This guy I work with has just got another job working at a new Apple store that is about to open on Southampton very soon. He is currently being trained ready to work in the store.
This evening he mentioned how great the Mac is, and so I replied saying they were rubbish. You should have seen the horror on his face that someone was putting down the beloved Mac.
The funny thing was that everything he them went on to add into the argument was complete rubbish. I stated the fact that all Intel Macs are basically now just Apple designed PCs running OS X instead of Windows. He wouldn't accept that and tried to argue some strange idea he had that Apple have been using Intel chips for 7 years When challenged about this he then retracted it slightly by saying they had been developing Intel systems for 7 years. Something I find hard to believe.
He also was under the illusion that Windows is rubbish and he would never touch it because you would get a virus within minutes of connecting to the internet. I enjoyed pointing out that the lack of virii on the Mac was due to it being a platform of limited importance globally and so the hackers and virus creators were not interested in wasting their time with it.
I then challenged him over the availability of games on the Mac. He had some strange idea that all the best games were released on the Mac soon after the PC. I seriously think this guy hasn't actually seen the PC market and is just being fed this from his Apple training. I went on to point out that less than 1% of games released on the PC ever got ported to the Mac. He replied by saying, who would want to play all the crap games on the PC such as puzzle games anyway. Again no idea what he was talking about.
Next I mentioned emulation just to see if he would be truly stumped. He did reply saying he had "a great SNES emulator for his Mac which played all the great games." What about emulators for all the other platforms? I asked. His reply was yeah, you can get those too... (no clue).
He then added the iPod element to the argument, which I quickly pointed out wasn't actually anything to do with the Mac, but was a completely separate consumer electronics device made by Apple that interfaced with a Mac for data transfer, nothing more. I also pointed out how restricted it was as standard, only allowing the user access via Apple's own iTunes which was also rubbish. Plus songs downloaded from Apple could not be played on any other device. Something he didn't seem to realise or understand.
He then finished the argument by mentioning the Windows Vista is a load of rubbish and that OS X 10.5 is far superior. Umm... he obviously hasn't actually seen Vista running properly has he.
Mac fans. Why? Personally I think they are just scared of the unknown and want to remain in the kid gloves environment called OS X.
This "conversation" proved one thing. If this guy is an average Mac fan you can see what the problem is.