0934: "Mac/PC"

[jpk]

All these comments and no one has pointed out that a Mac IS a PC? Well this comment comes closest:

The browsers are the same? Hell, the *hardware* is the same, too.

The Apple marketing department has managed to brainwash the world into thinking a Mac isn't a PC and that PC=Windows.

...I'm a Linux user, can you tell?

And a linux machine is not a PC because... why again? Actually, I think the "PC==windows" is a legacy usage from when IBM sold a thing called the "IBM PC", with a Microsoft-owned OS. There was the Apple ][ and the IBM PC, and there were some other things.
Now, of the two Dell laptops running Linux and the Mac with Linux on a virtual box, which is a "PC" to you? Does it make a difference that one of the Dells had Linux on it from the factory, and I wiped Windows off of the other myself?

[Ezbez]

All these comments and no one has pointed out that a Mac IS a PC? Well this comment comes closest:

The browsers are the same? Hell, the *hardware* is the same, too.

The Apple marketing department has managed to brainwash the world into thinking a Mac isn't a PC and that PC=Windows.

...I'm a Linux user, can you tell?

And a linux machine is not a PC because... why again? Actually, I think the "PC==windows" is a legacy usage from when IBM sold a thing called the "IBM PC", with a Microsoft-owned OS. There was the Apple ][ and the IBM PC, and there were some other things.
Now, of the two Dell laptops running Linux and the Mac with Linux on a virtual box, which is a "PC" to you? Does it make a difference that one of the Dells had Linux on it from the factory, and I wiped Windows off of the other myself?

Reread the quoted post - he clearly thinks that Linux machines are PC's as well.

[PhDFluff]

I like it that the joke works extra well with the indistinguishability of stick figures. Very clever.

If you look carefully you can see that the right stick figure has slightly shorter arms and a rounder head. Or maybe he's just positioned differently...

[Corcoran]

All these comments and no one has pointed out that a Mac IS a PC? Well this comment comes closest:

The browsers are the same? Hell, the *hardware* is the same, too.

The Apple marketing department has managed to brainwash the world into thinking a Mac isn't a PC and that PC=Windows.

...I'm a Linux user, can you tell?

I would've been very disappointed in Randall for the Mac/PC thing if it weren't for the fact that this is a parody of that stupid marketing campaign that Apple did.

[BrianB]

Indistinquishable? Everything done with a browser?

Hardly.

All the real engineering tools I use in my job everyday run on Windows OS (some run remotely on a Linux server cluster). None run on Mac OS.

And besides looking up vendor data from websites and using our CM/VM databases a browser isn't needed.

[jpk]

Reread the quoted post - he clearly thinks that Linux machines are PC's as well.

It's not at all clear to me what he thinks...

[Andrusi]

Indistinquishable? Everything done with a browser?

Hardly.

All the real engineering tools I use in my job everyday run on Windows OS (some run remotely on a Linux server cluster). None run on Mac OS.

And besides looking up vendor data from websites and using our CM/VM databases a browser isn't needed.

I think just knowing what Linux is already puts you far away from the target audience of the commercials being parodied here.

[McClow]

It's only recently that major video games started to be released for macs, and they still aren't all released on the platform. If you don't have a PC you have to run a Windows emulator and as a game that slows down performance. Screw Macs.

[Czhorat]

Right. Of course, if everything you do is in the browser, I'd suggest that you might maybe spend too much time in YouTwitFace and you might want to think about the tiny detail that every second you throw into the gaping maw of the Distractionator is another second off your life that you won't get back, ever.

(okay, maybe you're using google docs to write the novel that I'll read in two years and it'll blow my mind right out of my skull, change my life forever, and so forth. If so, carry on.)

I do you GoogleDocs for my fiction writing, thank you very much.

Your mileage may vary, but the company at which I work has a browser based system for:

accessing a company directory.
Time reporting.
Ordering and tracking equipment
Tracking expenditures and billing on jobs.
Entering change orders
Requesting time off.
Requesting training
Tracking training and certifications
Picking items from a warehouse, or transferring between.
Issuing RMA requests to return items to a vendor.
Creating ad-hoc FTP accounts to transfer large files (or large numbers of files)


And probably other things I'm not thinking of. It's easilly 80% of what I need to do my job, the remainder being word processing and the occaisonal spreadsheet. I even have a Chrome plug-in to read .dwg files. I also need the browser for its intended purpose to check vendor websites, download technical specs, etc.

