Slashdot Mirror
Mac Users More Liberal Than Windows Users
adeelarshad82 writes "A recent survey conducted on 400,000 people — in which 52% of respondents were self-described PC (Windows) people, 25% were Mac users and 23% were neither — showed that Mac users are more politically liberal than their PC-using counterparts. 58% of Mac users were 'liberal,' as compared to 38% of PC users. Amongst other things, the survey also indicated that Mac users were, on average, more urban, younger and more educated than PC users, which could potentially be a contributing factor toward being more liberal."
Oh god, conservative vs. liberal with ((mac vs pc) vs linux) on an Easter Sunday.......I'm gonna go steal eggs from kids or something.
Seriously, who the fuck cares?
There is at least one notorious outlier.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Mac User
Older
More conservative than anything you've ever heard on radio or seen elected to office anywhere
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I find these kinds of comparisons between "liberals" and "conservatives" distasteful. For me, what my political leanings might be are about making the world better in the little way that I can as a person who can vote. They're not about sitting around and deciding I am "an X" and comparing my lifestyle etc to "the Ys" in order to find differences, feel that I'm superior, blah blah blah. Would it be too much to ask for "liberals" and "conservatives" to try to focus on finding things had in common and little less trying to find things that different from one another?
What's next, Fox News viewers are more conservative than PBS viewers?
Christ. What a waste of time. A self selecting young, predominantly urban, affluent, middle class, college educated demographic is generally more liberal than the rest of the population? Well, I for one, am shocked.
No, not really. What would be more interesting is in looking at what the distribution for those attitudes looks like. I'd guess Mac users would represent a classic bell curve while PC users would have a much less predictable pattern. But then I wouldn't expect the people who do this kind of "research" have any interest beyond trolling in the first place. No questions about conformity or deference to authority either. That'd be an interesting outcome...
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
But only under the old fashioned proper definition of the word, not the modern one.
Since the term was high-jacked the term "Libertarian" has come up to replace the good version of Liberal.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
That's not surprising at all. Here, am I talking politics or electronics?
"Just spend enough to make it work. What's the most common solution? Let's do that."
"I want to spend as much money as necessary to get what I'm told is the best and shiniest system possible."
Then there are the Linux libertarians: disgusted by the major parties, trying hard (sometimes too hard) not to become cynical about their tiny minority. "Of course it's a viable solution! People will get it someday..."
No. Yes (provided you are only interested in Americans). Don't know.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
OSX's walled garden (good or bad) approach extends far beyond the hip and young crowd. I'm in my early 40s and nearly all my friends are Mac users. This is not due to us being young and hip, rather us being white-collar working professionals with disposable income.
I had suspected for a long time that Windows PC's were easier to use than Macs - now we find out you actually even need a college education and a higher IQ to use one....
lol......
52% Windows users * 38% liberal among PC users=19.76% of sample population are liberal PC users. 25% OSX users * 25% liberal among OSX users=14.5% of sample population are liberal OSX users.
They omitted the Mac Liberals also leaned towards Nazism.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
you're using the question mark sign incorrectly, it's for questions.
Where do you think X-boxes come from, Detroit? There's no such thing as a liberal corporation. Look at the stink MS raised about Washington state taxes. Nor is there any such thing as a patriotic corporation. Their only agenda is more profits. Their Bible is the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition (happy Easter!).
Free Martian Whores!
The "good" old fashioned liberals are today's economic conservatives. No thanks, they've done enough damage to the world. Social democrats are the good liberals these days. Libertarians are just scary in their slavish devotion to market solutions as the be all end all tool for every problem.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
What is this, the Fox News forums?
Sent from my CR-48
It could be that children who grow up in middle, upper-middle, or higher incomes tend to be more materialistic and grow up needing certain premium-priced merchandise in order to conform and be accepted by peers. This leads to adoption of Macs for cool/style factor.
I have owned Macs before because I like the stability, ease of use, and the form factors as well - but for most people it's just a fashion accessory.
urban as in being a city dweller and not a ghetto dweller.
