There are some topics that just won’t die. Vi vs. Emacs, GNOME vs. KDE, Coke vs. Pepsi… and Apple vs. PCs.
And I can’t help it, I just had to comment on this one.
It used to be an, sorry, Apples vs. Oranges comparison with PPC hardware vs. x86, but these days… Apple invites a lot of criticism by overpricing standard PC hardware. (Sorry Mac fans, but “OS X only runs on Apple hardware” is not added value for Macs, it’s Apple being unnecessarily proprietary.)
Anyway, the rest is over on ZDNet. Enjoy!
Oh, and on Vi vs. Emacs? Sorry, Vi wins. Hands down. 
You’ve got to be kidding me. Vi wins, hands down. Please. Try getting ecb or yasnippet functionality in vi.
Reminds me of a *workshop* I attended a couple of years ago where the topic was “Why a Mac is better than a PC.” Total curiousity on my part for attending. I had been working in a design shop where all users were using Macs so I had a pretty good idea of the differences already.
So this speaker was going “Mac has this, PC doesn’t…” “Mac has this, PC doesn’t…” This rather long litany of stuff. And I was sitting there in the front row getting rather irritated. So finally I stood up and raised my hand.
“Excuse me, but you keep saying the PC doesn’t have this, and I say my PC does have it.” His response was “Yeah but you have to download it whereas on the Mac it’s already there.”
I told him, no. It’s already there on my PC too. He looked at me like I was an idiot and said “Okay everyone, watch what he says. Now tell me how it is built into the PC already?” and he crossed his arms smugly waiting for me to say something stupid.
I said, “Well, first of all, you said PC, you did not say ‘Windows’” and you could see his face just suddenly started to fall apart. “PC is just hardware, you’re talking about operating systems. There’s also Linux which doesn’t cost anywhere near what a Mac costs.”
The audience started chuckling and a few stood up and asked for more information about Linux. He got angry and said that this is not the point of the workshop and I was detracting it and Linux is not to be discussed here.
But I got my point across.
But it is still true today that many people are unable to conceptually differentiate between hardware and software. And until that changes, Apple will continue to lead in the misconception that “it must be the hardware” why their OSX experience was better than the Windows experience.
I have always wondered why people always assume PC = Windows.
I figure that if Apple were to lower their prices on their computer hardware, they would have a much larger consumer base. After all, how can they expect to win over consumers in this economy when their computers cost twice (or more) what the competition does.