The Non-Hostile Mac vs. PC Debate

Last week, I was invited to a geek dinner at the home of blogger/nice guy Robert Scoble and his wife Maryam where the dinner consisted of burritos and the geekery was about one of the longest-lived debates in tech. Namely, Mac or PC?

Other folks in attendance included Fred Davis (who is, among other things, the former editor of both PC Magazine and Macuser), tech-industry veteran Jeremy Toeman, and unabashed (and articulate) Mac advocate Sam Levin.

The conversation was spirited and civilized, but there was a lot to say--in part because we didn't try too hard to stay on topic. Here's the first hour, as seen on Robert's ScobleShow, where he dubbed it The Non-Hostile Mac vs. PC Debate:

I had to bow out of the debate part way through to catch a plane, but it continued...and continued. Here's part two, sans me:

I couldn't appear in a contentious and angry debate on PCs and Macs even if I tried, since I'm a committed OS agnostic who uses Vista, XP, OS X, and, sometimes, Ubuntu Linux to get stuff done, depending on the task at hand.

People sometimes assume that my job as an editor at something called PC World means I'm duty-bound to advocate for Windows. Nope. We're a publication about mainstream personal computing--which means that in a world that's dominated by Windows, we'll devote most of our space to that platform. But the only tools we advocate for are the right ones for the particular job in question.

I will cheerfully acknowledge, though, that I do have a favorite computer right now: My MacBook, now that its initial kinks have been worked out. Running it with OS X--as well as Windows apps via Parallels virtualization--is the closest thing to an ideal computing environment, for me, that I've encountered yet.

In other words, the best answer to "Mac or PC" may be "Mac and PC..."

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