Via Zoso, I got to see Laurie McGuinness’ PC vs Mac spoof commercials. In case you don’t know, these are following along the idea of Apple’s GetAMac series, only in this case PC is the good guy. Oh, and the videos are put up on the website in QuickTime format *snicker*

Both Apple and McGuinness encourage stereotyping through these commercials. They also give the impression that people are locked down to a technology and their work cannot be done in any other way than by using either of the two as they have done always. “I’m a PC and I do spreadsheets”, “I’m a Mac and I do websites”. Yes, different people went ahead and wrote software biased in a certain direction for each platform. PC’s didn’t win marketshare because they could do spreadsheets, but because they were cheaper earlier and a lot of development of specialized software went into Microsoft. At some point Microsoft’s GUI looked better than Apple’s and people thought it would be easier to use in the workplace - not because one was significantly superior to another.

Trends from the last little while seem to indicate Apple’s doing quite well in selling their hardware. Not because it’s pretty, but it doesn’t lock people down to only one technology anymore. This was the winning argument with a few of my friends - you can now run Windows and Linux if you need to, and it costs about as much as your run-of-the-mill laptop anyway. So why not try something new for a change? Even the non-geeks did it and loved it and thanked me.

Me? I bought a Mac for that same reason [but then again I install some obscure OS in a virtual machine every month or so.] To try something new. So I can say I have experience with all the major operating systems and there are good things and bad things in all of them, and that’s simply the way it is.

So try something new for a change. Give everyone a chance.

Three very different cultures? More or less. The light that Apple’s Get A Mac campaign sheds regarding Macintosh users is one of a snarky, slightly snobbish individual, always ready to throw a ‘holier-than-thou’ remark to a PC user. This is partly why so many root for viruses and large-scale spyware to come to Mac OS X so that one of the ‘biggest’ arguments pro-Mac gets shot to dirt. It is immature to believe any current OS is completely protected from malware but that’s not my topic for now.

I am a `n*x-spawn user. This includes Linux, UNIX, Solaris, BSDs, Mac OS X. More importantly, I am quite aware of the ‘culture of the geek’ for any of these platforms and how it plays out between long-standing arch-enemies. Linux vs Windows, Mac vs PC. To be honest, they’re all the same. It is natural to defend the technology you’ve chosen because, heck, you’re doing it and you must be right. After all, you are a geek and you know your shit. It is far too easy to find bad (technical) things about a different platform - this only shows that all are flawed.

Now, activism is not bad. Pushing forward the benefits of a certain platform to gain users is normal and quite admirable - as long as those arguments are neither misrepresentations nor solely riding on the competition. Why? Saying you have something that’s just better than a rival’s offering means you’re not trying to be the best you can be. It’s like auctioning for a Lamborghini by just increasing the previous offer by $1.

Apple does knock Microsoft in its ads. Microsoft launched the Zune to be an iPod killer. Linux vendors say their OS is more secure than Windows. It all goes around.