Would you care to unpack that? Sounds like social snobbery to me. Reminds me of the upper-class Englishwoman on her wedding night: "Tell me, husband, do the common people also enjoy this pleasure? They do? Well, it's much too good for them!"

So, in what way specifically do clueless and/or uncool people using Macs damage the platform -- if that's what you are actually saying? I'm deeply uncool myself, and no geek either, but I don't see how the way I use my machines should degrade the platform or the experience for anyone else. I mean, I'm not actually infectious, surely? Are people really running round making like a Bateman cartoon (you´ll have to google that, you colonial) and saying, "If he is using one, it can't be any good"?

Since when did racism need reasoning? The Nazi's didn't really have or need reasoning. Nor did the heavily anti-Semitic Americans of the period.

Sure. They tend to be IT techs (not all, but many are IT techs) who only know Windows and want to treat every system they run across as if it were just another variation of Windows. While these people don't make up all of IT, they do represent a significant portion of it.

It's these types who see nothing wrong with porting a Windows app directly to the Mac without bothering to adhere to Mac UI guidelines. That is one of the ways they harm the platform. Another is that they lower Mac user expectations by repeating claims like "the Mac is just as insecure as Windows", which in turn reduces social pressure on developers to produce quality software. The result of that we already see in Windows: large quantities of low quality software. I don't want to see that on the Mac.

Back in the '90s I had a brief but final argument with a windows guy. Went like this:

"Name ONE thing you can do on a Mac that you can't do on Windows."

"Use 12 characters in a filename"

Sadly not true anymore, but worked for over a decade.

Hate to be the bringer of bad news, but when was the last time you went over to versiontracker.com? There's already a ton of low quality software out there for Mac.

Frankly, it's not a bad thing. People have to start somewhere, and since I don't know anyone who starts of as the best programmer the world has ever seen, I must assume they start somewhere else. Probably in the "sucky" area if I'm not much mistaken. They do get better.

In the mean time, the best way to keep your software experience "pure" and "undefiled by Windows" is to not download low quality software. Banning others from the platform is illogical, people have to learn somehow, and if that means starting off with low quality and working up, then there you go.

There are good developers and bad developers and that is on every platform. Apple doesn't get a free pass of being higher quality, because in many cases it is not. It is just different.

That reminds me of one of the greatest Apple ads ever:

C:\NGRTLNS.W95

As you can see, it’s made the rounds. :D
.

You've missed my point. Here's an example: Adobe software used to be great, back when it started on the Mac. They made a few things and made them well. Now, they're more interested in producing large numbers of packages than they are in doing any of them well. It's that attitude of selling the most products to the most people that results in crappy software, not that somebody's new to the business. High volume/low cost is not the Mac way for good reason: it leads to mediocrity.

I agree that just trying to push a big IP from windows over to Mac OSX could, and would, be a problem. Take X3:the Reunion or Madden for an example. They tried to use a re-bundled version of WINE called "Cider" to port games over to Mac. It wasn't pretty, but they wanted a quick buck. They didn't even make a vague attempt at following GUI standards for OSX, and the execution was very low quality, to say the least (well, at least for X3, which I have). And while I do enjoy the game (when it works), the overall impression is very "broken" if you will.

Taking short cut to save some cash usually costs huge dividends in trust and reputation, that's for sure. And if that's what you mean by "Apple knows better than this" then I whole heartedly agree with you.

It's more than that! Can you think of any software that got ported from the Mac to the PC that was bad? Adobe's products astounded PC users when they first got ported to the PC, so it's not just taking a big project from one platform to another. There's a level of inherent quality that comes with the culture you build the original app for, and getting the wrong PC users to switch, or even too many of the right ones too quickly, is bad for the Mac platform's quality.

From what I hear, Safari and QuickTime on Windows don't have a great reputation.

In the world of Linux WINE is buggy with games, and it always has been. I tried it, and ended up just going back to Windows for gaming. Windows has better gaming hardware and better support. They don't make the newest and latest and greatest video cards for the Mac, and the video card is the key component these days with gaming.

The gaming companies approached Apple years ago and wanted to develop for Apple and Apple gave them the cold shoulder. Jobs did not think computer gaming had any future and that consoles would be the gaming system of choice. Microsoft provided game developers will tools like Direct X, Apple did not.

