Section 1. It Just Works

1. It Just Works

The Friday after I bought my first Mac (the classic 12-inch PowerBook G4 pictured in Figure 1), I had to mock up 78 files for a publisher's art department. Each file contained a small amount of text, plus four big, fat, high-resolution images.

Figure 1. I still love my very first Mac: the classic 12-inch PowerBook G4. (Image courtesy of Apple.)

I'd done this before on my Windows-based PC. Because Photoshop or Microsoft Publisher would crash every other hour, the project took two days to complete. But my Mac didn't crashnot during editing, not during saving, not during printing. As a result, the job took just two hours.

Weary of losing data to crashes? Tired of figuring out which .ini file is calling on that .dll file that you erased from your computer last week? Alarmed by unexplained hard drive chatter? Sick of printers, scanners, and other peripherals that plug and don't play?

The number one reason for switching to the Mac is simple: it just works.