From: K.N. Sato
To: mgabrys
Subject: Your anti-mac site
Congratulations on a very well-designed site. It is obvious that you
know what you are doing and that you are very good at it.
You are probably the first designer I have ever encountered who talks
badly about the Mac. Some may be OS agnostics, but that is about the
extent of it. I find it hard to believe that a creative and talented
person like yourself would disparage the very company that is most
responsible for the form of your current livelihood.
As a graphic designer myself I'd like to know if you really use only
Windows and find it better than the Mac OS. Having no computer training
myself, I marvel at how I can configure and reconfigure my computers,
printers (laser and inkjet), modems, networks, removable hard drives
(Syquest, Zip, EZ), CDRom drives, joysticks, graphics tablets, scanners,
multiple monitors, speakers, etc. and install and reinstall countless
software for over 12 years almost all by myself. I'm not saying I have
never had any problems; I just have almost always been able to
eventually figure them out myself. Would I have been able to do all this
as easily on a PC?
I love my Mac, though I have to admit that I have never seriously used
Windows. I know that I dislike Bill Gates, his business philosophy and
his world view, and I admire the idealized (if not actualized) vision of
the Mac and its creators. I so want the Mac to survive and prosper
because I truly think the world would be a better place with the Mac in
it. (And what is wrong with Guy Kawasaki, as an Apple Evangelist,
promoting his own company? What does conflict of interest have to do
with that? Isn't that what he is SUPPOSED to do?) That doesn't mean
Apple hasn't made terrible blunders and that Steve Jobs can be jerk. I
just know that I feel a professional and emotional bond to the Mac that
really goes beyond it being just a tool. And if it were to fail, I would
feel like I was losing a close friend. And it saddens me when someone
like you ridicules Mac people.
Thanks for listening.
With sincerity,
Kathleen Sato
The company most responsible for my income is Quark, which is quite multiplatform friendly these days. The other company that got me into this whole design thing, is Adobe and J. Warnock's Postscript. If it wasn't for postscript design tools, I wouldn't have dropped my charcol sticks and ink-filled syringes. For the record, I stopped using Macs entirely 2 years ago for design both in my work, and at home, after first dumping Apple in 1991 for NeXT.
-mgabrys
