My Life as a Mac Girl

With today's frenzy over the Apple iPad’s debut – formerly known as the Apple Tablet – I started thinking: What is it about Apple that gets designers’ hearts all fluttery? Why is our devotion so rabid? And why do we fill with angst when – if – for whatever reason we switch over to a PC? Yes, it does happen. Sometimes.

If you’ve been living under a rock and are unaware of Apple’s fan following, just check out what I’ve come across in the past 24 hours:

Beat-era poet Gary Snyder, who lives in the Sierra foothills of California with no electricity or cell phone, appreciates his laptop so much that he wrote “Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh.”

CotyGonzales.com compiled “101 T-Shirts for Apple Fanboys and the Mac Faithful.” Yes – 101. Can you imagine trying to find 101 shirts that promote one’s love for the PC? In addition, capitalizing on the Conan O’Brien vs. NBC debacle and the ensuing “I’m With Coco” campaign, “I’m With Cocoa” T-shirts and posters are now being printed as an homage to Steve Jobs and the Cocoa application framework that apps for the Mac and iPhone use. I’ve always tried to be diplomatic in my love for and defense of all things Mac. I grew up on them – the Apple IIe was the first computer I used, way back in the ’80s (not counting the Commodore 64 I used solely to play Frogger). Working on the school newspaper, I learned all about graphic design and layout using PageMaker. My high school staff even lugged our Macintosh SEs to a competition at Stanford University since we were beyond laying out the paper on a dummy. Through college, my newspaper career continued on Macs, with me learning on the job and becoming dependant on keyboard commands. At the time I didn’t even realize I was a Mac addict – that’s just all I knew. But then I graduated, and reality set in. All of a sudden I had to buy my own computer and work at newspapers and magazines that barely made any money, which meant I had to switch over to a PC. I had to learn to use the Ctrl key and to right click. I had to reboot. I wasn’t greeted with a happy Mac face. Since then I’ve gone back and forth between PCs and Macs at home and at work. And while I’m currently a two-PC girl, I still ravenously devour Apple news. But what about you – are you a Mac or a PC, or can you go both ways?