First post here so hopefully not stepping on any toes.
Hi !apple I wanna talk about the weird world of talking to non-apple users about apple products. Specifically, the phenomenology of personal experience vs the weird focus on technical specs that a lot of people get hung up on.
I’ve been a long time computer user since I was about 6 years old. I remember getting our AOL disc at the front door and my mom booting up our PC with windows 95 for the very first time. I spent hours and even days combing through every inch of the operating system and learning all of the secrets it had to offer.
In my teenage years I became friends with some mac and ios users and become instantly jealous of how much nicer their experience was (I was on windows xp at the time). Growing up with little to nothing to our name I knew it would be out of reach for a long time. So spent time getting into gaming and building my own PC from spare parts here and there. I even learned a few lessons after killing explorer thinking it was some rogue instance of IE running in the background.
Right out of high school I got my first full-time job at a local restaurant and ended up saving for a 2015 12-inch macbook pro. I instantly became obsessed with it. I remember skipping college classes just so I could spend more time programming, more time learning how the shell worked in unison with the OS. It’s the first machine I learned to program on. It’s the first machine I bought myself. It’s the first machine that really made using a computer feel right.
To this day that laptop sits lovingly entombed by itself in my desk. Covered in countless hack-a-thon stickers and a beat-to-hell plastic case, yet it still runs when I boot it up for nostalgic reasons.
For me this is what macOS (and being an apple user in general) is all about. It’s about the personal experience. In comparison other operating systems feel fundamentally broken or half baked. When something is wrong in macOS it makes you sad, like how losing your bike as a kid would. In contract, when something doesn’t work in windows it feels like it’s to be expected (no hate I know plenty of people love windows, this is just imo). I’ve even had the pleasure of watching some of my close friends slowly come around to the idea of getting an iPad or a macbook when looking for an upgrade. Normally this has happened only because they had some expose on their own. Their significant other got an iphone, or their work offered macbooks. Never did describing the experience seem to take a hold on people.
All of that is to say I’m curious how all of you feel about discussing why apple’s operating system(s) feel better, why it feels like home. Moreover I’m curious how y’all’s experience has been when talking to non-apple users. For me it’s largely been this weird alienating experience where you want to talk about why something fits like a glove, and instead the other party would rather talk about price points, or ram specs. To me this feels like the conversation around computers is immature. Immature in the sense that for any other hobby, enthusiasts are happy to talk about specs, but what they love is so much more important and often not grounded in the physical.
edit: I’m bad at spelling
Linux user here. Personally, macOS just never clicked with me. I don’t like some things here and there and I want to mold my OS until those things are no more - which I can’t. The interactions between different devices, like with the new VR headset and macbooks, are really nice. They are just not worth the little annoyances.
From this perspective, there is just nothing left besides the price and specs. I’d remove macOS anyways if that’s even possible nowadays.
I actually like linux too, just for completely the opposite reason I like macOS. The configurability can be fun, especially if you have an itch over a weekend. Personally I just find it annoying how it feels all-or-nothing. Thank you for sharing!
I’m a grizzled Windows user and absolutely love it. However, every person who knows me is shocked when I pull out my iPhone and sing it’s praises. I mainly love the security, but there’s something else when it comes to experience:
Optimization. In a time where Moore’s Law is dead and computer performance has largely stagnated, Apple still managed to forge ahead making their systems as high performing as possible. Rather than supporting every ancient floppy driver and COM file extension, Apple has a carefully designed and programmed ecosystem. So much so that my iPhone 6S received an update THIS JANUARY! Let alone how long it received actual feature updates. It’s such a breath of fresh air, like you aren’t a piece of garbage and so is what you bought from us.
I really respect Apple’s approach to customer experience, they’re a whole other breed.
That’s a great point too. Even if you want to talk about specs it’s important to talk about how well optimized a stack is for the hardware
So I grew up as the internet started and I was first a huge windows user especially windows 95 and 98. At that time it was macOS 8 or 9 and I really despised macs at the time. Then in the late 90s and early 2000s I got into Linux. Then I found out about Mac OS X and I wanted one but couldn’t afford it. I finally got my first Mac at my first computer job. I feel like macOS has a lot of great upsides that Linux provides but a much more polished system and has better compatibility since it has office.
Most of my friends are windows people so I don’t really talk about macs. It’s funny though the same people do like their iPhones and iPads.
I spend about 90% of my time in macOS because it’s what I use for work, but like you I have a long history with PCs and still build and maintain them mostly for gaming and testing. Macs are overall a more polished and integrated experience, and it’s the attention to detail I like the most (not that they’re perfect of course).
Some examples upon many… Windows 11, which I use on my main gaming PC, STILL doesn’t have a consistent dark mode. Basic windows like disk operation progress are white still. You still have to dig into control panel at times for certain things, even though they continue to add more things to settings. You still have to deal with drive letters. Installs now REQUIRE an MS account, even though the workaround still works. Overall it works fine, but there are a ton of things that bug me.
As for talking with people, well living in SoCal it’s not a big deal because the overall market share for Macs is pretty high regionally. So everyone is familiar with them, and if I had to guess, 80% of the people I interact with are Mac users even though most also use PCs for certain things.
Regional culture is definitely an interesting point. I lived in north county for about 12 years so I totally get what you’re talking about. There is an interesting concentration of mac users in that area. And yea you’re probably right, windows can often feel like death by a thousand paper-cuts. Maybe that’s the crux of the issue is the standard of quality across the board tends to be a higher focus on Mac
