My son likes getting under the hood of his car, tweaking and tinkering. I like getting under the hood of my computer and tinkering. Just as my son likes to push the performance of his machine, I like pushing the performance of mine.
Occasionally, my son will bump up against the limits of his knowledge, so he’ll come into the house, sit down at the dining room table, boot up the spare laptop, and start googling around. Depending on the size of the problem, or what piece of machinery he’s working on, he can be engaged for hours. Sometimes, he pulls out his phone and starts calling friends with expertise. Not once in all the years he has been working on cars has anyone told him to get a Ford/Chevy/Dodge/Toyota, or etc.
I also will occasionally bump into some esoteric little quirk of high-tech behavior that I have never seen before. If I can’t find an answer on Google, sometimes I ask on Facebook. I have over 4300 “friends” on Facebook, many of them are wizards. Some are not. Inevitably, one of the non-wizards will say, “You wouldn’t have this problem if you had a Mac.” And just as inevitably, I will unfriend that person. It’s not like I don’t warn them ahead of time—but they say it anyway. It’s the cyberspace version of Tourette Syndrome.
Actually, they're right. If I had a Mac, I wouldn't be having that problem—but I also wouldn't be running a state-of-the-art machine either. Inside my custom case lurks a Sandy Bridge motherboard, an i7-2600K running at 3.40ghz, 16gb of RAM, a 240gb SSD for the OS, and 6TB of onboard storage—so when I'm trying to change a tire on my Ferrari, I don't want to be told I'd be better off with a Lexus. I wouldn't. The Lexus is very pretty. It’ll get you to the grocery store and the movie theater and the mall. But it won’t get you the other guy’s pink slip at the track.
100 years ago, and if someone driving a horseless carriage had to stop to change a tire, passersby would yell "get a horse." The "get a Mac" remark is the 21st century equivalent. It’s thoughtless. It’s stupid. It’s rude. It’s what falls out of the mouth of someone who has nothing useful to say, but has to say something anyway.
The remark doesn’t address the problem I'm trying to solve—it simply asserts that I’ve been wrong in all my choices. It’s no different than a bible-thumper insisting that I’m going to Hell unless I accept Jesus as my savior. The remark is an arrogant assertion that my years of expertise in the x86 architecture has been wasted, and that my decades of investment in high-end hardware and software is immediately inferior to an overpriced and underpowered exercise in style that offers me significantly fewer options, almost no opportunities to get under the hood to tinker, and a much smaller menu of available games and applications.
I don’t want to join iCult. I see no advantage in living in a "walled garden" controlled by a corporation that has proven itself more interested in serving its own needs than mine.
Friends don’t tell friends to get a Mac. So if you tell me that, I will unfriend you. Honest. (Unless you’re a redhead who owns a chocolate store. But that’s the only exception.)