(But, it was NOT easy)
After 31 years of being a loyal Apple customer (and spitting for luck just on hearing the word Microsoft), a few weeks ago on 16th October 2024 I managed my get away from the evil clutches of the monster that Apple has become since the death of the genius Steve Jobs.
But, that process to escape the Evil Empire was extremely difficult and unnecessarily complex. Now, I don’t usually post stories like this. I never write on forums and I have the standard British way of complaining which is when we get bad service we simply never go back to that restuarant or that store. We know we’re not happy and we choose to walk with our money and use it elsewhere but we usually don’t make formal complaints. I don’t usually make complaints, other than to myself or close friends.
However, this escape from Apple turned me into one of those people like ex-smokers who become evangelists for anti cigarette campaigns.
In this case, dear readers I am now an evangelist for (takes deep breath and counts to ten…) Microsoft Windows and Android.
Let me be very clear at the start of this article.
Just so you can see how far I had to be pushed to finally the see the light.
I honestly never expected to ever utter the words ‘I’m moving everything to Windows/Android’ and Tim Cook be damned!
I was a fanboy going back even before I got my first Mac in 1993. In 1984 I was working as an assistant for the world’s worst photographer – a guy whose Dad had bought his son a business as a going concern with a roster of really first class clients and who had then managed to alienate and lose all of them. (and example was when doing catalog shots at Steinway & Sons in Marylebone he used something called matt dulling spray on their flagship already matt model. When he rubbed it off, it took the factory matt with it, leaving a nice shiny portion on the otherwise pristine matt black grand piano. Needless to say it was the last time they ever called him for work).
One of those clients was Soho based VNU – the publisher of Computer Magazine. This guy James was their go to guy for pack shots – studio based images for use in the magazine reviews. One day, the guys from VNU turned up at the studio with a secret product. Their instructions were we needed to take photos but they would need the negatives and we had to be sworn to secrecy.
The two guys from the magazine thenput a large cardboard box with a multi colored label featuring an Apple with a bite out of it and unboxed something incredible – a small computer like a little cube. When they turned it on it had a graphical display! WTF?!
None of that flashing green type that all other computers had. This was something where you could draw and oh my God, it had fonts! Not many, but in those days the only fonts you could get your hands on were mega expensive Letraset sheets. And here you had aw, maybe a dozen? Who could imagine that in 1984? They let me use something called a mouse to control the pointer on the graphical black and white screen. I was in awe.
The guys from VNU, told us to shoot the photos and bike them over to them ASAP. But, they warned James “whatever you do do not plug this machine into a wall socket. It’s 110v from the USA and only a prototype. It’s the first Apple Macintosh in the UK, so take good care of it and we’ll be back on Monday to pick it up.”
Being a Friday and James being incredibly lazy, Monday came around and we set up the lights and the massive Gandolfi 10×8 plate camera (in those days the only method of getting images that had zero artifacts in them, as pictures were printed 1:1 ratio and not enlarged more than 10×8 inches. Anyway, I digress as usual, but the time soon came when we needed to position the Macintosh for its first ever British photos.
“I think we need the screen for the photos otherwise it will look weird…”
I had left the studio for a moment and, hearing this, came back in only to see James, the idiot photographer, plugging the Macintosh into the wall.
NO! I shouted.
James gave me one of his shit eating grins and…
BANG!!!
There was a flash and a smell of burning and no more working Macintosh. The idiot had destroyed the first and only Macintosh in the UK.
This is the kind of guy he was: When the guys from VNU came back to collect it at the end of the day James told them all his shots had had to be with the computer screen blank because it didn’t work, didn’t turn on.
For around half an hour the magazine guys nervously poked and prodded and even tried plugging it in with their own step down transformer.
Nothing. The Macintosh was in Dodo land.
“Are you sure you didn’t plug this in to 240v?”
“Of course not, said James, I’m not stupid.” Nervous laugh.
I really despised my boss, and I really, really wanted to tell these guys what he’d done, but James bribed me GBP 100 to stay schtum. In 1984 as an 18 year old my cash in hand pay was only GBP20 a day. What was a poor boy to do?
