One of the things about which I dislike complaining, but sometimes dislike even more hearing from, is that kind of person who uses Macs, and can never resist an opportunity to tell you about it. Not just that they like their Mac, because some of the longest-time Mac users and the newest converts tend to be unable to shut up about it, but the people who have been using macs maybe two or three years total, have never intentionally touched a Mac without an Intel processor. Often, they just got their MacBook a few months ago, after having been the worst kind of PC user for a long time.
And what of those of us who were with Apple in the dark times? Those of us who have had Macs long enough to experience ones that maybe weren’t as well-built as some of the current unibody machines? Often, made fun of for the fact that we either can’t afford to buy another Mac, or simply don’t want to, due to fairly significant problems we’ve had in the past, or a switch we’ve made for whatever other reason.
It’s not just the fact that you’re using something that’s not a Mac. It’s the fact that you’re using a totally inferior computing platform, with inferior hardware and inferior hardware. This group even has difficulties acknowledging that the Dell Latitude E6400 XFR and the Panasonic ToughBook series are durable computers. And these are machines designed explicitly to be dropped out of airplanes and shot at fairly close range with powerful guns, and driven over with fire trucks.
Sometimes these particular Mac folks find out that they can join forums where, ostensibly, they can find other people who are as absolutely fanatical about Macs in the same way they are. Unfortunately for them, sometimes people at Mac forums are fairly regular, average people who either can’t afford a Mac, or have more than one computer for different purposes. (I have a Lenovo ThinkPad because I have a fairly legitimate need for a computer with a warranty that covers accidental damage, just as an example.)
I am a very long-time member, somewhat new moderator and new administrator on one such forum whose focus happens to be Macs. (However ours doesn’t tend to cater to the folks who are using OS X on a brand new MacBook, or folks who are only just now using Mac OS X because you can run it on a generic x86 computer.) One of the problems that happens from time to time is some kid gets a MacBook, or some older person gets a MacBook, and they think it’s just the coolest dang thing ever, and absolutely have the need to, within a few weeks of getting it, tell everybody everywhere a few things.
These things are as follows (in the words of the newly converted):
- That their MacBook is the coolest, best-designed, most durable computer on the market, for the money it was totally worth it given the gorgeous display, the fact that you can never get viruses or malware ever, and it is probably going to last forever, or until they buy the marginally faster next model up from the next generation.
- That Mac OS X is the best operating system, it’s the most beautiful, it always works, you never need to restart it, it never gets slow, it has perfect memory handling and under no circumstances shall anybody ever need to perform maintenance of any kind upon Mac software, or by extension, hardware.
- How they have always wanted a Mac, despite the fact that they were just the other day talking about how Apple should have died in the ’90s, if it weren’t for the massive cash infusion they got from Microsoft.
- How you might recognize them from [just about any other forum] because they signed up there also, and indeed, at every Mac forum on the Internet, because they love Macs and Steve Jobs that much.
- How you or somebody else is an inferior human being because you or they have chosen to either own something that’s not an Apple product as your phone, music player or computer, or indeed to own anything from another company, where Apple makes such a device. (Great examples of this involve owning a laptop that’s not a MacBook, owning a media computer that’s not a Mac mini, owning an expandable desktop that’s not an iMac or a Mac Pro, owning a phone that isn’t an iPhone, and even though it hasn’t been released yet, an Internet tablet or e-reader other than the iPad.
- How they saw this thing they were pretty sure was a Mac on this episode of The Drew Carey Show or Seinfeld or this really cool looking Apple computer and/or device in Batman Beyond.
Some of the items in this list apply to people who have been Mac users longer than just a few weeks, of course, and the most annoying of these things, to me anyway, are the latter items about how people who make the conscious choice to use something other than a Mac are for whatever reason, inferior, either in their intrinsic value as a person or in their reasoning capabilities, or in their value as a person represented by “what they own.”
And I think that brings me to the real issue at hand, at least for me. Some of the people I know are the type of Mac users who use it to think of themselves as better somehow, either because they can afford it, because their lifestyle allows them to use laptops that aren’t very sturdy, or because somebody told them that they could watch and download as much porn as they could ever want, without ever suffering malware and system performance side-effects that Internet Explorer, dangerous torrents and other P2P programs such as LimeWire can cause, when used without caution.
Is somebody who uses a Mac a better person? Probably not– to put it bluntly, most people who have switched to Mac in the past few years are really rude about that fact. They didn’t switch because the Mac has great photography software like Aperture, or because the HFS+ filesystem has benefits over NTFS or EXT3. Most of them don’t even know about Aperture or the Final Cut or Logic series of software, meaning they use mostly if not completely the same software they would have used on their Windows PC. And yet, they’ll throw around buzzwords like UNIX.
But how many Mac users have you actually seen in the past year run scientific or high media or other UNIX-specific software like Mathematica, Final Cut, or BLAST or whatever.
Most of this, of course, applies to legitimate Mac users, people who have been with the Mac a long time, or have fallen in and out of love with it as the platform and their needs of it have changed over the years. People who use Macs because they just want something that works, people who use Macs because they love great design, people who use Macs for their work, and people who use Macs because the Mac is one of the few remaining legitimate UNIX (or formerly UNIX compatible) platforms are an entirely different class of Mac users. This class of Mac users doesn’t care that they use a Mac. They might have been using SGI’s old IRIX operating system if it were still around, they may be recent converts from Sun’s Solaris operating system, they may have gotten a Mac back in the ’80s when it was the computer that could do what they wanted for less than $10,000, or they might just be normal people who don’t love a computer or a corporate CEO more than they do other people.
What’s the solution? Unfortunately I don’t know if there is. Some people are insufferable Mac users. Some people are insufferable Linux users and some people are insufferable owners of Chevrolet vehicles. What the rest of us normal folks need to remember is that we made our decisions based on legitimate factors, and that not everybody who uses any given product is so vocal about it. I’m sure there are a lot of folks out there happily using any given piece of technology to get things done, other than badgering other people about how they should be using that technology.
And, I’ll end this one, which has been a bit of an unplanned ramble I have wanted to have for awhile, with a question for anybody who happens to be reading. Do you know any insufferable Mac users, whether they’re a veteran of the platform, or they think they’re a veteran because their first Mac, a MacBook, is now two years old? If so, or even if you don’t, how do you deal with it? What is your reply when they ask you why your computer isn’t a Mac? What if your computer is a Mac and they talk to you about it as though you should be as crazy as they are?
Interesting things to ponder, for me anyway, when I’m walking between classes.