Wrong. Being a balanced individual, who can think for themselves is a good thing. If you are going to be brain dead enough to say I am Liberal or I am Conservative really means that you really didn't spend any time on thinking about the issues and if they fit into your personal philosophy or not. They are things in life that needs to be changed that needs a liberal view to help bring to into play. There are other things in life which are not perfect but are at an optimal or near optimal state and any changes will negatively effect it. You should based your opinion on every issue that comes up and prioritize them in order of importance so when you go to elect an individual you choose the one who stands for most of your highest priority items.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It's working pretty well, the problem is most people don't educate themselves about what's actually being done. They just want to buy into the predominant narrative, because it's more fun to hate on whoever's in the white house.
I wonder what percentage of mac users pay for their own machines. Almost everyone I've ever known with a Mac got it from their parents.Once they have a job and their own money the problem of spending $500 or $1500 on a core i5 laptop comes to light.
I would imagine Mac users are also...
More likely to be stoned on Medical Marijuana because it helps their "Headaches"
More likely to collect welfare and have more babies just to collect more
More likely to ignore debt and keep spending more.
See I can swap it around on you. (I tried to leave out being Gay just because the Mac already has that reputation, and homosexuality really isn't an aspect to liberalism, nor should it be perceived as a negative trait.)
Any Extreme Side can be just as stupid, greedy, lazy and misinformed as the other.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
At least a contract between Ferengi is a contract. We can't say the same for most of the US corporations and the citizens of the US.
Otherwise Western Europe would have more Mac users on average than the U.S...
52% of respondents were self-described PC (Windows) people, 25% were Mac users and 23% were neither
So Linux has a 23% marker share? Is it that year already?
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
I would expect higher incidence of homosexuality among mac users to contribute to this? Possibly in a statistically significant numbers?
If you are so desperate to pull, why don't you post your name, address and a photo?
I love the term "more educated". Without strict definition, it is completely useless. How is it measured?
I have several dozen friends and associates who only have a high-school diploma, but are far "more educated" than many (most) who have masters degrees. They are self-educated, but still have a far larger body of knowledge, and integration of that knowledge.
"more educated", as popularly used, has -zero- to do with intelligence. It has everything to do with opportunity, privilege, and money. Congratulations, wealthy folk are more likely to own Macs. They are also more likely to own a Rolex or drive an over-priced car. Sometimes the things they purchase truly are of higher quality or are inherently better. Sometimes the pricing is solely based on exclusivity and perceived status, and the product is inferior.
BTW, I have a master's degree. I spent 10 years working full-time and self-educating, but needed to "check the box" for employment opportunities later in life. A complete waste of time and money, other than it opened some employment doors.
Liberals love pretentious things. It's because they believe they're better than you, and know better than you. :-P
*flaming mackeral* on my trolling line.
Libya...
You might not call it a war. But I am sure the people we're dropping hundreds of bombs are call it one.
OS X has a walled garden?
OS X is a certified UNIX on which one can install just about any third-party proprietary app (made by, for example, Adobe and Microsoft) as wells as tons of open-source software. Much of the underpinnings of OS X is itself open source.
What precisely do you mean by "walled garden" given these facts? Oh, you were trolling. Never mind, then. Carry on.
blog
Firstly, the sample refers to Hunch users only. This is not a general population sample and should not be applied to the general population. While they failed to spell out the implications of this important bit of context, Hunch did at least disclose prominently that the survey was of Hunch users, unlike PC Mag which seemed to reluctantly mention it once. The Slashdot summary however ignores it completely and thus implies reference to the general population.
Almost a quarter of those who actually responded described themselves as neither PC or Mac. The sample is stratified and the terms "PC user" and "Mac user" no longer exist, you only have the (markedly different) categories of "self-described PC people", "self-described Mac people" and "neither". To their credit TFA not only discloses this, in the header no less, but makes it a theme of the infographic. PC Mag seems to mention it once then forget. The Slashdot summary, however, appears not to have even noticed that there is any distinction:
52% of respondents were self-described PC (Windows) people, 25% were Mac users and 23% were neither
These aren't relevant to each other, it's like a random collection of figures that add to 100% by coincidence. Or... Hmm. Subby appears to be promoting a Pro-Mac bias but perhaps this is really a subtle dig, intentionally implying the terms "Mac users" and "self-described Mac people" are one and the same? Have I had my own humour fail and underestimated the summary?
