Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Reason #1,739 to love Macs

The recent release of the new Windows OS "Vista" and subsequent reviews like this: "Compared with Mac OS X 10.4, Windows Vista feels clunky and not very intuitive, almost as though it's still based on DOS (or at least the internal logic that made up DOS)" has revived the PC vs. Mac debate. (Of course we Mac freaks know there's no contest, but we indulge them.) In the PC vs. Mac spirit, Daily Kos has an interesting discussion about the political persuasion of PC users vs Mac users: Do conservatives/liberals tend to use PCs or Macs?

Apart from the dominance of PCs in raw numbers, Macs represent about 5% of the computer market. Comparing visits to a conservative website to similar stats from a liberal website reveals that as a percentage liberals are far more likely to use Macs:

"When it comes to visitors to Instapundit, OS X visitors make up only 2-3%, suggesting that conservatives are less likely to go for the Apple brand than the general public. On the other hand, Daily Kos statistics show that between 15% and 25% of visitors to this site are using Macs -- an astounding 5x times the general population of these computers. If you were at YearlyKos last time around, you could spot more Macs at breakfast than you'd find in an Apple store."

The article goes on to suggest some possible reasons for this phenomenon, as do the ensuing 700+ comments following the post. It's an ideological struggle, I tell ya, it's a struggle between good and it's a struggle between evil.