I gave in to the watch last year… the Ultra 2. If you’re going, go all in. Lol. I have to admit to liking it a lot.
Macs work, and work well. I do have a Win laptop, but all music stuff is on Mac. I didn’t get on board fully til the later 90s, though. Were you in the Big Brother commercial?
My first 'computer' was an IBM Mag-Card. machine that used cardboard cards with a magnetic stripe that was attached to an IBM electric typewriter. I had left the firm I worked for and opened my own office as a solo.
Each card could hold one paragraph, not a whole document. I bought it for my legal secretary's use (now called 'legal assistants', which means that the Secretary of State should now be called 'Assistant of State').
It cost about $25,000 late '70s dollars. by 1982 the office was on 3 or 4 DOS machines; we'd grown, computers got cheaper and more capable. The legal secretaries got them, and I bought one for the law library so we could use Lexis/Nexis, the first legal search engine.
The '87 Mac was the first computer I used myself. I bought it to run a sequencer called 'Performer' that eventually became 'Digital Performer' when they added the ability to record. A sequencer could operate MIDI instruments and I had a few synths I puttered around with, so it was wonderful to have this thing!
I also had a travel bag for it and took it to the office.
In the office I discovered I was a lot more efficient if I drafted documents on a computer myself instead of cutting and pasting hand written stuff on a legal pad - yes, that's how we edited what we were drafting, with a scissors and scotch tape (!) .
So I got my legal sec a Mac and an Apple printer, and set up an ethernet network, myself. It worked well and was very easy to create.
Everyone else wanted to do the same thing (we were now about 8 lawyers and a fairly large staff), everyone wanted to ditch DOS. We set up a larger ethernet network that worked well, and we never needed a tech to do it. That sold me on Macs forever. My former partners stayed with Macs as well, even after I went into music.
My contemporaries were tearing their hair out with DOS machines and tech companies at the time. We were up and running having created the network ourselves in a single afternoon. The main thing the network could do was send files around and it was hooked up to a larger laser printer.
In 1990 I bought one that could run a program called Sound Designer that became Pro Tools. Sound Designer could only run one or two tracks at a time, if you had a fast machine. I had a fast machine but thought SD was useless and stuck with tape.
By 1991 I decided to leave my practice and get into the music biz. It was a stupid, risky idea. Necessity became the mother of invention. I somehow made it work -- I had to!
My studio of course ran on a Mac for my sequencing. The Mac ran MIDI Time Code, and sent it to an MTC converter that converted MTC into SMPTE time code. I'd stripe the tape machines with SMPTE - there was a 3/4" video tape machine, synced to a multitrack tape machine, sync'd to a mastering tape machine, by 1994 sync'd to a Roland DM-80 8 track digital recorder that I used for editing and flying in parts. I used machine synchronizers for the audio and video machines.
One remote control on wheels operated the whole schmeer. You needed several seconds of pre-roll to get all the machines going in sync. As cumbersome as it sounds, it felt really easy to use. But it was a contraption!
With the Mac it was easy to set this up as well, I didn't need my studio tech to do it.
So that's how I got into the Mac and stayed with it. When I started becoming friends with other composers, I noticed that everyone else used Macs as well, including the film and TV guys.