There's some rather odd statistical presentation. For example "PC people are 33% more likely than Mac people to say that two random people are more different than alike". 33% looks like a big difference, but "more likely" is relative and says nothing about significance: the same figure is arrived at when 8 of the 202k PC people say that and only 3 of the 97k Mac people do (0.000040% is 33% more than 0.000026%). Why have they not simply said the full result, the almost ubiquitous way to present the result of a binary question? Any time you see statistics presented this way alarm bells should ring because it's a great way to grossly over-emphasise trivial things.
Noted that there is no control group, no attempt to compare survey results with statistics of the general population simply in order to gauge reliability. This is despite the generally accepted view that questionnaires are utter horse shit and anyway Hunch isn't exactly a reliable scientific source.
With the Hunch infographic, none of the above matters because the whole thing is presented as slightly tongue-in-cheek entertainment. Unlike PC Mag or the Slashdot summary which appears to take it quite seriously.
Libertarian is a form of right wing extremism, Liberalism is middle-left.
Viewed from continental Europe, the US liberals look exactly like the standard right here. The US Republicans (without the Tea Party loonies) would be considered extreme right in Europe. Even though even the European extreme right takes universal health care for granted.
I'm not sure if there is any party in Europe defending the Libertarian ideology of destroying government (and let mega corporations rule over anything they aren't already).
> It's working pretty well
I guess this is the kind of in-depth understanding of current events that one gets when using the NYT app as an exclusive source of information.
lucm, indeed.
Liberal by which definition? American or European? AFAIK liberal in USA means "socialist" while in the rest of the world liberal means someone who likes freedom.
Once again researchers have a head up their ass by looking for correlations while ignoring causation, and then presenting the correlation in the wrong order. Don't they know that people never see the distinction and assume that the correlation translates to causation as presented? An OS is not going to influence your political views, but your political views may influence your choice of OS. If you are going to imply causation, may as well imply the right one.
It would have been more appropriate to state that of the 308000 people polled, 44% were liberal and 56% were conservative. Of the liberals, 58% used a PC, 42% used a Mac. Of the conservatives, 75% used a PC, 25% used a Mac. A much more informative correlation, don't you think?
I'm with you. In the US removing government power is one of the few ways to remove corporate power. Corporations own the politicians and staff the agencies that regulate the corporations.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Rush Limbaugh is actually a conservative who stayed with Mac through the lean years (1990s). I know because I was forced to listen to him on a daily basis when I worked for one of his affiliates back then. *heh* :)
They surveyed 202 thousand PC users.
They surveyed 97 thousand Mac users.
Of PC users, 109 thousand had completed a four year degree and 93 thousand had not.
Of Mac users, 65 thousand had completed a four year degree and 32 thousand had not.
Conclusion: PC users have more combined education years than Mac users do. PC use is more egalitarian in that it reaches more deeply into the less educated among us.
And what kind of statement is this?
52 percent of Mac people live in a city, while PC people are 18 percent more likely than Mac people to live in the suburbs and 21 percent live in rural areas
My interpretation: 52% of Mac people live in a city, 48% of Mac people live ex-Urbana. PC people have a 52*1.18 = 61% chance of being suburbanites, with a 21% Rural component, leaving only 18% of all PC people living in a city. Put into sample sizes, there were 36 thousand Urban PC users and 50 thousand Urban Mac users. This versus 166 thousand PC users outside the city and 47 thousand Mac users.
While I think the proportional representation of Mac users is consistent with my expectations, I'm very surprised by the HUGE swing in market share from an urban to ex-urban market...surprise supporting a strong degree of skepticism that they've actually interpreted their own data correctly.
