OK, I need to make a confession. I have a dark secret that many clients don’t know about.
I use a PC.
There, I said it. It’s off my chest.
In fact, I’m not the only person at Wholegrain that doesn’t use a Mac. Some do, some don’t. Some use Windows, some use Linux, and some use Apple OS.
But why am I making this confession? A few years ago, there were a mixture people in the creative and technology sectors using different platforms. Apple, being a single manufacturer platform with a narrower range of software naturally had a much smaller share of the market but it was popular with arty creative types that loved the clean design. Different people had their preferences, and that was just fine. But things have changed in recent years. Apple products have come to dominate our sector, aswell as the general consumer market. They have taken over the market to the point that people have lost perspective of the fact that there are a range of options, all with their pro’s and con’s.
I recently went to a developer event where one of the speakers asked for a show of hands of who used Mac and who used a PC. Most people used Apple. When a few people (including me) put their hands up to say that they used a PC, there were sniggers throughout the room and the speaker implied that anyone not using a Mac was out of date and somehow unprofessional.
This is the crux of my issue. It is a positive thing that we have choices and that we respect those choices. But the Apple community has gone beyond a user group and become a cult. A cult that openly patronises people from outside of their community, that worship the brand in retail temples and that preach with religious fervour. The Apple community have become blinded by marketing and it has gone too far.
There are many good reasons to use an Apple product, but there are also many good reasons NOT to use Apple products. Here are just a few reasons from our agency:
- As an agency, we need to have a variety of devices for testing, so it isn’t healthy to all use the same platform
- We believe in freedom of choice, and all of our team members use the platform of their choice
- Apple is a brand, not a technology. There are other products on the market that perform just as well or better
- We believe in open source, and Apple are the pioneers of the closed product eco-system – exactly the opposite of open source
- Until very recently, Apple had a terrible environmental and human rights record
- Apple products are very very expensive. From a commercial perspective, it rarely makes financial sense to pay 2-3 times the price for a machine with the same performance, even if it does look pretty
- There is a wider range of software available for PC than Mac
In my opinion, if you want to be evangelical about something then it should be Linux, but we all have our individual reasons for choosing our preferred platform.
I use a PC, and that’s OK.
