Game reset:
* You bought a Mac the year Reagan was shot and figured out after the fact it was proprietary.
* You made the same mistake a few years later.
* These two experiences alerted you to the fact that computers become obsolete.
* Your friend can't figure out how to print from his Mac.
For shame.
LOL -- well, the Apple III machines I purchased in 1981 weren't Macs -- they were more like a business version of the Apple II; they featured 80 character displays and upper and lower case letters. You could get software like Wordstar and Visicalc. At that time, people were still using MCST (Mag Card Selectric Typewriters) for word processing so the Applie III was both more economical and could do more. As I recall, we had a Qume daisy wheel printer which worked just fine.
The problem was not that the machines were proprietary but that when Apple cancelled the machine they provided no upgrade path. My business was expanding and I needed more hardware and it didn't make sense to support two sets of incompatible files, etc. The local Apple guy said the only option was to buy costly Lisas and that would have required new software and converting all of our hundreds of files manually. We went with the IBM PC/XT instead, converted the files one time and never looked back.
The reason for purchasing the Mac later on was different -- to support customers in the field with Mac equipment. It was fine that it became obsolete but I expected more than one year's use from it.
As far as my friend who can't get his Mac to work with a printer, what can I say? He has a 13 year old daughter so there really is no excuse. But I think it gives the lie to the claim that Macs are somehow easy to use.
And how about that single button mouse? Do they still use that?
I've got another piece of legacy PC software for embroidery machines. New programs are pretty pricey -- a few thousand dollars. And the file formats are not only proprietary but there is no simple way of converting them to more common formats. I have literally thousands of them. In the PC world, however, I'm able to run that program fine under Windows 10 and use a USB-linked floppy disk to create files to use on the embroidery machine.