But the brief time I spent with the working Macintosh after the guys left on the previous Friday left me in awe. But, I was a kid and not likely to have the money to buy one any time soon. I think, if memory serves me right it was 3000 in 1984 pounds. You could buy a house in the North of England for that money.
After some digging around I came up with the actual issue of Personal Computer News from January 1984.



I’d like to say these were the photos I worked on with James C, but after the explosion incident they gave the brief to one John Price Studios, an arch rival of James’, who based on what we can see here, clearly managed to take photos of the replacement without blowing it up.










In this photo you can see the massive VGC PMT machine – to use it you had to put your arms into the machine with Robbie the Robot style sleeves fixed to the inside. I can’t remember now why putting your hands in there was considered dangerous. Let me Google it!
UPDATE Weird I cannot find any reference to this machine. It was used to take high contrast photos of collage artwork from the ad agency upstairs. I’m sure it was called a PMT machine and the brand was VGA but Google has nothing.
For those nerds (like me), I was wearing a Westaway & Westaway lambswool roll neck in beatnik black – hard to imagine but it was almost impossible to buy a roll neck sweater in London in 1984! Black italian cords by Raffaele Rocco (?) a John Simons purchase and the dark cordo color Bass Weejuns.
I was definitely going through a jazz ivy stage. Listening to Chet Baker, Jimmy Giuffre, Lalo Schifrin.
I had the sweater mint for 15 years until my Brazilian ex put in the washing machine on ‘hot’. To be fair most people didn’t have washing machines in Rio back then, they had maids to handwash everything.
Fast forward to 1992 and I was contracted by a rich Italian design mogul to write an updated screenplay of Rigoletto, set in contemporary Milan which was experiencing its worst corruption scandal ever called Operation Clean Hands). I’d been using an Olivetti typewriter that was so modern it could hold 126 characters in its memory so you could type and read the sentence on the LCD screen and edit or hit return to accept. Such technology was our future!
By freaky weird coincidence my oldest friend David B randomly sent me an audio of a voicemail taken from this then state of the art Panasonic answer machine. For some reason Selfridges was the only retailer of these that didn’t have an audible alert to the other person that they were being recorded.
While he was testing this machine I called and left a message asking if he knew anywhere ‘around here’ (being Crouch End) where I could buy a replacement ribbon for my semi-automatic Olivetti! Those were the days.
It’s so weird to hear your own voice from 32 years ago!
I decided to use some of the huge advance I was paid for the screenplay and buy one of those Mac things. They had moved on a lot in the intervening years but the entry level models were still black and white screens.
In the summer of 94 I started hanging around something called a ‘startup’ an entity then entirely unknown in the UK and based in Denmark St the heart of the old school British music industry. I worked as a kind of intern learning the business of digital music distribution. We had access to MPEG before the German anarchist Karl Heinz Stockhausen leaked the codec to a waiting world. Anyway, before they would even let me volunteer there, they asked me a very important question. ‘Do you know how to use a computer and a modem?’
Of course I said yes, so they gave me a seat at a table with some hideous beige plastic screen and told me to start cataloging the CDs David Bowie, always ahead of the game, had sent to us to ‘rip’ so he could sell his music online.
Digressing again I know, but this has a point. I sat down and pressed the power button on the PC. The screen powered up black. What the hell is this? I thought to myself. I was sitting in a corner so luckily no one could see me. A little cursor popped up and said ‘login’. I hit return, nothing. The prompt appeared again. I did this several times. I couldn’t understand why the PC wasn’t working. After about 30 more minutes I decided I had to ask someone if it was broken. I asked the guy sitting next to me who had the smelliest foot odor coming from his sockless sneakers that I ever experienced – I can still smell it today.
You need to type WIN mate, then ENTER.
What do you mean?
You need to get past the MS DOS. Look, type WIN and then it loads…
Sure enough the screen went pale blue and said ‘Windows 3.1.1
I was flabbergasted. My Macintosh from two years earlier opened to its OS the moment you pressed the power button.
I had to learn to use that awful machine and I even learned to code HTML – in Notepad!
