Slashdot Mirror
Apples Are For Grannies?
RoboJock writes "So much for Justin Long — the young, hip 'n' trendy face of the Apple Mac (as seen in the 'Mac vs. PC' ads) is even further removed from the average Mac owner than everyone suspected... By three or four decades. According to research discussed at Silicon.com, 'nearly half of Mac owners are 55 and older — that's almost double the share for average home-PC users.' It seems the young guns don't have the extra cash to stump up for smooth shiny aesthetics." From the article: "For the digital youth, high-street box shifter Gateway is the brand of choice, taking the number-one slot among PC buyers aged between 18 and 25. Dan Ness, principal at MetaFacts, said in a statement: 'Apple can claim long-time loyalists but its future among the young technoliterati is an interesting dynamic.'"
Well I think the same can be said of something like the VW Beetle. When the new Beetle debuted in the late 90s, it was being pushed as the trendy hip-mobile for young urbanites. But when you actually looked at who owned and drove these things, it was the 45-55 crowd. Hell my own mom (in her 60s) wanted one because it reminded her of her 20s when she wanted the original VW Beetle. I think this is laregly planned on the part of these companies. Just like the Mustang is all the rage now with the 45-55 male set. It reminds them of when they were 18 and they used to lust after the original Mustangs.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I find it's both. It's shiny and pretty, and when you know how to use it it's insanely functional. There are all kinds of key commands that make productivity on OS X far surpass that on XP (for me). There's system wide automatic spellchecking, good window management, and I've yet to mention how wonderful Spotlight is.
Like any OS you're going to have to learn it to get use out of it. If you don't put in the time you're not going to get the result.
As for the digging around in your OS, I've found OS X to be _much_ better than XP. Let's see, I can use bash, or I can use a shell that isn't as useful as the one that came with OS/2. Once again it takes some time to learn the OS X conventions, where files are, what you can change without breaking things horribly, etc. And I'll be the first to admit that Linux is (generally) more hackable. XP fanboys go ahead and flame me, but I think I am right here.