Passion of the Mac

One of my coworkers came in to my office yesterday to discuss their experience at the Apple Store, it was a good experience, but they noticed that the store itself was crowded, while the Sony Style store next door was empty. That the Apple Store was open and bright and white, while the Sony Style store was dark and closed up. He was surprised at the number of people there. I explained to him that Apple has a religious following and that the Apple Stores are the churches for the faithful. There are a few Cathedrals, Paris, New York, California where people flock to, and there's Mecca (AKA 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA).

I'm surprised at how passionate Mac fans are, if you looked at my desktop you'd think I was a Mac fan also, I have a Macbook Pro, iPhone, iPad, Time Capsule, several iPods, etc... Now while I like my Apple products, I feel that there's a lot of improvement that can be made to then, they aren't as perfect as everyone thinks they are and to work in a seamless fashion, it helps to have everything in your local swimming hole being an Apple product also. For instance, using my network drives (running NTFS) to back up my Mac to, can't be done (this should just work). I've heard the religious faithful bash other products saying that they weren't as modern as OSX (well OSX is based on Unix, which is VERY old itself). The passion of the Mac keeps people from questioning the products, people just accept that the design flaws in the iPhone 4 are OK and that they need to use their phones differently. That when they hear Steve Jobs tear into Google, that Google somehow deserves it (Personally I'm no Google fan, but since they offer free products, it's hard to pass up, which is why I'm using Blogger, a Google product). They need to question Jobs, push him some, force him to deliver quality products and let him know when he doesn't (Apple will be in trouble if ANYTHING happens to Jobs).

If I had to choose between a Windows 7 or OSX laptop, which would I pick? I'd say it depends on my job function. Right now I'm in the mobile space, since Apple requires you to have a Mac to build iPhone apps, I'm sporting a Mac. If I got back into pure web development, I might go back to Windows (mainly for the added support I'd get at work, not that I need it, I've been taking computers apart for over 20 years now, so I'm pretty adept at supporting myself). Computers are put here for us, the companies deliver to us, it's up to us not to become zealots for these companies, but push them and move to other applications based on quality, not name.