Because it was a digital music business there was a lot of obession with something called a ‘soundcard’ preferably it needed to be Turtle Beach. I didn’t really understand what a soundcard was that was necessary to hear music from the PC. When I got home I checked my Macintosh. Not only did it not have a soundcard but also no modem – that little box that made strange tone and noises to allow you to ‘get on the ‘net’.
So my computer using skills were spread across the two platforms. I swore to myself that I would only ever buy Apple if I had the money.
That Mac served me well until 1994 when I moved to Rio and carried it with me in hand luggage to sell to my ex girlfriend for 300 – the UK second hand price. Little did I know that Macs were illegal contraband in Brazil in those days in order to protect the Brazilian computer industry that was stuck in the world of DOS with their national pride the XT machine. So the value on the black market was around 5000 dollars. Nevermind.

The only computer legally allowed in Brazil in the early 90s was this IBM clone.
But from that moment aside from one brief period where for work I had to use Windows and bought a mini Toshiba Portege I was Mr Mac all the way. My friends who all worked in arts also used Macs. Other friends who were musicians also used them. Logic was only available for Mac OS and the standard machine to match with a Pro Tools rig was a Mac.
When I moved back to London in 1998 a friend and I built a studio with Pro Tools, Alesis, Roland JV2010, MPC all the must have gear of the day, and of course at its heart was an Apple G3 that was more than capable of doing the job.
Later, when I built my mini studio at home in 2004 I bought the cutting edge G5 ‘cheesegrater’. That was a work of art and over engineered to an extreme level. Mint copies fetch crazy sums today. You could then still swap out RAM or upgrade the harddrive yourself. As it should be.
From that time on, I moved to buying laptops only. Apple had created works of art in aluminum, the screens were the best, the battery life was not perfect but hey, we had Macs. We were a fanboy community. In my mind back then, only accountants or people with zero taste or style used a PC. Or weird shutins who played RPGs in their basements. PCs were usually made of shitty beige or black plastic – all the parts from the parts bin and until 1995 you still had to type ‘WIN/ ‘ and ENTER in order to start windows!
When the iPod came out I bought one, then the new color screen version, then every 3 years or so a new laptop. The second hand resale value stayed strong when upgrading. But around 2013 I started to notice issues with the quality. Keys started losing their print where they were being used – the S and A and E usually. Keys also fell off.
The black plastic Macbook literally disintegrated over several months. All the edges crumbled. Only later did I find out that Apple had quietly been replacing the laptops of those who complained.
The next laptop needed to be aluminum. I was not going to put up with plastic again. Around that time was the last time, in my opinion, that Apple produced a really great product. The famed 16″ MacBook Pro was a thing of beauty. But from the next iteration things started to go awry. But we were Mac fanboys, so we’d forgive anything right? We’d put up with issues because what was the alternative? Windows? Don’t make me laugh. Microsoft was at its worst and the then current Windows was infamously broken.
My 2016 Macbook had totally pointless touchbar, that only worked with functions that I never used until six months in it failed entirely. It still lit up but a touch bar that doesn’t feel touch is pretty pointless. Plus third party software companies didn’t seem to be allowed access to the touchbar functions. A programmable touch bar to use for key shortcuts or as Fn keys would have been useful, but left to their own devices Apple would never let third parties have access to their ‘secrets’ (read other peoples code they wrapped in their own protection wrappers).
The solution to these ever more common issues, at least according to Apple forums, was ‘upgrade! Buy a new one!’ And for years that’s just what I did like all the other Apple fanboys in our cozy walled garden, I let Apple fleece me time and time again for products that got worse, not better, and definitely, and as regularly as clockwork, more and more expensive.
I also bought iPhones. A new one every two years. The iPhone was great. It was innovative and user friendly – until it wasn’t.
I had the iPad 3rd iteration but to be honest it was a TV for the bed. I don’t think I ever used an app for work purposes.
But, dear readers, I was still firmly entrenched in the Apple of made up speed tests and claims of inventing that the likes of Samsung had been using for a couple of years.
The very name Microsoft caused me to literally curse and spit. My acronym for anything windows was MPOS – Microsoft Piece of Shit.
