MacuserUK

MacuserUK Podcast

This podcast was launched in March 2008 by Simon Bainbridge and William Burrell after listening to many Apple related podcasts. Simon and Will came realisation that the vast majority of these podcasts were of American bias. This do represent the views of UK users or cover many Apple products that were available in the UK.

Our aim is to give news, reviews and discussion on Apple products and services available in the UK. Also help build a community where Mac users from the UK can all come together to share their experiences and views in the UK.

Simon

This is a brief history of my IT / Tech background up to April 2009. I started at the age of 13 (1999) with a ZX Spectrum 128K +2A computer which I used to play games on and wrote small programs in Basic.

I then bought my first PC when I was 18 which was an Escom Intel Pentium 1 75mhz with 16MB of RAM and 8GB hard drive. This PC was running Windows 95 which was the start of my years of pain with Microsoft operating systems. The PC company Escom liquidated so we never got all of our software this PC either.

After this I had another 3 desktop PC’s in succession of each other. Running Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows ME and Microsoft Windows 2000. Each time a new Microsoft OS came out it was supposed to be an improvement on the last. Although in theory each OS had more features than the last it seemed slower and more unstable each time.

I then in 2002 bought a desktop PC and a laptop from Evesham both running the most up to date system at the time of purchase. This was Windows XP which was vast improvement on what come before in features and performance. Although XP was much improved over what come before hand, it was still painful to use as it would crash (blue screen of death) or lock up. I used these two PC’s for all of my study in Computing at college.

After college I used PC’s in the work place which all ran Windows XP. It was a nightmare try to use the computers to be productive in the a business environment. I always excepted that this was the only way and there were no other viable options out there.

In 2007 I joined Long Stratton High School as an ICT Technician. The school used mostly PC’s except for this one suite of these smart looking white Apple iMac’s. My ICT Manager (Paul Judkins) also used an iMac in the ICT office and always went on about how great they were to use. I was always of the opinion that were just for graphic designers and were not compatible with most peripherals.

After supporting and using a Mac at work for 6 months in 2007 I was hooked on the Macs and Apple products in General. I first started using OSX Tiger which was great OS that was fun to use and so stable. Then in March 2008 I bought a Mac Mini for home use which had the OSX Leopard installed on it. Wow this was such a joy to use and was packed full of useful features.

Comparing my experiance on Windows to using OSX Leopard it just seems like the OS’s a worlds apart. Lets start with the vast amount of free software that is available on OSX which are well developed and work well. Finding software on Windows to do the same thing that you can get for free on OSX is extremely hard. Most of the decent Windows software is very expensive and free stuff is limited with terrible user interfaces. Connecting to peripherals is so easy to do on OSX without having to install a drivers half of the time. The last thing is that OSX is so much faster than Windows running on similar spec computers.

The other great thing is the Apple / Mac community online which is large global community. The community are always willing to inform and help a Mac users on any aspects of the Mac platform. There are so many sites on the internet which will assist you in finding Mac apps or tutorials. It’s great feeling being part of this community.

My conclusion is that I will now never go back to Windows and I would challenge a Windows user to try it for a month. They wont go back because it just works!

Will

I have always been interested in Macs since the first iPod was produced. I remember one of my friends had one iPod, the original scroll 5GB (10GB March 21, 2002), never seen anything like it. As soon as he showed me I immediately loved it!

Before this I had never really heard of Apple or their products and instantly I was amazed, by the quality and design of this iPod.As iPods where developed over the years they grew greater in number, becoming increasingly popular to all ages of music lovers. The presence of iPods made me look further into Apple.

MacBooks and iMacs started to appear in large computing stores; but not many with a small selection of products, iPods were still only the main growing Apple product. Although the lack of other products I was still fascinated in the Apple operating system. Only ever really used Panther on an old iMac (which at the time I did not know was an Apple product!) the new Tiger OS was a totally different operating system; which at a first glance I did not think was real.

Although I wanted to know more about Apple there was not much information floating around at the time, many people did not have a clue. People that did have about Apple products at the time that I had contact with were generally Windows users; in which they did not speak fondly of Apple. I got a desktop when I was young with Windows 95, which at the time was the most recent Microsoft OS. Worked fine for what I wanted it for, but as newer OS came out my desktop and 95 degraded to a point were it could not meet the needs of modern computing. So, after SP2 was released for XP, I scraped my 95 machine and got a XP desktop. As you can probably imagine, is saw a big difference between the two.

The reason I did not get a Mac is again because of people not giving them very good reviews; not compatible, no support, unstable etc. So at this point I still knew that Macs were there, I was just starting to lose faith in them from what I had herd. But now about 4 years later I have a job at my local high school as an IT Technician with Simon which I do as part of my NC in Computing Science at college.

Where I work we have about 27 iMacs, so at first I was a bit skeptical about working with them after using Windows for so long. But my boss quickly made me realise how Macs are so much more faster, powerful and hassle free compared to Windows including Vista.I was so impressed with stability of Apples Software and like I have always thought the quality that I went and bought a mid spec Macbook with Tiger and then upgraded to Leopard. Best computer I have ever bought; had it for just over 7 month now and not a single problem! Nothing!

Now I am a total Apple fan, don’t see how I could ever go back to using Windows as my main OS again. I am always bugging people to get Apple products because I know they will be pleased with them.