Re: Don't get this MAC is simple thing
[Author here]
> roped in to buying MACs
MAC is short for Media Access Controller and it is part of an Ethernet interface.
Mac is short for Macintosh and is a brand of computer.
The capitalisation is significant and a good techie should be aware of this. MB are not the same as Mb and both are different from mB and mb which don't exist. Case matters.
Macs are good solid desktop and laptop computers, with an excellent range of high-quality apps. Sadly, some techies consider them to be "just another Unix" which is very much *not* the case, and in my experience such people can often badly break a Mac system in trying to repair it using traditional Unix skills.
My own home non-work desktop computer is a Mac, and it's a lovely machine which is extremely reliable.
But, shock horror, when a Mac goes wrong, you need to use Mac methods to repair it. The skills are not transferrable from Windows or other Unixes. A few _were_ transferrable from Classic Macs back in the day: Target Disk Mode, restart and repair, selective reinstall in place, and so on.
But non-Mac types don't know how to do this stuff -- which is fine, because PCs for the most part lack these features, so those skilled in PC repairs don't know them.
The problem is that they don't *know* that they don't know, and so they get angry when the stuff they try doesn't work.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
