Bloggers have a weird obsession with Apple Macs

Another of my blogging buddies has succumbed and bought a Mac, this time an iMac rather than a MacBook, but still a Mac. Her reasons for buying it are exceptionally familiar to me:

I need it for video and photo stuff. My PC wasn’t cutting it.

I used to belong to a Facebook group for British bloggers (and similarly one for British parent bloggers), and one of the things that constantly came up was recommendations for new laptops or computers. You could have a mental count of ten before bloggers began posting things like:

You must get a Mac! They are so good for blogging !

or

If you’re doing video or photo editing, a Mac is a must!

That is the power of brand awareness/loyalty right there because there is absolutely nothing I can think of that supports that viewpoint. Maybe 20 years ago there might have been something in it as far as video and photo editing went. I remember sitting in a computer lab at Lancaster Uni in 1996 playing with Photoshop on a little boxy Mac because there wasn’t much available to do the same on a Windows PC. But that simply isn’t the case here and now in 2016.

The problem is, Apple only sells about 4m Macs a quarter, against a (declining) 64m Windows PCs in a comparable quarter. As a software developer, it’s not rocket science to see that developing for both platforms or just Windows makes more sense.

Chucking all you Apples in the Mac camp makes even less sense since they switched from IBM PowerPC CPUs to Intel x86- this basically means that Macs are just fancy OEM PCs that can run Windows if you want them to and conversely you can build yourself a Hackintosh out of PC parts and install Mac OS if you really want to.

Just to make sure I’m not missing out on anything, I googled, “What can you do on a Mac that you can’t do on a PC?” Unsurprisingly video and photo editing didn’t appear on the top result from MacWorld- a long standing Mac site that you would expect to blow the Macs trumpet keenly. The top 20 things list they came up with for things that are easy on a Mac but trickier on a Windows PC was full of slightly odd stuff like:

  • Installing software is easy on a Mac
  • Removing software is easy on a Mac
  • Getting online is easy on a Mac

None of which I’ve ever found tricky on a Windows PC.

Many people shout about the apparent reliability and build quality of Macs, without seeming to realise that there have been multiple instances of hardware issues that Apple have failed to acknowledge or been tardy dealing with. You’re not getting something that is appreciably better than a top end ASUS Zenbook or a Lenovo, or a lot of other top end manufacturers for that matter.

This isn’t simply a case of not using a Mac so not appreciating the benefits of a Mac. We’ve got an i5 based Mac Book I won in a competition a couple of years ago. It’s a solid brick of a machine that worked pretty well when I doubled the RAM in it (via crucial.com/uk rather than the horrendous upgrade price Apple would have charged) but nothing we do on it can’t be done on the Windows machine better. In fact, if I want to edit video in iMovie, I actually have to fiddle with the settings on my camcorder so it outputs a file type that works with iMovie. Hardly friendly, and I think I’ll stick with Premier Elements thanks!

 

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