Well it's that time again. After two short years of faithful service, my mother's Dell laptop failed today. As much as I tried to save it, after attempting to preform a fresh install of Windows it turns out the motherboard failed. Failed as in- shorted? I'm not entirely sure. It's a bad hardware issue, the kind that would cost more to fix than replace the whole computer. This planned obsolescence that I have come to observe in many of these product lines is both bad and good. Bad, because two years ago she walked into a BestBuy and unknowingly bought a low end laptop, and paid money for it (obviously). Good, because whether she had bought the $300 laptop or the $1700 laptop, it probably wouldn't be featuring the latest and the greatest today. Some like to replace their computers quite often, others not as much. For my mother, getting a new machine occasionally is customary.

So we set out to purchase a new computer. A desktop this time. Then.. IT came up. You know, that realization that there are companies other than Dell, HP, Acer, and ASUS that build PC's. There's also one called Apple that builds this "Mac" PC. Or at least to the less tech savvy segment of our population, this may be their understanding of it.

I try my best not to be biased. And I also do my best never to come off as a fanboy of anything. I've used Windows, Mac OS, Linux distros, and other UNIX based operating systems- all for different reasons, and to make sure that I can form my own healthy opinions about all of them. they each have their place, and they're each good at at least something. So today I got that question, "What about getting a Mac?" It was said a bit hesitantly. I've been using Mac OS 10 as my main platform for quite a while now, and I'm happy. I still use virtual machines with windows, and as a matter of fact both my HTPC and home server are windows based. I explained why I use what I use, what I think it's strengths and weaknesses are, and answered the few obvious questions that were bound to come up. In the end, my mother wanted more reassurance than just her son's opinions before purchasing a new computer.

You never know where a person is going to go to get their tech information. To the geek that feels as though they are quite literate, it is often a bit scary thinking about having ones you know receive faulty information. My mother consulted with two good friends. One wasn't quite sure, having used Windows her whole life. The other was a bit more opinionated. She works for a company as a software trainer and had quite openly admitted that she hates Macs. According to what I heard, her company also makes a Mac compatible version of the software. Through personal experience in learning how to deal with Mac customers, she had formed her own opinions about Mac OS. She also herself owns a Mac for the purposes of being literate in both languages. Though I do know she has reasons for her opinions, I unfortunately was not able to find out exactly what these reasons are.

To me hearing the word "hate" when it comes to computers wasn't anything new. It kind of astonished me that this one source so negatively effected my mother's decision. Her end statement was simply that people in business don't use Macs. I cringed at yet another piece of faulty information that was being fed to me. I never said Macs do it better.. I just said , they do it too. She was the one who asked. I could care less what kind of computer my mother uses, as long as she's happy. I configured a custom desktop PC to avoid cheap branded construction, and hopefully we won't run into any issues.

This is not the first time I've run into this form of bias, and I'm sure most geeks notice it all the time. Why someone might choose to over-promote or over-emphasize the superiority of their favorite computing platform is beyond me. However, when someone tries to feed me faulty information, that's often when I'm not able to take it so well. I'm sorry, but if you're trying to tell me that Damn Small Linux (DSL) is better than Windows Xp because it can fit on a 50MB image and boot faster, we've got a problem. Wrong reasons, bad argument. Now this may be a bad example with horrible specific reference, but you get the idea.

What are your thoughts?

Tags: OS, biased, choosing, fanboy, linux, mac, windows

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Comment by gypkap on June 28, 2010 at 3:48pm: I have a Windows Vista system at home, and my wife has a Macbook. The computer lunched her motherboard two months ago after the Mac techs replaced her hard disk.

Good thing: they didn't charge for the motherboard.

Bad thing: why should a bad hard disk kill a motherboard?

Incidentally, there was another guy there with exactly the same problems with his Macbook--dead hard disk, killed motherboard.

Fix was also exactly the same in both cases. Apple needs to look at this...

OS opinions:

I like Vista, and I like Unix, especially AIX. WIndows 7 may change my mind--later.

I'm skeptical about the Mac OS, but the problems may be hardware, not software.

Comment by Richard L. Dawson on June 25, 2010 at 5:03am: I'm currently a data architect and DBA. I've worked with and on a LOT of the computer systems that have been on the market over the past 35 years. I first learned programming on a teletype terminal connected to a DEC mainframe. I learned pascal and cobol on an Apple IIe. I learned machine language on a Commodore 64 and then C++ on an Amiga 1000, and the list goes on.

My point is that things come and go. Over the years it has always made more sense to use what is going to get the job done without consuming too many resources. Traditionally that has not been an Apple or Mac product. Until the last few years the Steve Jobs club has made sure that the hardware was not commoditized to bring down the prices and repair parts are difficult to find and often more expensive (than non-apple parts) when you do find them.

All that said, I don't have any bias against or for a particular platform. They all do the same things to a greater or lesser extent and usually what you can get one of them to do is based more on your personal knowledge of how it works than anything else. Until you get into embedded systems they all do pretty much the same things. One may be prettier or have better graphics, but they all run programs and it is the programs that we use, not the OS alone.

Comment by 0gref on June 25, 2010 at 4:42am: I maintain a Windows Server farm. My work desktop is Windows, my personal laptop is a dual boot Windows/Ubuntu. My wife's laptop is Windows. My PS3 is Linux, and my phone is Android. My e-mail server is Exchange, and my Web Server is Apache.

My point is that there are positives and negatives to every single OS. However you'll notice in my list that I too do not have an Apple. Our advertising department has 2 Mac's connected to our Windows Farm for obvious reasons.

IMO, Apple is great for those that want to play around with art and media, but outside of that I would stick with Windows PC's for the most part. If anything becuase most, if not all, hardware is upgradable and swappable, whereas in my experience with Mac, trying to find replacement parts cost not only the entire contents of your savings account, but also cost in time trying to upgrade the part in the Mac OS. However it's amazing ability to handle high powered graphics, video, and audio make it a hard case to completely hate and therefore dismiss.

I share the loathesome feelings about Mac. It's an all to expensive platform, and exceptionally difficult to maintain in a Windows environment (in my limited experience). Unless you have a reason to purchase a Mac (art, media, etc.), don't... Windows will do you just fine.

On a related note, i'm shocked to hear more and more people complaining about the hardware on their Dell notebooks and desktops. I have purchased nothing but Dell for years now and have had unlimited sucesses... You should have seen my face when I purchased my Dell XPS M1530 with Windows Vista Pro... Happy? Indescribable. Then the shock set in when I installed Windows 7 Pro onto it and watched my base memory consumption drop by nearly 2/3! Then I thought I had died and gone to heaven when I installed Ubuntu for the first time on the laptop and didn't have to configure any hardware at all. Knock on wood, I've had nothing but good experiences with Dell's PC's and Servers.

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