Apple clicked with me when our middle school computer lab conisted of an Apple II+ and a TRS-80. The TRS-80 seemed unusable as it required a cassette tape to save and retrieve files and the Apple II+ had floppy disks. I remember reading about the Lisa being a computer so simple that a 2 year old could use one. I thought that was the craziest thing I ever heard. I tried to imagine how that could be case. Years later my Mom (someone with a masters in english and made her living as a potter) happened upon a demo of the Mac 128k. She couldn't believe the experience and purchased one. Changed her career with desktop publishing.

My training was Industrial Design but I Have spent my whole career administrating Mac Networks. My first job involved networking a 30 person design firm. The computers were half Macs and half PCs. When System 7 was released the Macs we purchased Ascente ethernet card for them and they all worked. We needed to purchase ethernet cards for the PCs we had to move them off DOS, switch the from Word Perfect 5.1 (pissimg off the writers) and install Novell 3.11 to network the PCs and added a Mac NLM to the server to exchange files between the 2.

I love OS X but System 7 was better. I think the Mac lost it's simplicity when the Desktop was moved into the home directory. Everything became more complicated. I still think Apple caters to the founding spirit of simple computing tools for people. Computing has just become too complicated.