In all honesty, both PCs and Macs do the same things about on the same level. Whether it is Linux, Windows or OS X. I think that Windows does perform a bit slower than Linux and OS X, but I also look at how much legacy support Windows has. There is good and bad with it, and when I say perform slower I mean very marginal. My current Windows machine is just as snappy as my Macbook Pro.

So, when I help consult a friend or family member I ask them a few questions. One of them being if they prefer Mac or PC. If they say PC I don't try to convert them to Mac, but if they say they don't know which, I then give them pros and cons. If gaming is in question I just tell them to get a PC.

Gaming is not a huge factor for everyone, but even if you want to casually play the newest games, you might as well get a PC. There are a very few companies out there, like Blizzard and id, that actually port their games to Linux, Windows and Mac.

It is too bad Apple won't work harder with the gaming companies and video card companies to get better support. I also think the lack of them having a decent mid tower also turns off some people. I love my iMac at work, but not sure if I would buy one for personal usage because I would like to swap out my tower and keep my monitor in future upgrades.

Don't forget iTunes, it also crashes a bunch on Windows. I always use quick time alternative for my web browser in Windows as regular QT is bloated and it sucks on Windows.

I also hate Windows Media Player with a passion too. I pretty much use VLC on both my Macs and my PCs.

I've used them both and see nothing wrong with them. I haven't used them a lot because I try to avoid using Windows at all, so there could be problems I'm not aware of, but I'd expect problems with any software that runs in Windows just because it's running in Windows. ;)

My reference to quality was intended to be about the user experience though.

I think one of the best arguments for pro mac is Apple's business model and when you look at the total cost of ownership. I had an old G5 running 10.5 and it is about 5 years old. Try getting a 5 year old PC to run Vista is going to be hard, Windows 7 maybe.

I do think that Macs will last longer on the end of life cycle as far as technology goes. Minus your wear and tear parts like hard drives, but that goes for all computers.

Lest we start thinking Mac users are equal citizens or something... wellllll, not so fast. Just tried to download a grant application from HUD.... no can do, requires the latest version of Adobe Reader and 9.2, apparently, is not late enough even though it is the latest Adobe will give me.

HUD did let me have the instructions... tried to open an Excel file in the instructions folder and got a warning saying Office for Mac:2008 does not support some kind of stinkin' macro and the spreadsheet will not function as needed for electronic grant submission to our own government. The US govt is prejudice against Mac users..... doesn't that make them worse than racist?

Course, we can use the print dialog to "Save as PDF" and our XP using friends cannot.

Yeah, I know I could run Windows, but I refuse. Old, stubborn, set in my ways, etc.:)

P.S. For our friends overseas, HUD is Housing and Urban Development, a federal agency.

That has got to be the fist time in the histoy of the univese that a government (any government) has been ahead of the technological cuve on anything (err... anything not related to killing, torturing, or spying on people, that is). though in fairness, this is an adobe issue - I've been running into that particular problem for at least three years. I think the issue is that Adobe (for whatever mindless reason) chose to use activeX components to make that system work (even though Adobe already supports javascript, which would have been the more obvious choice).

edit: my bad - that can't be true, because I have filled out forms on my Mac; I just keep running into documents that my mac won't handle. that might be because adobe distributes updates quickly but lags dramatically on creating updates for Mac. pardon my grumpy moment. :)

Ha. You were most kind compared to what I was saying under my breath. BTW... the politically correct word for idiot is... bureaucrat (even though I was one of them there bureaucrats for a while.:))

Maybe we should spin off a thread on bureaucrats?

My definition is a person who doesn't do Task A because he's too busy not-doing Tasks B and C, and contrariwise.

If course, you don't get this only in the public sector, corprats do it too.

In this case, I don't know if the bureaucrat failed to check for Mac compatibility, or worse, she did check and decided the heck with them and went ahead with the windows only version.

The site does have a "minimum requirements" chart which says Mac is good all the way back to Reader 8.1. Note the site will not let me download the file based on the version of Reader on my computer, as opposed to the file not actually working on my Mac after it is downloaded. May be a bug in the download programming, as in checking only for Windows version and shutting every thing else down. That would make the IT the bureaucrat!

I'm eating a lot of crow over this one.... had to ask a Window user friend (associate) to get the file. And the Windows friend will have to do the grant submission, too, because my Mac isn't up to the task.

Won't be bragging on my Mac for a while because they now have the perfect argument in support of Windows... no compatibility problems because Windows is what everybody uses! Hard to argue with that because that actually is the case!