Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Penny Arcade Switchers?

Wow, today's Penny Arcade strip is all about emergent stealth cool from Apple. Could it be that Apple mindshare is starting to turn a corner?

In Tycho's companion blog entry, he talks about possibly, finally, integrating the Mac into his lifestyle, and wonders if you can "love" your OS. Apparently the reasons for not switching are dwindling for him, as I suspect they are for many other people who now understand the benefits of the Mac approach to design, having held an iPod in their hands.

I've been using Macs exclusively for, what, a decade? I don't know if I "love" the Mac OS, but I do know that I feel like I'm drowning whenever I have to sit in front of a PC (say, to figure out why the fuck a standards-compliant web form works on every other browser on the planet except for IE/Windows). It's a distinctly unpleasant experience, always the low point of the day. Windows feels...gutteral, off-balance. Anti-zen.

The only thing I've ever had to marginalize by using a Mac is gaming. Ironically, Microsoft's moves to advance console gaming might wind up giving Apple a market share bump. After all, if you have a console for gaming, the relative lack of games on the Mac is irrelevant. Once that's out of the way, there's really no reason to continue using Windows, is there?

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