned. I asked if I could bring in my computer, which is 3 1/2 years old, to have a similar thing go on (minus the new harddrive) and they said sure.

Apple is great. If they continue to help their customers in this great way it is no wonder they are one of the most succussful companies out there.

Everybody should buy a Mac. That is all there is to it. But if not, that is cool too. You will just have to pay to have people help you.