It's hyper-sensitive replies like yours that give us Mac users a bad name in the community. I'm not trolling anything, because I'm an avid Mac user and Apple supporter. I prefer the walled-garden approach because it allows stuff to just work and prevents all the headaches associated with the free-for-all mentality of the PC market.
Telling me that OSX allows for any third party apps and open source stuff is kind of like trying to convince the Pope he's catholic.
> Like if you were trying to get away with saying "black people commit more crimes," you might say "urban populations commit more crime." Urban means "lives in the city."
Urban doesn't mean black even then, unless someone doesn't speak English. The formal definition applies.
Urban people commit more crime because of simple math. More people closer together means more opportunities for crime, and a city means more laws.
I agree the statement "black people commit more crimes" is unacceptable, almost as a rule, due to the ambiguity inherent in the sentence. In addition, there is a perceived racism in the statement "black people commit more crimes," bolstered in legitimacy by a combination of factors: (1) black people are arrested disproportionately. For example, NYC spends ~$100M on arrests, largely of young black men, of people with small quantities of pot. However, studies show that white people use pot much more than black people do. (2) People of lower socioeconomic status commit more visible crimes, and they are disproportionately black, so saying black people implicitly creates a tenuous causal connection between "black people" and "crimes" in your statement. (3) On a related vein, "black people commit more crimes" is ambiguous. It could be either an empirical statement about the current state of affairs, or a truism. If the latter, it would be highly problematic for our entire notion of egalitarianism, and would be racist (even if racist with an empirical basis). (4) Even if true as a statement of the past, the statement would still be problematic because people will look to it as justification for racism--when we generalize, we give ammunition to people who hate others based on their affiliation or skin color or religion or political party. (Okay, the latter might be okay if it's the Nazis.)
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Agreed. I tire of the "the market will sort itself out" garbage of the Libertarian movement. The market inherits all the societal inequities around it, thus being a completely unfair market that most certainly will not "sort itself out". It will only perpetuate the inequities of society.
Homosexuality isn't correlated with the liberal/conservative spectrum. The only difference is that liberal homosexuals tend to be open about it. Conservative homosexuals tend to try to hide it from their wives and fellow church-goers.
I am a liberal. Not a democrat, a liberal. I use that as a shorthand proxy for my ideas. If you want to guess how I think about something, it is better than any other proxy word I can use. People want to understand things with ease, and that's a necessary part of our political process, there's just no way every person can understand the complexity of one other person's beliefs, much less millions. Proxy words are a necessity, and there is a limited pool.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I live in rural Arkansas, and you're full of shit.
I can drive down the road to Zinc, which is probably the nastiest, stereotypically hillbilly town you'll ever see. The poorest there live in run-down trailer houses, have three or four vehicles in the front yard in various states of repair, and they all have 30+ inch flatscreens on the wall. They are poor because of the choices they make, not because of lack of opportunity or ability.
Now, go do the same in rural Mexico. You'll see people living in dwelling constructed of native materials, with no electricity, running water, or sanitation. Further, there is near zero opportunity for them to improve their situation, short of move to another area with no financial support.
Seriously suggesting that "poor in America" is equivalent to "poor in Mexico" is so far from reality it's laughable. Try stepping outside your bias sometime, and see the real world for what it is.
Learn about Photography Basics.
Someone who gets it. Government is the seat of coercive power - allowing it to grow unchecked gives companies incentive to develop and wield influence over it.
Learn about Photography Basics.
Socialists want to replace capitalism, not attempt to stabilize it.
Eh, as a socialist, I disagree. I don't mind capitalism.. What bothers me is corporatism. Government is a necessary evil; Walmart is an unnecessary evil.
The "good" old fashioned liberals are today's economic conservatives... Libertarians are just scary in their slavish devotion to market solutions as the be all end all tool for every problem.
