Them Ads

They have been bothering me for ages: the tit for tat adverts, purporting to show how cool are users of Macs (read OS X) as opposed to PC (read Windows) users.Or how down to earth non-geeky are PC (read Windows) users as opposed to Mac (read OS X) users.

I watch them when they come on TV, and I'm thinking - what utter tosh.Honestly. As if there's that much of a difference between them. Because, in this context, what does PC mean? No, not Politically Correct. The term PC, at its beginnings, was an abbreviation for - Personal Computer. And, what, at the end of the day, is a Mac? Yup, a personal computer. No more, no less. It's not an exalted piece of mystical machinery given to us by the gods - even though some might regard Steve Jobs as belonging among them - it's a machine, which since Apple moved to the Intel platform, shares exactly the same components as your most humble, cheap, own label supermarket brand PC. The difference is in the packaging - the case - and the perceived image, which in the Apple Macs case is down to very very clever PR. But otherwise, it's in the OS - Operating System - Mac OS X, Windows or Linux. But, seeing as the basic machine components are the same, there's no reason why if an OS runs on one machine, it shouldn't be able to run on any other - unless it is artificially prevented from doing so.

But of that, another time.