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• Windows users are 20% more interested in stories about religion than Mac users
• Windows users are 39% more likely to read a story about personal savings than their Mac using friends
• Mac users are 6% more interested in intellectual property law, and 5% more interested in fitness
• Mac users are 20% more interested in stories about Biology
And so forth.
For what it's worth, I suspect those profiles are fairly accurate. While I have a lot of seriously Christian friends who are also passionate Mac fans, I've noticed a perceivable bias among many Christians, especially among evangelical/fundamentalists, toward Windows and away from the "liberal's computer" Mac.
Business-oriented folks also tend to strongly hew toward the Windows end of the spectrum, and can also naturally be safely assumed to be more interested in personal investing information.
I'm not sure what the deal is about intellectual property law or fitness interests as they relate to computer platform preference, and I would assume that 6% and 5% are well within the margin of error in a small survey like this anyway.
Biology? It's interesting that the difference spread for interest in both religion and biology is 20%. I'm a Christian, and I'm interested in both, but if I was asked on a poll which I was more interested in, it would definitely be religion.
I wish the Thoof survey had asked some questions about specifically political issues, which I think would have clarified the matter further.
On the other hand, I know lots of Windows-using, Mac-scorning, professed liberals, and a lot of the Mac-users I know are conservatives too, although it may be that I just know more conservatives, tending that persuasion myself.
A couple of reasons for the Mac being characterized as a "liberal's computer" are its low penetration of the business computing market and fact that it is spectacularly popular among members of the entertainment industry, and with other creative, artistic types, who more often than not tend to be liberal in their political views.
At the user level these computer platform rivalries play out in apparently intuitive terms. Windows machines indeed do seem to appeal to one sort of person and Macintoshes to another - at least historically. Windows is widely perceived as the OS preferred by no-nonsense business and techno-geek hacker types, while Macintosh is popularly pegged as the tool of artists, writers, and other creative individuals. This arbitrary pigeon-holing reflects practical reality to a degree, although Macs (especially in the MacIntel age when they can run Windows natively if you must) can be superb business computers, and plenty of writers and graphic arts people use Windows these days.
I'm biased - convinced that there are few things a Mac can’t do as well or better, and in almost all cases more elegantly, than a Windows PC. I concede that there are some very good non-Mac PCs out there. It’s just that Macs are so much nicer.,,, for objective as well as intuitive reasons.
“Plug in and play” has long been a reality with Macs. Printers, scanners, wireless peripherals and optical drives are easy and quick to hook up to Macs. Windows XP closed the user-friendliness gap somewhat, but the Intel-based machines’ hardware and configuration clunkiness still haven’t been addressed. The Mac is still slicker. Check out the brevity of the Mac compared with the Windows installation instructions on almost any platform-ambidextrous software or hardware item. For example, Fully 12 pages of my digital camera's 52 page User’s Guide are taken up with instructions for how to install and use the required software for Windows support. With a Mac you can skip the whole thing, and just connect a USB cable.
My LapWorks Optical Scroll Mini Mouse is a straight plug and play proposition on the Mac. As the instruction sheet notes: "For Mac users, the mouse will install with no [on screen] message and will be ready for use in a matter of seconds." For Windows XP users, there is half a page of configuration instructions, and a note that some users might experience slow responsiveness with the mouse that would have to be corrected by "changing the power management setting for your notebook's USB port." Ah, those zany PC-adherents; amazing gluttons for punishment.
But I digress. Loyalty to one or the other platform and OS transcends even these rational considerations. Some of it has to do with familiarity -- ie: which machine you learned on. Macintosh is fighting an uphill battle here, since the overwhelming majority of PCs sold are Windows compatibles.
More than a decade ago, Italian novelist Umberto Eco's (Foucault’s Pendulum; Name of The Rose) decade-old observation, published in a back-page column of La bustina di Minerva in the Italian news weekly Espresso, on September 30, 1994, that the Microsoft/Apple rivalry is “a new underground religious war which is modifying the modern world.” Eco said he was “firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and while Microsoft computers are Protestant. Indeed,” Eco declaimed, “the Macintosh is counter-reformist.... It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach - if not the kingdom of heaven - the moment in which their document is printed,” pointing out that with a Mac you deal with simple formulae and sumptuous icons, and “everyone has a right to salvation.”
On the other hand, Eco argued, the PC is Protestant, "or even Calvinistic,” demanding difficult decisions and interpretations, and taking “for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation.” The PC user “is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.”
Writing in 1994, Eco noted that when the Windows graphical user interface was added to erstwhile command line only DOS, there came a superficial resemblance to the Macintosh’s "counter-reformist tolerance.” Sort of like Anglicanism, said Eco, with “big ceremonies in the cathedral,” but “there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions: When it comes down to it, you can decide to ordain women and gays if you want to." Hmmmm. I'm an Anglican Catholic member of the Traditional Anglican Communion, and we take the "Traditional" part very seriously, but Eco was and is right about contemporary mainstream Anglicanism.
"Naturally, the Catholicism and Protestantism of the two systems have nothing to do with the cultural and religious positions of their users," noted Eco. "And machine code, which lies beneath and decides the destiny of both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that belongs to the Old Testament, and is talmudic and cabalistic. The Jewish lobby, as always...."
Umberto Eco’s only partly tongue-in-cheek theological analysis of the computer wars has stood up well and is still entertaining, capturing a great deal of essential truth. If you still can’t decide which computer “denomination” to join, or if you’re required to have a Windows machine for work but would like to have a Mac for personal and family computing, or if you’d really rather switch to a Mac, but don’t want to orphan your investment in Windows software, you can of course now opt for a Mac anyway and have the best of both worlds. Computer ecumenism!
You can read Umberto Eco's original complete essay here:
http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_mac_vs_pc.html
Charles W. Moore
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