A new marketing study has found Mac owners tend to think they’re more extraordinary than the average Joe. They’re also more likely than PC users to whiten their teeth, drive hybrids, drink Starbucks coffee and eat organic food. Andrea Gardner reports.
Story at Marketplace on American Public Media.
Unskilled and Unaware
Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.
I generally build my own computers, but I have owned Apple computers. I don’t whiten my teeth because I brush and floss regularly, I don’t drive a hybrid because the ROI is not there. I think Starbucks is overpriced, and all food is organic by definition ( I think they mean pesticide free, or perhaps chemical free which is complete nonsese as nothing is chemical free).
If they want to pay too much for a computer, toothpaste, cars, coffee and apples then perhaps they are too stupid to know that they are paying too much.
The Better Driver Syndrome
This reminds me of something I call the “Better Driver Syndrome.” I don’t remember the exact numbers but it goes something like this:
90% of the people think they’re better than average drivers.
It kind of bounces off effete Mac users who think they’re better than PC users. Which is fine. No matter what we do there will always be something for those who have to lord over those who have not.
Me, I’d love to buy a Mac, but for the price of a standard MacBook I can get myself a really rockin’ Vista laptop or build myself a desktop PC that’d be damn near a dream machine. Macs are pretty, useful, and the OS seems pretty tight. But dammit, I’m not paying that kind of premium for it.
Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes. Tycho (Jerry Holkins) @ Penny Arcade
Mac users are cooler
Ah the jealous. Join the cool kids and get a Mac.
what’s the point
of whitening your teeth and drinking Starbucks? they’re going to get stained anyway…
This is unintentionally hilarious
How was I to know this would come up after the interview I recorded last night for the next episode of LISTen?
I have been the owner of PCs and Macs. I have also been root on a SPARCStation. Does this mean I solely use Macs? Nope. I sit at a PC as I type this because my Mac has fits trying to log into UStream.TV. If I could get another SPARCStation I would probably have that beast up and running as quickly as possible.
Why do I own a MacBook? For me it is as close as I can get these days to running a SPARCStation Voyager which went “end of support” in the middle of my sophomore year of college. As Sun is not producing any new SPARCStations right now having a Mac is as close as I can get to having a UNIX box to play with that I am not necessarily worrying about the hardware for.
When we record the podcast and take calls via Skype we are mostly using government surplus hardware that runs Windows. Nothing here really goes past Windows 2000 as that is far more stable for our purposes than Windows Vista might ever eventually be. The Mac is used in this instance mostly for doing the mix-down and for putting together sound beds for use.
Now, for video editing I find it easier to work with the tools on a Mac instead of a PC. The tools required also do not have the same financial costs let alone aggravation costs. As long as I can find a good compositor, we might actually be able to eventually do some green screen work. The big thing holding us back is that I most certainly do not have the money to back having LISTen become a video enterprise.
And as for the often heard complaint about Safari crashing and the like, who has forgotten “kill -9”? All Aqua happens to be is just one more window manager for a rootless X11, really. I miss Common Desktop Environment from Solaris 7 somedays…
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Stephen Kellat, Host, LISTen
Manufactured debate
“Taste’s great!” v: “Less filling!” It’s all bullshit. Computers are tools. You use the right tool for the right job. If you can’t, because of resource constraints, then you make do with what you’ve got.
There is nothing that cannot be found offensive by someone, somewhere.
Another reflection on such things
See:
http://www.rndforge.com/index.php?view=article&catid=25:rndforge-blog&id=52:mac-hardware-a-requirement-for-tech-bloggers&format=pdf
I found that interesting yet related.
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Stephen Kellat, Host, LISTen