Bugger. Was going to go to bed, but got embroiled in a discussion on Twitter with a Mac owner, which compelled me to write something here. I generally don't like generalisations (see what I did there?), but that said, Macs suck, and their owners are, without exception, self-righteous wankers.

I jest, of course. Well, 98% jesting. To be fair the discussion we had was relatively civil, but I found myself bemoaning the 140 character limit for making it hard to get my point across, or rather shoot down the erroneous points she made. I don't want to weigh up the benefits of each system directly, as my main point is that both have advantages and disadvantages. The problem is that whereas the average PC owner accepts that, Mac owners tend to seem somewhat blinkered. Or perhaps just more novices use Macs - that would be an interesting statistic to have actually - probably exists somewhere. If someone's only ever used one system they may be more predisposed to assume its superiority, and be less-informed about the capabilities of the alternatives.

Short version is I said that PCs are far easier to upgrade and have far more gaming options - not a universal argument, but two things which matter a lot to me, hence one of the reasons I prefer PCs. She came back with arguments like "well, you can upgrade the RAM", and "Macs have just as many games - they play better, with full screen graphics".

Upgrading RAM's all well and good, but you can completely disassemble PCs and replace any bit of them, or build them from scratch. Absolutely not a big selling point for a lot of people, but it's a categorical difference. And re gaming on the Mac, that's just a horrifically uninformed argument - while games of course exist for the Mac, including quite a few new ones, the PC has huge numbers more - always has, probably always will. That's just a fact - wander into any game shop and compare the shelves.

Again, non-gamers won't care (nor should they), but trying to make the "Macs are fine for gaming" argument to a gamer was going nowhere. And the "full screen graphics" comment just marked her down as completely out of her depth. Full screen graphics, you say? What will those Apple wizards think of next? She also seemed to miss my point about upgrading, saying that Macs came with free software upgrades - perhaps indicative that Mac users don't even think of upgrading hardware as an option, whereas for PC users it's an easy route to take.

I've derailed my point into ranting against this poor woman, which I didn't intend to do, but this is the problem with having a discussion one sentence at a time - pent up arguments I couldn't properly express. Plus I'm by nature a relatively polite person when in direct discussion, so didn't want to offend her. When rambling on like this though, I'm less concerned. I eventually resorted to pointing out that you can't have SLI on Macs (if you don't know what that is, trust me, you won't care - gaming thing), which whether she understood the term or not, seemed to make her realise that her definition of "serious gamer" was somewhat different to mine.

My original point - the cult of Mac. This woman was arguing for the Mac in areas where it just can't compete - and the discussion didn't even start as a comparison anyway, she brought it up! Macs are a lot of people's machines of choice, and no reason why not. I don't know enough about them to sing specific praises, but equally there are no utterly damning reasons not to use one. If I had to pull one out of the air, primarily it's cost - Macs are expensive, but then some would argue you get what you pay for. As an iPhone user I'd say that of the price premium on Apple products, 50% is justified in the components/construction, 50% is stomached because they're well-designed - they're not quite as good as their price-tag implies.

Still, hardly a deal-breaker either way. For most of my day to day work a Mac would almost certainly do just fine. However, I'm a Windows user partly through habit (I know all its ins and outs, and because I maintain my system properly nothing really irritates me about it), also because I play games a lot, also because I'm an upgrader. Those last two are things that Macs just don't do. They just don't. Yes games exist for the Mac, and yes you can upgrade the RAM, maybe even the hard disk, but the processors are soldered in, and if you wanted to build one from scratch you're shit out of luck.

Neither of those arguments would or should sway most people to or away from PCs or Macs - if they matter to you they're important, but they're not universally applicable. But this woman was clearly compelled to pitch Macs as being the best option, despite evident facts to the contrary.

No other product line seems to generate this kind of zealotry, and I genuinely can't work out why. Actually, one thought is that because Mac products cost more, people worry that they're being ripped off, so feel compelled to argue their merits that much more fervently in order to justify the cost. I really am a cynical bastard.

I'm deeply suspicious of pretty much any sort of unquestioning passionate belief, firmly believing that if you're unwilling to question/debate/discuss your belief, you must, deep down, be scared you'll be proved wrong. That sounds like it could be anti-religious, which I don't mean it to be - I'm at least semi-religious myself, but accept that it's belief, not knowledge. Anyone religious who'll gladly explain their beliefs, why they have them, acknowledge contradictions, etc., entirely fair enough - just sit there saying "well, it's my belief, I don't have to justify it", and I'll be fairly sure you're just kidding yourself. Or a moron. Or both.

I digress. I'm especially skeptical of belief when it comes to things technological, which I'm relatively well-informed about. Not least because with techie things there are certain absolutes you can point at - this does something better than that, this picture is better than that picture, this processes faster than that, etc. Usability is obviously more subjective.

I'm boring myself with this now, and so no doubt you as well - congratulations on making it through this disjointed ramble. If you're a Mac user and have a genuine case to make as to why an experienced Windows user who plays games and upgrades his PC on a semi-regular basis should switch to a Mac, by all means email me. In life I'm open to pretty much all arguments with any sort of validity, but telling an upgrading gamer that "the Mac has some games" and "you can upgrade the RAM" really won't cut it, trust me. If you're a Mac user who can't think of any arguments - that's fine, honestly! It doesn't mean Macs are worse than PCs, just that, horror of horrors, perhaps people have different desires and requirements.

Maybe what got me worked up wasn't even the specific Mac/PC debate, but that it's a good example of someone trying to make an argument they clearly don't know much about, rather than realising that fact and staying quiet. As the great saying goes (approximately): "it's better to say nothing and be thought stupid, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt." Things along those lines will be a recurring theme of my writings here.

This will be no surprise to many people, but I wanted a rant, as I've just spent...far too long fiddling around with code on another site, desperately tweaking and prodding it so it does what it's meant to in IE. In every other browser it works fine and looks great, but IE insisted on adding an 8 pixel margin for NO REASON WHATSOEVER, which was a bigger pain than that sounds. As it turns out, because what got broken was being generated via javascript it was relatively simple to detect the browser, and if it's IE adjust the sizes to compensate for the extra margin, but it's still a pain in the arse.

I've not yet played with IE 8, which is apparently more standards-compliant, but no doubt that'll have its own range of problems. Apparently they've had to include a legacy mode within it, because so many sites have an IE-specific setup that when loaded in IE 8 they then break. Bwahahahaha. Serves MS right - why it's so hard to make something that sticks to the accepted standards is beyond me. Opera forever.