Really. If you want to convince of the virtues of your software or your hardware, let me try it out, give it a spin while you softly outline its virtues somewhere in (distant) background.

Even if you’re brash and self-assured and quite convinced that what you use or what you’ve written is the best thing to happen to computing since the command line interface I’ll listen.

But if you’re an ignorant twat, do the world a favour and shut up. Got that? If you can’t even give me several real selling points for whatever you’re advocating, not only are you making yourself look stupid, but you’re spreading manure over that very thing you’re evangelising.

Mac fanatics are truly guilty of this. Especially neophyte Mac addicts. You know, the ones that decided to drink Job’s Kool-Aid and woke up feeling like they were truly enlightened? You probably know at least one.

The guy, for instance, who told me I should switch over my entire workplace to Mac because - his words, not mine - Macs can now run Windows programs! Oh really? I will try to treat this with grace, but there’s no possible way that it can unless some sort of virtualisation is going on in the background. (Which, as a side note, was exactly the case.)

I understand this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the fact that Apple software and hardware are two different things, but still. Let me spell this out for him. He wants us, a company of 30 or so people, using more than 30 computers to switch to Mac so that I can switch inbetween Windows and OSX in order to - again, his words, not mine - do better email, surfing, and desktop publishing? That’s somewhere in the range of $75,000.00 just to get new hardware and licenses for all those copies of Windows.

And for what benefit? None that I can see. Sure, I like OSX as much as the next guy. I’m that guy in the advert that is all hip, and I get the fact that Mac is cool and Windows is not. But you have to understand that I’m not at work to be hip. I’m at work to do work. If a Macintosh can help me do work better, I’ll consider it. But not until then.

I managed to explain all of this clearly and without raising my voice. Amazing.

Tags: geekery, rants