I’m not a Mac user because I live in the inner city, grow lima beans on my balcony and hang vintage bicycles on my living room wall as post-modern installation art. I’m a Mac user because that’s who I want to be.
I straddle two worlds in that I was born into a PC dynasty and was using Microsoft DOS from the age of four and learning behaviours such as not wearing pants and sleeping in until midday.
Trying to escape the orbit of the traditional personal computer (that is, not a Mac) is not as simple as purchasing a Mac. You don’t become a computer turncoat because you feel like it, you do it because you begin to redefine your lifestyle. My epiphany came the first morning I realised I absolutely abhorred Pop-Tarts but was developing an affinity for bran.*
And this is the basic premise of the ongoing war between Mac and PC. It’s the second greatest ideological battle of our time, beaten only by the struggle between cat and dog owners as they compete for the funniest captioned pictures on the Internet. So far, the cats have it by a whisker.
This isn’t just mumbo jumbo necessarily. There is a genuine lifestyle divide between the two computer camps. A non-scientific (but still 2000 user strong) survey from Hunch confirmed the following existing stereotypes:
58% of Mac users are liberal, compared to 36% of PC users.
13% more of Mac users have completed a four-year college degree.
PC users want to fit in, Mac users want to appear to be ‘unique’.
PC users dress casually, Mac users describe their style as ‘upmarket, chic and design influenced’.
Mac users are 80% more likely than PC users to be vegetarian.
Mac users are more likely to be early adopters, PC users are 38% more likely to be late adopters (of tech).