A push towards extreme capitalism is not "conservative" and I really wish people would stop applying that term. Moving to tax absurdly less progressive taxes than we had even under Reagan isn't conservative, it's extremist. Literally it is pushing the balance of economics to an extreme not seen since the days of old. Both Libertarians and Republicans (regardless of whether or not one agrees with their economic policies) are advocating for extremist economic policies in relation to historical norms for the last 50 or 100 years. Do not make the mistake of thinking they are pushing the status quo. For the last 20 years the economic balance has been skewing further and further to the extreme end of wealth consolidation.
rather us being white-collar working professionals with with more money than sense.
there fixed it for ya
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
That is a crock of shit. I live in the Ozarks, which with Appalachia, constitute friggin' poor. I've also been in Mexico. Huge difference.
"... centers of non-third-world trailer park dwellers known as "cities"
Never mind. I see you simply see rural as same. Self blinded.
Oddly, even the poorest US citizen has access to food, shelter, and far better health care than you do.
Really?
I make an ok amount, a little over $40k a year. I have a Wife and 2 kids. My wife is a teacher (got her degree in 08), and between the two of us, we weren't doing to badly. She graduated magna cum laude, but after getting laid off due to the economy, she can't find a job anywhere. There are so many teachers out of work subbing, she can only get about 1-3 days a week, making just enough to cover her student loan payments and gas to drive to work.
I get medical through my job (already the least expensive my company can find), my wife and kids had been getting it through hers, that just ran out. To add my wife and kids to my medical is between $900-$1000/month. That is nearly 1/2 of my net take home per month. There is NO WAY I can afford that, so as of right now, my wife and kids have no insurance.
I don't know what dream land you live in. There are a LOT of people worse off than I have it, and things are really bad right now for a lot of us.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I don't know where you're driving around at. I'm from Oklahoma with roots in the Ozarks of Arkansas and most rural people I've seen still have running water, electricity, phone, cable and internet. Not to mention a car (and sometimes more than one but it's usually up on blocks in the yard).
If the patient is diseased you do not kill the patient.
You do not kill the village to save it.
If some entity is too powerful you can't reduce its power by neutering the only challenger strong enough to temper it.
In short, you're swallowing the shit hook, line and sinker. The intention in the past 3 decades has been to corrupt government precisely so you can then say, "Look! Gov is corrupt! You don't want gov! Let us take over!"
The correct response is, "Yes! You corrupted it! Now it's time to remove corrupt elements."
Oddly, you're almost completely wrong.
While the poorest here generally have access to food, health care is available only for immediate emergencies, and will saddle you with enormous debt if you use it. The quality of that tremendously expensive emergency care is variable, and may be worse than anything that you'd get in South America.
Shelter can be completely unavailable, unless you consider the underside of a bridge to be adequate shelter. The shantytowns that the poorest in South America may call home aren't an option here - building codes will result in such a thing being bulldozed in short order.
No. We Europeans understand that there is only one reason for a government to exist: to serve us. And if the government doesn't serve us right, we fire it and elect a new one. We are very vary against institutions we can't fire and elect anew, this is one of the reasons why the EU is often frowned upon - most europeans fear they can't change the EU enough to serve them.
But once we had agreed that the government is our servant, we are ready to trust it with lots of stuff to do for us - because if it doesn't work out as advertised, we will just fire the government and hire another.
Unfortunately, they must be counting Arts degrees as education.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Telling me that OSX allows for any third party apps and open source stuff is kind of like trying to convince the Pope he's catholic.
If you know that, why do you keep calling it a walled garden? iOS is a walled garden. Game consoles are walled gardens. Macs and other traditional PCs are not walled gardens because they allow "for any third party apps and open source stuff", though there are indications that they may be heading that direction in the future (e.g. Mac App Store, Windows App Store, DRM, "trusted computing", current mobile OS trends, etc.).
I'm not comparing poverty in a developed country with poverty in undeveloped countries. I distinctly said other western developed countries. The lowest tier of rural America is no better off than the the rest of the developed hemispheres. And like I said, this is extra sad, because it is mostly by choice.
I've lived in Tunisa, Yemen, and Egypt. If you think Mexico is on par with these countries, you haven't seen much of the world.
I've also lived in England and Germany, whose bottom tier are far better of than America (again, mostly by choice).