When I think of the age old argument of Mac vs. PC anymore, the classic song Anything You Can Do pops into my head as the two platforms over the years have struggled to out do each other in features, stability, ease of use, etc. The war between Redmond and Cupertino has even begun to heat up yet again in the public eye with the scandalous news of Apple asking Microsoft to end their Laptop Hunters campaign. Sure Apple’s machines look sexy, work right of the box, & have an easy to use interface, versus Microsoft’s cost effective, universal and ubiquitous operating system that works on a larger pool of computers… but does it really matter anymore?
Don’t get me wrong, I am an Apple fanboy in all facets of the term, and will only give up my MBP if you pry it out of my cold dead hands. The more I start to look and evaluate my every day computer usage, the more I have come to understand why the differences between the two are slowly fading away, and becoming more of a marketing ploy than anything else, for two major reasons.
1) Apple stopped being a baby, and decided to move it’s development platform away from the PowerPC architecture and instead adopt an Intel chipset like the rest of the world. YAY! That means Macbooks are just PCs running a Mac based operating system, and if you’re feeling fancy, you can install Windows inside OSX, as a partion, or as the primary operating system (which may work better than your typical pc)
2) The all knowing, all seeing, all awesome… CLOUD. I would say that the Lion’s share of my daily work life centers around tools that are platform independent, and really only require a web browser. Think about it, my office suite has moved to Google Docs & Zoho, my chat client is Meebo, my email is on Gmail, and even my music library has moved to LaLa. I’ll need a random multimedia application (Photoshop, Premiere, iMovie, etc), but the more I look, the more I find that the cloud has absorbed my professional and personal life.
Now, I don’t think the argument between the two crowds will ever go away since marketing will always be looking for a
new way to spin their products, but I do think it is going to be less of an issue for your every day user who starts to use more web services. Who cares anymore what kind of computer you have, if all you need to do is access the web to get to your applications, files, and even multimedia?
