I had always been a PC person, but in 2006, when I had the option of ordering either a Mac or a PC through the office, I thought, "What the hell, they're paying for it, why not try a Mac and see if it's better?" After all, Mac people are typically like religious zealots about their machines, so why not see if they're right?
So, over the past two years I have basically become bilingual in Mac and PC. Again, I'm not a super-techie person; my friend Joel gave me a computer that runs only open-source software and I basically couldn't make it do much of anything. And I have fairly simple needs; I'm not trying to hack the DoD or play MMORPGs, etc. So this commentary is by someone who just needs a computer to connect to the internet for email/shopping, make spreadsheets and documents, and play music and DVD's.
So here are my thoughts:
From a design philosophy perspective, the two machines are radically different. A PC, because they more or less run Microsoft stuff, is a prisoner of Microsoft design philosophy, which appears to be this:
"Hey, we know you want your computer to be able to do A, B, and C, but we only kinda know how to make a computer do B, and we have no idea how to make a computer do C, so anyway here's our best try at it. It's going to crash every so often because the B thingy doesn't work quite right, and we know that, but since we over here at Microsoft are basically printing money selling you software of this quality let's face it, we have no economic incentive to figure out how to do B and C properly. If you don't like it, buy a Mac, and then you can hang out with the other 6 people who have them and you can be a happy little family together. A happy little family that we'd get a lot of pleasure out of torturing and killing, but that we never actually will, because if we did, we'd have no plausible way of denying the fact that we're a shitty monopoly."
A Mac, of course, has a very different design philosophy:
"Hey, we know you want your computer to be able to do A, B, and C, and sure, we could make your computer do any of those things, plus D through K, because we're really fucking smart over here at Apple, but you what? If YOU were even half as smart as we are, you'd realize that what you REALLY want your computer to be able to do is A, C, and E, because that's like a major chord, which is intrinsically beautiful, and so that's what we've done- made your computer able to do A, C, and E. Because we're Apple and we know what you want better than you do. That's it, stop your futile resistance and let us assimilate you, and soon you too will realize we know what's best for you.
Or, you can just take the blue pill like the rest of the fucking zombies out there and buy a shitty PC. Your choice."
That's the design philosophy difference. There is another stark difference, which is in terms of what happens when you try to get your machine to do D, an action very similar to C, but which is not a default capability.
My friend Sarah used to have a corgi named Tommy. He was a real sweet dog. But he had a way of getting in the way sometimes, and if you wanted him to go away, you might have tried throwing something in the direction you wanted him to go, saying "Tommy! Go get it!" On a good day, Tommy might possibly have looked in the general direction you threw the aforementioned object, but even if he did, he would quickly revert to his default position, which was looking at you, mouth wide open, tongue hanging out, and head tilted slightly to the right.
A PC is like that. When you try to get it to do D, it does the computer equivalent of tilting its head to the side and looking at you stupidly. It has no idea what the fuck you're asking it to do. And no matter how many times or in how many different ways you ask, it will continue to look at you stupidly, until you want to beat it like the mangy cur it is.
[Note to dog lovers- I did not ever actually beat Tommy, or any other animal for that matter. He was, as I said, a sweet, if simple-minded, eating machine. Only people/things that should actually know better deserve beatings. Like neocons and Windows machines.]
When I was in middle school, I had a neighborhood friend, who coincidentally was also named Tommy, who had a 32 lb. cat. That cat was the biggest cat I have ever seen outside a zoo or a National Geographic special. And it was just as agile as any other cat. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, it would come into Tommy's room when I was sleeping there, and decide that the best place for it to sleep was on my stomach. So it would just jump on up onto my stomach.
Let me tell you something: in the middle of the night, when you are peacefully asleep, dreaming blissful dreams about Andrea Herzog, the cutest girl in school, who wears those soft clingy little sweaters that you have only just recently realized you appreciate, and who does not now, and possibly never will, know that you actually exist, it is extremely disruptive to have 32 pounds of cat land in your gut. And the thing was, when you'd try to shove him off, he'd just squat down, dig in a little bit, and passively resist you. And being as big as he was, he could passively resist pretty hard.
A Mac is like that. You might want to get it to do D, and it probably can, but it doesn't _want_ to, and like a cat, it thinks you're fundamentally misapprehending who exactly is boss around here. So, while you might get a Mac to do what you want eventually, it will passively resist you the whole way, and will do what you want only grudgingly. Somehow, Apple engineers have managed to engineer petulance into machines. More evidence of their misguided brilliance.
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