Mac vs Windows, no Real Difference?

If you’re a Mac fan you probably think that the Mac is superior to any other available platform. It could be successfully argued that many people arrive at this fact a priori, for them the Mac simply is better, to argue about something as completely obvious as that truism would be akin to positing the sun rises in the North and sets in the West. In short, for the Mac fans whose blood runs bondi-blue Mac superiority just is. In essence, for many people, the Mac’s superiority is taken on faith.

As faith driven as their opinion might be that won’t stop them from arguing with great zeal that the Mac is demonstrably (and thusly factually) better than the Windows platform. The platform wars may long be over (or never truly begun) but history provides no impediment to those with an Apple tilt from finding seemingly valid reasons to declare the Mac victorious in a mental Mac-v-Windows showdown. The rub comes when the arguments are carefully examined. While many of them are wrapped in truthful observations the arguments, in general, are of dubious value.

The most persuasive argument currently making the rounds is the issue of security. People will happily note that if you take a Mac running any Mac OS and an unpatched Windows system and connect them both to the wonder that is the world wide web the Windows machine will be compromised in moments while the Macintosh will sit there unperturbed. This is undoubtedly true, hooking up an unpatched Windows box to the ‘net and hoping your computer doesn’t get turned into an email zombie is a lot like rolling around in a great big pile of medical waste, picking the needles out of your skin and thinking you won’t start running a fever in a few days. Currently that might be an unfair comparison, Windows has come a long way since the introduction of XP and with the release of Tiger the Mac has taken a step back. At this point hooking up a fully patched PC to the ‘net is not the exercise in unsafe computing it once was and until Apple fixes the widget fiasco it is getting more difficult to maintain this point of veiw.

Mac fans, at this point, will argue that Macs are much easier to use. Which is probably true. From personal experience it is my fervent belief that from the box to the ‘net happens much faster on a Mac. Of course even supposing that is true (take anecdotal evidence for what it is worth) this is a one-time investment in frustration. If a PC takes a day to set up and the Mac takes an hour over the lifetime of the computer the difference isn’t very great. The argument becomes more questionable in terms of general use. Computers at this point have become so complex that some amount of training is required to use any of them. To illustrate: Suppose you had spent the last 20 years in the jungles of Hawaii looking for the Tiki god Greg lost when the Bradys took on Hawaii. Upon emerging from the jungle if you were presented with both a Windows machine and a Macintosh you wouldn’t know how to do much on either. Why, for example, would you click on “Start” when the machine is obviously on? How could you, with your musky jungle smell, possibly divine that a compass looking thing is really a way to access a vast amount of information? In the end it is easily shown that “ease of use” is less about the machine being easy to use and more about the machine responding in an expected manner. Obviously the more you know about your computer the more it acts like you expect it to because your knowledge has shaped your expectations. With that in mind it is easy to conclude that the Windows platform is actually easier to use than the Mac for the majority of people. The reasoning yielding the aforementioned conclusion is easily explained: Since there is no small amount of learning involved with either platform the more exposed platform will, all other things being equal, be easier to use to the majority of people because they have been trained with the more common platform.

Which bring us to aesthetics. Looks are, strictly speaking, not an integral part of the computing experience. Generally you look at the monitor instead of being constantly bedazzled by the deft styling of the box. Imagine your computer as a hammer, would a brushed aluminum hammer pound nails any more efficiently than a similarly sized and weighted beige hammer? Ask your local contractor if you’re stumped. The point being that aesthetic consideration are important if you’re trying to achieve a certain look but most folks are more than willing to trade a bad looking modular computer for compatibility with programs lifted from the workplace. It is also worth remembering that aesthetics are completely subjective, there is no caliper that measures aesthetic value and no conversion chart to subsequently monetize any discrepancy.

So there are your top three arguments, there are plenty of others. TCO (total cost of ownership), resale value, the list continues ad infinitum. Of course as the arguments get more obscure the objections become more easily made. In short all the stated reasons one can think of can be easily argued against or dismissed as irrelevant to the majority of computer users. So we are left with one inevitable conclusion: the majority of folks are right, the Mac is just a less supported Windows machine. Right?

Well, not quite. The Mac is better than a PC and better in just about every possible way. The exercise above illustrates not the sameness of the platform but rather the difficulty of quantifying the advantages of the Mac. On the surface this seems absurd, several hundred words have been employed with the express intent of painting the computing platforms as at least similar in most aspects, how can one espouse such a position and then dismiss said position with such ease? It does seem to be an example of willful ignorance but I ask you to consider two paintings. First I ask you take a long hard look at this painting (it’s no Chelvis but it will do) and compare it to this work of art. Now both paintings are merely oil on canvas (or velvet), both paintings are accessed in the same manner (by viewing) and both works would make an interesting statement hanging over your fireplace (respectively: you’re tasteless and you’re famously wealthy). Objectively one would be hard pressed to find any real difference in the paintings but only the most obstinate among us would maintain that the velvet-based painting reached the level of art or that the oil canvas work was little more than naked pandering.

And that is why the Mac is better. It may be difficult to objectively quantify the Mac superiority yet it exists. The great stuff about the Mac is in the small things, the brushstrokes as it were. These are the things most Mac users know. When you go to Panera Bread and don’t have to reconfigure your wireless settings that is a brushstroke. When you find yourself watching a television ad pushing internet service that comes bundled with virus blocking software and smirking that is a brushstroke. When the dock pops up with a mouse over that is a brushstroke. When you press CTRL-ALT-DELETE to login that is the sound of velvet stretching. And that is what makes the Mac so great and simultaneously makes the Mac’s superiority so difficult to convey, it is not any one thing, it the summation of the multitude of individual touches that elevates the Mac above the competition.