Being agnostic (about technology)

I really do try to keep my bias in check. I use Linux, OS/X and Windows frequently. But, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to say that my personal laptop is a MacBook Pro, and I do love it. I generally feel that the Unix-core operating system is much better for my research than Windows, and I find some of the applications to be hands-down better than what’s available on Windows (particularly, OmniGroup’s products, Keynote, Aperture and Merlin).

But one thing that I always do pounce on is the misconception that Mac hardware is more expensive than PC hardware. It’s just not true. As Popular Mechanics recently reported:

Our biggest surprise, however, was that PCs were not the relative bargains we expected them to be. The Asus M51sr costs the same as a MacBook, while the Gateway One actually costs $300 more than an iMac. That means that for the price of the Gateway, you could buy an iMac, boost its hard drive to match the Gateway’s, purchase a copy of Vista to boot–and still save $100.

And in vindication of my personal computing choice, they added “Leopard OS trounced Vista in all-important tasks such as boot-up, shutdown, and program launch times. We even tested Vista on the Macs using Apple’s platform-switching Boot Camp software–and found that both Apple computers ran Vista faster than our PCs did.”

So what? Well, if nothing else, you can rush right out and buy a sexy new MacBook Pro and install Vista on it. If you just absolutely must.