I know not everyone's environment is like this, but don't be so quick to discount the browser as a toy.

[Enlong]

Hi, I'm a Mac

And I'm a PC.

And since we're both depicted by stick figures, we're pretty indistinguishable.

[limyreth]

So when will we be able to pipe web apps?

[jqavins]

I like it that the joke works extra well with the indistinguishability of stick figures. Very clever.

I read all the posts just to see if some had said this already so I wouldn't look bad when I posted it. To me, that detail is the funnyest aspect of the strip. (But not quite as funny as "douchecanoe," "YouTwitFace," and that picture of the browsers.)

And, yes, lots of us use sizable applications both at work and at home that are not browser based (so I won't bother to list my favorites) but I'm pretty sure that the I'm-a-Mac-I'm-a-PC commercials were aimed at the people who believe that FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, and GMail constitute the entire internet, and therefore everything computers are good for. Oh, and shopping.

Spoiler:

Or maybe they're aware that Google also has a search motor or something to find icky stuff like porn and that encyclopedia thingy that nerds use.
(Fine, I'm an elitist. What's the point of being in the elite if you can't be an elitist?)

[nogling]

Meanwhile PCs are monstrosities wrought from steel mined by orphans in the depths of Earth's mantle, smelted in forges powered by the souls of lost kittens, and consecrated by the blood of Bambi's mother. And they're powered by a dying star.

This. I want this. A million times this.

[jqavins]

Right. Of course, if everything you do is in the browser, I'd suggest that you might maybe spend too much time in YouTwitFace and you might want to think about the tiny detail that every second you throw into the gaping maw of the Distractionator is another second off your life that you won't get back, ever.

(okay, maybe you're using google docs to write the novel that I'll read in two years and it'll blow my mind right out of my skull, change my life forever, and so forth. If so, carry on.)

I do you GoogleDocs for my fiction writing, thank you very much.

Your mileage may vary, but the company at which I work has a browser based system for:

accessing a company directory.
Time reporting.
Ordering and tracking equipment
Tracking expenditures and billing on jobs.
Entering change orders
Requesting time off.
Requesting training
Tracking training and certifications
Picking items from a warehouse, or transferring between.
Issuing RMA requests to return items to a vendor.
Creating ad-hoc FTP accounts to transfer large files (or large numbers of files)


And probably other things I'm not thinking of. It's easilly 80% of what I need to do my job, the remainder being word processing and the occaisonal spreadsheet. I even have a Chrome plug-in to read .dwg files. I also need the browser for its intended purpose to check vendor websites, download technical specs, etc.

I know not everyone's environment is like this, but don't be so quick to discount the browser as a toy.

My company also has web-based applications for many of those things and the like that I use. Though word processing, spreadsheets, and CAD take up more of my time, when I have to do those other things they're mostly in a browser. And most of them work very poorly. It's good for the company directory, and that's about it; the rest sucks compared to purpose built, desk-top-resident applications that do the same job. I originally thought that web-based applications were a fad; they've been around too long to qualify as that, but they should have been one.

[Duban]

Yup, they're pretty much indistinguishable now except for two things.

1) Mac's cost 2-3 times more for the same hardware.

2) Macs have the better media software. Ironically, the only reason they have better media software is because companies make their media software for the Mac OS. The only reason they make their software for the Mac OS is because people want their media software to be on the Mac. The reason the people want their media software to be for the Mac is because they have the crazy idea that Mac’s have the better media software…

[myoilu]

Chrome tab overview.


there. i'm done.

[Anonymously Famous]

Not even a mention of Chrome OS? Perfect punchline IMO...

I kind of thought so, too.

For people who use their computers to the fullest, sure there are things to consider besides the browser, but for most casual personal computer users, you need a browser, necessary plugins for the browser (Flash, Adobe Reader, etc) and maybe a word processor. If the casual personal computer user likes Google Docs, then the browser and plugins are it.

