D_Fresh's Journal: Encountering Apple bigotry

Yesterday I had a job interview, and my interviewer said something that bugged me. She made a remark to the effect of, "Yes, some people insist on using Macs here, they have this religious devotion to them that I think is incredibly silly." Now, I can understand where evangelism rubs people the wrong way (and I try to keep my rhetoric to a dull roar in crowds of questionable "loyalty"), but her closed-mindedness was very irritating. She's clearly never used a Mac on a regular basis, so she's probably unaware that different OS's can affect a person's productivity and satisfaction more than a little. I'm never going to claim that a Mac is the solution for everyone, but if more people tried them out I think they'd realize that they've been struggling with their Windows machine a lot more than is necessary. I kept emphasizing at this interview that the computers shouldn't be the focal point of education - they should fade into the background and become appliances, like plumbing or electricity. I think IT types tend to enshrine the computers and make the technology central, because to them it is - but to the rest of the organization, especially in education, it's definitely not.

The good news was I found another person there, fairly high-profile, who is also a Mac fan. I think he could be a valuable ally if I get this position, because I definitely intend to introduce Macs as much as possible to those who show the willingness to switch. Heck, with Virtual PC they could be using all their old apps while still enjoying the stability and usability of OS X 10.2 - and if others see how easy the Mac experience is, and how the computers "just work," they might start asking for Macs as well. It's just a dream, but it's more likely to work in education than anywhere else, no?

I think that my wife is going to enjoy the new G4 because it will be so much zippier than the G3 we have now. In the past she's really objected when I switched to OS X on the G3, and I can't blame her - it's dog-slow on this CPU, and the stability gains do not outweigh the frustration of waiting several seconds for Finder operations to complete or windows to resize. I'm a bit concerned by the barefeats speed test that showed no speed improvements for the new dual-proc DDR boxen over the old dual-GHz models, and I'm hoping that somehow their benchmarks were skewed. If they weren't, I guess I still got dual processors for under $2500, which was impossible before, and OS X 10.2 for no additional charge. *Sigh*