The other day an art director told me he doesn’t know anyone who works on a PC. Reminded me of the doofus Manhattanite (a famous lady writer) lamenting Nixon’s ’72 election “I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”

The fact is zillions more people work on PCs than on Macs and I don’t understand it at all. When you buy a Mac, you basically plug it in and off you go. With a PC, you need to hire someone to set it up and someone else to keep fixing it. PCs get all the viruses, Macs get none.

And yet, I work on a PC. How dumb is that? I have three laptops and one of them is a terrifically fast Mac. I never use it. I actually don’t like it. Maybe you remember this from school:

I do not love thee, Dr Fell,

The reason why I cannot tell;

But this I know, and know full well,

I do not love thee, Dr Fell.

That’s how I feel about Macs. It makes no sense at all, but there you are.

When I started in this business at Ogilvy & Mather, I worked on a manual typewriter, then an electric followed by a Selectric with interchangeable fonts on “golf balls”. My last typewriter was a tower electric with memory.

My first computer was an Apple 2c, a basic word processor with a built in Pong game. My second was one of the first laptops, a Toshiba. No Windows. You had to remember DOS commands and there was a strip of laminated paper at the top of the keyboard to help you.

Then something happened in the 80s. I decided everyone in my agency, the DM arm of a much bigger advertising agency, should have a computer and we should have a local area network (LAN). I made a few calls, got quotes and before I knew it, there were PCs on every desk with … Windows! Wow. And I’ve been a Windows guy ever since. I don’t recall ever making a Mac or PC decision one way or the other. It just happened. I suspect there was a hidden genius behind it because it just happened all over the world.

          Apple may not be helping its cause with those PC and Mac commercials. The PC guy, chubby with glasses, slightly sneaky, embarrassed about his product, is kind of likeable. The Mac guy is young, cool, sure of himself, tolerant and I’ll bet not 10% of the audience relates to him. That’s about Apple’s overall share of market, isn’t it?