This conversation over at Scatterplot is hilarious.
Personally, I have finally come to rest on this topic with the following opinion: Apples were just as irritating as PCs before OSX. OSX is based on FreeBSD, which is a Unix operating system. No matter how you slice it, FreeBSD is more stable and less vulnerable than Windows… or at least it was at that time. I haven’t checked lately, but I’d bet it still is (at least marginally so). But none of that matters when it comes to the question of which system is “better,” or “cooler,” or anything-er.
In the days when Infocom interactive fiction was a major source of fun (for, ahem, certain people), my family had an Apple. Eventually, work necessitated a switch. I got a Dell. When OSX came out, I switched back to Apple. At that time, the relative stability of OSX combined with 1) ready access to a TeraTerm-like application and 2) general prettiness were enough to hook me.
In other words, I switched to an Apple because it was the latest shiny new toy and it had a couple features I liked (that were very specific to me and my situation at the time). I’ve used a Mac ever since without constant debate over which is better.
I relate this example here in order to illustrate what I believe to be a generalizable principle regarding the Mac vs. PC debate. Other than a possible marginal difference in OS stability, which few people even know about let alone care about, the difference between Macs and PCs is not in quality but rather within the preference and familiarity of the user. And I would argue, in keeping with related research on the topic, that familiarity is really the clincher.
Further, people say this a lot: “I want it to just work.” People in both camps say its, and both groups believe that whichever system they use just works. Well, of course it does. It just works because they know how to use it. The other system would just work too if they pressed the right buttons at the right times. What people really mean to say, I think, is that they don’t want to have to learn how to use a new system, or that they want all systems to have a standardized set of immutable laws which they are intimately familiar with. (ronically, I think if that last really were the case, everyone would be screaming about fascism or something.)
When I was a project manager, I sometimes also wrote documentation or training materials for software. I never really articulated it in my own mind, but I always operated on a similar premise at those times. In other words, documentation projects weren’t for simply describing the technology or how to use it. It was to transform unfamiliar information into bite sized, familiar bits in order to soothe the troubled minds of my readers. Nowadays, I use this technique when I make any sort of presentation in sociology. In fact, any time that I present information that is familiar to me but not to my audience, I try to remember that finding ways to make the material seem familiar is usually a very effective and in fact pleasant way of conveying information. (This is why it rankles me so when I read sociology articles that are written in obtuse language.)
I agree and this was what I was trying to get at over on Scatterplot. Same goes for handhelds. Maybe there are systems better than Palm OS, but I’m used to it, it works well for me so I’d rather stick with it than spend time learning a new one that has no obvious benefits over what I already use.
And yes, I see no excuse for academic articles to be incomprehensible.
I think there are two differences between OS X and Windows XP (or Vista). First, Windows is fugly. Second, it’s is still way more vulnerable to malware.