We need "simple but effective", Jman.
(After reading all the above info, I've reluctantly put a red line through Movie Making as a possible career change!!) 
sorry bondy - it's got a habbit of turning like that when we techno dorks can't help but to post a response
makes up for having a small.......fin
exactly the point I tried to make about the Mac OS plus hardware.
I used to get hung up with all that techno mumbo jumbo as well. Now that I work primarily on the mac platform things just work most of the time. if they don't work the most common reason is that I try do something the way I used to do it in the Windows environment, mainly over thinking the problem. It does take about 2 to 3 weeks to find your way around Mac OSX when you come from Windows.
Sorry but I have to double pipe in here !
It is operating system related.
Having been a user of both Mac and Windows for many years I can definitely say the Mac OS is a much more stable platform. Applications crashing and locking up is a rarity.
Admittedly this is partially dependant upon the hardware, but Mac/PC machines I use have similar processing power and applications running.
A wise computer boffin friend once told me a main hang up with Windows is it has to run on any number of different hardware configurations of motherboard, graphics card, processor, RAM, hard drive etc etc. Also it has to be backward compatible.
On the other hand Mac has it's hardware and OS software devloped by the one company, much better for smooth running. Additionally they made a decison to move to Mac OSX which wasn't backward compatible with old software. A major difference to Windows. It allowed them to produce a better product.
As for the comment about there being a lesser range of software for Macs that is definitely a comment from someone that has had little if any exposure to Macs.
Name me something you can do on a PC that you can't on a Mac. There is software for everything on a Mac too !
Finally I believe you will find it was Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak that brought us the first Personal Computer, not to mention the theft of ideas from Apple which brought about Windows by Microsoft. Now we have Vista which attempts to emulate Mac OSX. Without Windows we would happily of had the spread of Apples !!!
i remember seeing on a doco that xerox had a mouse or puck driven home computer beast prototype back in mid 70's but it was canned because no one thought it would appeal to the publichttp://www.maniacworld.com/alto-computer-video.html
wasn't the commodore pet and microbee around before any ibm & mac equivalent pc?
WW66,
While I agree with you mostly, I would probably limit my agreement to Mac OSX. OS9 sucked royally compared to Windows XP. As a matter of fact it was only 6 years ago that I was truly in favor of the Windows environment.
Apple has worked hard since then to make OSX what it is today.
And who knows... perhaps once Windows 7 comes around I might be going back to a Windows world (although it's hard for me to imagine at the moment)...