So how hell did that change?
In the next episode we’ll see where things started to go really wrong with the Cupertino Cowboys.
PMT’s there a phrase I haven’t heard in over 35 years.
My first job in ’86 was in an agency production dept. We used to create PMT’s for local press work. I remember the machines being more like a camera lens. You’d place the original artwork on a base screen then configure the print size you wanted in line with the space booked.
I wonder if the machine in the image is for dispro – bromides where you adjust the image size photographically
I’m glad I’m not the only one. This machine was used solely for photographing composites for print, always B&W for newspapers. There was an agency above the darkroom I managed and they had CBS Records as a client.
Every day I would use a rostrum camera to shoot original artwork, album covers etc on 5×4 Kodak line film, send them upstairs where the airbrush boys would add Letraset to them and hey presto, you had an ad for the Evening Standard of Bruce’s Born in the USA show at Wembley with the album art, and the info for CBS and the promotors.
After they composited all the elements I would use the PMT to take a 1:1 image again, high contrast and sometimes with newsprint filters.
Those jobs that you could do today in 10 minutes with Photoshop used to take 3 days!
The prints were definitely bromides so they were prefectly matte
Re. the cords in the shot. I didn’t realise that JS stocked anything Italian. The few times I visited in the Eighties it was virtually all American stuff.
I finally remembered the brand. Raffaele Rocco. They were the last pair of pleated trousers I ever bought in 1983, soon after JS opened. There was already a trend for him to find European stuff as the prices in dollars got really expensive. Later he would push Hartford a lot.
Shirts in 83 were all Sero (I bought a S/S blue one for my first purchase there, havind decided from FLIP vintage that SERO was the best fit for me) or Geoffrey Beene. I remember I had (rent money) burning a hole in my pocket and although I went in to buy some Halrin flat fronts, he had none in black of course, but that was my beatnik ivy period.
I just googled Rocco but found only a Mayo Clinic physician!
Is the JS- Euro connection where Vetra and Paraboot come in?
I bought a Hartford shirt from Paris last year based on the old JS connection
Although pleated trousers look like making a comeback I now prefer the simplicity and elegance of a flat front.
I’m pretty sure the Vetra connection is 2000s hipster. I don’t remember anyone wearing such things and almost certainly the company was just making overalls for French workers back then.
The Paraboot story I do remember very well. I was working at Blazer so was autumn 1986. My Dad had been making shoes for Bowen in Paris, a kind of one step down from JM Weston, and Blazer and JS were the only stores at that time who were buying those export models. One of them was a Paraboot Micheal copy with a Dr Martens sole (Loake was then one of the 6 licensees of DMs) that I had a pair and they were commented on constantly. Blazer was a stone’s throw from Russell St, so I used to go over and chat with John in the lunch break. One day a very serious-faced JS said, ‘Let me show you something I want you to tell me what you think of it’ and he went downstairs and came back up with a real Paraboot Michael. ‘I like it but do you think customers will?’
I realised that the pair I had were just a basic copy of the Paraboot. 86 was about the time that the ivy thing started to move towards a Parisian style. Paris was totally isolated from London in those days and had its own style. As we used to go over on the boat train and walk around and soak everything in and then mix things up. I never had a pair of Michael until the late 2000s, then I had to resell them because they just didn’t fit with my feet for some reason.
So JS started stocking them in 86/7 but having discovered the lure of the Chasse, demi Chasse and the Golf I became obsessed with JM Weston, then still a very fusty family business with crazy models like the triple semelle. I think John later sold the Embassy copy of the triple semelle, I’m fairly sure my pair come from him.
I bought the 180 moccasin in the Champs D’Lysee store that was like a gentleman’s club and wore those to death but the prices of Weston were always just out of reach. Loake made a true chasse for Bowen and I remember my Dad being approached by Roberto de Niro’s PA because he’d seen the Bowen ones in a magazine and wanted several pairs for his character in This Boy’s Life the movie that launched a young Leonardo.
So Paraboot was a thing with JS early on. I’m tempted to suggest that Vetra came in with Paul going into the business.
Very interesting. You’ve definitely got a book in you somewhere 🙂