Ok it was true that in my younger years, I was very hateful towards the Mac and Apple. It was a long time ago and Apple changed it’s way and has now become my platform of choice. It all started in Grade School, my school used old Macs, still running OS 9 and using a Power PC processor. In addition to all that, they also used Mac Manager to allow students to log-in, but control what they had access to. The worst part was that it was totally slow, applications took forever to launch and a lot of the software was very outdated. For example, until High School, the primary Word Processor they had us using was Apple Works and the browser was Netscape Communicator 4. Needless to say this added to the slowness issue and made it very unpleasant. The PowerPC platform was much weaker than the Intel which came with most Windows machines at the time and Mac OS 9 was extremly outdated making the more Modern-looking Windows XP look to be the better platform.This hatred towards the Mac continued throughout all of  Middle School.

Then, in High School, we switched over to Windows XP and they were just as slow and had just as many if not more than the Macs and continued to have problems. Apple had also upgraded their operating system to OSX and made the system much better and more evolved than Windows. Then in 2006,  Apple moved to Intel Processors in their machines using a much more powerful platform and making their computers a lot faster. It was around that time I began to follow Apple and consider changing my mind about Apple. I realized that with a Mac, you get a much more reliable system, with few if any errors, and Macs take much less work to setup and manage. Plus, I began tv become more interested in video production and podcasting both things that Macs can do amazingly while Windows machines do poorly with it.   Apple also makes computers that aren’t just the average beige box, the computers standout becuase they don’t just use plastic, and they always put a big glowing Apple on  the computer. Then after seeing the power of Final Cut Studio compared to other Windows editors I knew that the Mac was the computer for me. Now having a Mac for almost a year, I have had much fewer problems than my old PC and am very happy for switching to the Mac. Yes, they are more money but, if you want a computer that you just turn on and it works, the Mac is the computer for you.

Long gone are the days where hard drives cost a fortune and only large companies with hundred-thousand dollar servers could afford terabyte hard drives. Now, you can get terabyte hard drive for well under $100 and terabyte notebook hard drives, although still very expensive, are beginning to reach the market. With storage becoming so affordable there is no reason to delete data and all the more reason to digitize as much as you can because it makes the data easier to access! I know that computers are still considered to be a “new” technology however, as long as you backup, preferably off-site with a good service like Backblaze or Carbonite they even if a tragedy occurs like your hard drive crashes or your computer gets stolen, your data is still safe!

If you are a content creator such as a photographer or video producer, then you may want to make a large storage device that can hold several terabytes. Long ago, the only way was to build a large Network attached storage device or NAS which could be very expensive to build and took a lot of management. Now a company called Data Robotics make a device called the Drobo, which simplifies having RAID and protects data by striping it across multiple hard drives making sure your data is safe. With devices like Drobo, you can keep all your digital data safe by keeping it backed up. I have saved data for most of the time I have been using a computer and no have very old data that I can look back on and can easily find because it is all on my hard drive all because digital storage has become so much cheaper. Hopefully cloud storage will become this way as well!