Am I the equivalent of a Prius Owner in the Geek World?

No I haven’t bought a Prius, god forbid I ever become that delusional, but the fact is most prius owners are actually car lovers of sorts, now I’m a typical car lover, I’ve had cars like the Nissan Skyline R32 GTR, the Ford Capri 2.8 V6, the Ford Falcon 4.0 V6, the Supra 3.0 Turbo and the good ol’ Jaguar 5.3 V12 XJS, (Before anyone thinks I’m showing off here, I now drive a 14 year old Nissan Primera with a big dent in the side, the previous owner did the dent!), but some car fans look for things like practicality, good gas mileage, reliability, cost of insurance etc etc all things the above mentioned cars do NOT have. Believe it or not they are genuinely car lovers, just not in the typical sense, if they didn’t love cars, they’d buy a 20 year old Ford Fiesta Poplar and have done with it.

Prius owners however are a different breed of car lover, they’re not particularly looking for style, but they actually do think the Prius looks damn hot, they’re not necessarily looking for something cheaper to insure or maintain, and let’s face it they definitely won’t get that in a Prius, unless you’re comparing it to a GTR or a Jag in which case ANYTHING is cheaper in those fields, believe me! What they are looking for in their car, and they really, really, REALLY think they’ve found in the Prius, is a SUPERIOR car to everyone elses. Prius owners have fallen for the whole idea, that a hybrid car is superior, they ignore the fact that it takes more energy and fossil fuels to create their batteries than a normal 4 cylinder car would use in petrol over the period of 5 years (I keep getting told and keep reading this, so if it’s wrong please tell me, preferably in a non flaming kind of way), they ignore the fact it can barely even hit 100mph going downhill with a tailwind, it’s SUPERIOR remember.

Anyway enough about cars, I’m a Power man, in every aspect of the word, I like playing football (Soccer for the yanks), driving fast cars, using the command line instead of pointing and clicking and I like to know exactly what my software is doing, when it’s doing it, and how it’s doing it. Now the thing is, I think I’m using a superior operating system by using Linux, and well, no the analogy really just fell down right there, I don’t just THINK I’m using a superior operating system, I AM using a superior operating system, I can customize everything I want to, I can play the games I want to, I can program anything I want to program and I can use more software than you could imagine, by pointing and clicking OR by typing commands, it’s fantastic, not for everyone I admit, but for me, fantastic.

So who are the Prius owners of the Geek World? I’ve come to the conclusion, that it’s Mac owners, they think their machines are more eco friendly, faster, easier to use, easier to fix, less vulnerable to viruses, they’re even more fanatical about them than Linux users in my experience and they do nothing but try to convert everyone else to Mac. The truth in fact is that Macs can in fact be FAR MORE costly in power terms, MUCH slower than even Windows in lots of circumstances, harder to use for anyone who’s used anything other than a Mac, harder to fix because you can’t get to anything in the all-in-ones, you can’t modify the source code and re-compile to fix nackered applications, you can’t issue basic bash commands in a lot of circumstances, because Apple decided to remove them, more vulnerable to Viruses than Linux, BSD, Solaris, Unix, in fact now I come to think of it, the only Operating System Macs have less viruses than, is Windows.

Macs look very nice, stylish, expensive and professional, but the thing is, it’s all wrong, there are other machines out there that look nice too and having a Mac is like driving a BMW 316, you may have the badge, the looks and the price tag, but you just don’t have the grunt under the hood. As for professional, Macs are anything but really, the old tagline of “Hello I’m a Mac” “And I’m a PC” is just the definition of WRONG. PC stands for Personal Computer, what on earth could be more of a Personal Computer than a Mac? It allows you to store YOUR MP3s, YOUR Movies, YOUR Photo Albums, YOUR web stuff, it’s ALL ABOUT YOU on a Mac. Which is great, but the actual PC gets associated with Windows all the time as a result of that slogan/ad campaign and it’s just plain wrong.

I used to work with Windows as an IT Engineer and I didn’t like it much, I started to deal with Macs and Linux professionally after a while because I was so into Linux in my personal life, eventually I just moved away from Windows all together, stopped working with it, stopped dealing with it, completely gone, woohoo! The last job I accepted was working in a school, with a completely Mac network, I thought “This could be cool, I’d rather there were some Linux machines in here, but that’s ok, Macs are Linux cousin, maybe I can have some influence” WOW WAS I WRONG! Mac guys are just plain and simple unconvertible, I don’t want to turn hard core Mac users into hard core Linux users, I just want them to recognise Linux the way I recognise Macs, it’s just not gunna happen though, that Prius attitude of “Mine is more superior than yours” is just unbeatable for them, you can’t get round it, if they’ve been sucked in enough by Macs, then there’s just no way back, not even an inch.

So in short, if you start to get involved with a Mac Guy in someway, and you think you might be able to convert him a little, at least get him to use Linux servers, so that the job is easier, faster, stronger and more reliable than Mac XServes, just forget it now, if someone is hardcore enough to use XServes, they’re a lost cause and you may as well just forget it and run, trust me on this. I’ll simply clarify this post by saying, I will still and do still recommend Macs to basic computer users, older computer users and people who don’t really need to do anything powerful with their computer, because that’s what a Mac is for, I just wish the Mac users would realise that. Lost cause.

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