Mac vs. PC: Finally a Truce!

I have to come out and say it: I am a Mac fan. I haven’t always been one. Early in my IT career, I was an avid Mac hater. No reason in particular, just didn’t care for them, even though my first love was an Apple IIe we had in school. Once I built my first Windows-based PC, I was hooked, and my hate for Mac grew...until I took a job where I was forced to use Macs. I rediscovered my love for the computers—how easy they were to use, how stylish and simple. I found my productivity soared. Today I use all Apple computers; the only Windows computers I use are virtual machines running on my Macs, and I have no hatred toward either one. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had their ups and downs, and it was thought they hated each other. Jobs called gates “unimaginative” and said, “He [Gates] would be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram.” In 2007, the roots of the truce began when Gates set up the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. Gates said, “Steve and I did an event together, and he couldn’t have been nicer…I got a fair bit of time with him in his last year.” Bill also paid Steve a visit months before he passed: “We spent literally hours reminiscing and talking about the future.” When it was clear Steve was not going to make it, Bill wrote Steve a letter. “I told Steve about how he should feel great about what he had done and the company he had built. I wrote about his kids, whom I had got to know.” Bill says it best: “There was no peace to make. We were not at war. We made great products, and competition was always a positive thing. There was no [cause for] forgiveness.” It turns out Jobs kept that letter by his bedside up until the very end. His wife said to Bill, “Look, this biography really doesn’t paint a picture of the mutual respect you had.’ And she said he’d appreciated my letter and kept it by his bed.” So what can we take from all this? I don’t know where this hatred among users comes from, even having partaken in it myself. I have no idea or any reason for it, and wish more PC users would see the other side of the coin. Macs and PCs are essentially the same; they both get us from point A to point B in our lives, so let’s put down the hatchets and just get along. Steve would have wanted it that way, and certainly Bill feels the same. Source:  telegraph.co.uk