Not the way I read that, Bart - to me, he's simply saying that it's natural for him to be exclusively on a PC rather than a Mac. I didn't get that his phraseology implied anything else - other than that his choice was natural for him. Gee, is your Mac evangelism showing?
Nope - no Mac evangelism showing here - just anti-monopoly evangelism. I really don't care what OS people choose to use, just as long as they realise they actually do have a choice. And it's not just a choice between Windows and Mac, those are in a way very similar choices, both commercial software, people also have the choice to go free and open source. If all you do is surf the web, read email, and watch porn, there's no earthly reason to give either company your money - just get Ubuntu Linux and off you go!
For the record, both types of computers and OS have their strong points and limitations. If I have to do audio or video editing (a side gig that I sometimes do) it has to be on a Mac (used to use a Sun Sparc workstation running Solaris). PC's just don't cut it for real pro work in that line. However, for statistical number crunching, a PC stands head and shoulders above Macs for the various software written specifically for those jobs, and native to the PC.
Both? That's not a fair representation of people's choice either - though I grant you that Open Solaris hasn't been the hit Sun wanted it to be - and now even Sun themselves are gone
Anyhow - your points about software defining the reason to choose one platform over the other were once very true, but are now mostly, though not completely irrelevant. If you're into pro photo of video or audio you can use either of the commercial OSes. Adobe's pro-suite of apps is cross platform. You can argue that if you go Mac as a pro you double your options, on Windows it's mostly Adobe or bust, while on Mac you can choose between the Adobe suite and Apple's pro apps, but you can be a video pro or a graphics pro or a photo pro on a PC without it being a crippling inconvenience. The same is also true the other way. When it comes to stats SPSS is king, and it will run on Linux as well as Mac, so you have even more choices there than in the creative sphere! Office 11 was released for PC and Mac at the same time with the same features - so that's no different.
In short - it used to be true that software forced you to choose an OS - very much a case of the tail wagging the dog IMO, those days are thankfully history. You can choose your OS based on your preferences, and then get the software you need to get what ever you need to do done!
It was also true in the past that Apple machines were somewhat under powered with their PPC chips, but since Apple made the switch to Intel over 5 years ago, there is no hardware difference at all. Windows, Linux, Mac, heck, even Solaris, all run on Intel architectures now.
Finally - now that so much of our software is web-based, you have even more choice in which OS to use. It really doesn't matter what you use for so many things now, as long as it has a browser!
In short - we've never been this free, and it saddens me to see people ignore that freedom and continue to slavishly fork over cash to Microsoft without even thinking about whether or not they're happy with what that money buys them.
Bart.
