As a lovely way to start off the week, my workday is filled with corporate meetings of varying banality. One of the meetings involved an IT guy who seems very knowledgable in his contribution to the common corporation we work for and I looked forward to speaking with him. Part of his presentation including a software demonstration.
The problem is, he is using a Mac. And as an rabid Apple fanboy, it pains me to start this paragraph with “the problem is”.
I made a comment stating that I noticed the MacBook Pro that he was using to accomplish his tasks and that I was an avid Apple products user as well. My supervisor, who is an avid Windows user, also made a comment stating his surprise that he was using a Mac for his company business, since we are very much a PC world inside the corporation.
“I’m using a Mac because they gave me a PC. They claimed it was top of the line but it’s still a PC.” His voice was dripping with that holier-than-thou attitude that one occasionally hears from a Mac user and quite frankly, makes me cringe. A lot. Because it’s that attitude that gives us Mac folks a bad name.
Here’s my deal. I love my Macs, I love my iPad and I love all the iDevices that I have in my home and life. I have tried to switch away from Mac but the old adage of “Once you go Mac…” (or something like that) is very much true and I find the cohesiveness of my computing experience with my various portable devices to be quite nice. I am excited about the rumors about Verizon Wireless getting the iPhone in the fairly near future. And quite frankly, using a more expensive Mac in Panera or wherever is a bit of an elitist ego boost for me, because I feel like I have spent our money on the best possible computing experience. The hardware feels better, the software is more intuitive and it really does “just work”.
But I’m certainly not going to poo-poo random PC users and make them feel any less special or important in their computing experience because overall, the Mac is just a tool. I choose to use my computer as a tool to get whatever I want to get done, done. Others choose PCs as their tool. We both get to the same websites, we both type documents and we both exchange e-mail, it’s just that they have their way on their PC and I have my way on my Mac.
I have been known to roll my eyes and groan on more than one occasion when asked to help someone with a computer issue. The groan and eye-roll usually indicates that said user is using Windows Vista, but I digress. I have also had to bail out many Mac users in my day.
Folks with the uppity attitude about their Macs give all us fanboys a bad name. I just want to get my work or play done on a system that doesn’t crank about it.
And I want to do it without an attitude.
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