[ModestMouse]

Hi, I'm Firefox.
I'm Chrome.
Wazzup, I'm Safari.
Howdy, I'm Opera.

[Clown walks in]

Hi, I'm Internet Explorer.

LOL - Maybe an obese clown? With gaping holes in his clothes. :

[orbik]

Does using a browser really hide the differences? I can think of a few counterexamples.

1. Keyboard conventions differ. Windows, Linux and others use mostly consistent, predictable keyboard shortcuts. Except on a Mac. Telling a Safari user to F5 a web page leads to nothing but confusion.
2. Font rendering is done by OS libraries. Unlike the others, Macs don't use font hinting, resulting in more blurry but theoretically more accurately positioned glyphs. Personally I don't like it. On some fonts even "i" and "l" become almost identical (no gap below the dot, just 1 or 2 pixels of a slightly lighter shade of gray).
3. Interaction with the file system. Ever need to upload some files through a web page or "app"? You'll most likely use the system's native GUI shell. The Finder simply doesn't offer the usability that comes standard on Windows.

[rcox1]

It is interesting to reflect that it is not the browser itself that makes the pc/mac choice less relevant. It is the fact that MS lost the browsers wars that make the choice less relevant.

At the turn of the century MS was well on the way to uses the web browser, specifically IE, as an application front end. IE was deeply tied to MS Windows functionality, which meant the if the user were not running MS WIndows, the web page would not work. To be fair there were many advantages to this. There were incompatibilities between version of MS Windows, and this was an easy way for MS to minimize the effect on developers. It was also an easy way to implement thin net.

But really what people used IE for was to create web pages that would always render the same. HTML defined context, not rendering, so managers that had to have consistency used the
IE standards. Now, some of these would run on Mac, but pretty much if you weren't running MS Windows at the turn of the century you were screwed.

Eventually HTML with CSS made most of these MS standards obsolete. We can also thank Google for creating open standard based technologies, which had the side effect of not only marginalizing the IE kludge, but also Flash.

So we now live in a world where all one needs is a standards complient browser to view the vast majority of the content. not because browsers have always done this, but because MS lost.

[stanthegoomba]

Funny, I'd say I use more native (Cocoa) applications on my Mac than I did a couple years ago.

Running right now:

• Safari
• Terminal
• Mail (better than web-based GMail in Lion in my opinion)
• BBEdit
• OmniOutliner
• OmniFocus
• XCode
• Keynote
• iCal
• Twitter
• iTunes
• Colloquy
• Reeder
• Transmission
• Pixelmator
• Adium

And soon enough the AlienBlue Reddit client will join that list, giving me even less to do in a browser window.

Many of these aren't available on the web or, for that matter, on any other platform. The recent "app" culture has triggered a revival of small, high-quality native software for Mac OS X and I think it's great.

[Ifritho]

So you mean that Mac/PC = 1 on a browser base?

This is madness!

[Pxtl]

Except that we've got no new featureset and suddenly we require multi-core 2GHz machines with multi-gigabyte for simple document management.

Beautiful.

Also, where's the web-based programming IDE? Web-based 3D modelling applications?

[RogueCynic]

I miss John Hodgman. Sigh, I tried to load the image but can't find it.

[TaylorP]

Funny, I'd say I use more native (Cocoa) applications on my Mac than I did a couple years ago.

Running right now:
..snip..
And soon enough the AlienBlue Reddit client will join that list, giving me even less to do in a browser window.

I'm kind of in between as far as my Mac goes. I use Google Reader, Docs, Calendar and Mail instead of native equivalents, but I'd never go for any of those online music options over iTunes. It's just one of those things that seems like it's supposed to run natively. Same goes for any programming IDE; I'm using Xcode and Eclipse at the moment. For general school/office use I think I could use one of those Chromebooks, but I'd still need a second machine for development so it's not really worth it.

As far as the comic goes, it's definitely targeted at average users. I could give my Mom a Mac, show her where to find the Skype and Chrome icons, and she wouldn't find it any different than Windows. The shortcut keys wouldn't even be an issue since she's one of those types who does "Edit->Copy", "Edit->Paste" no matter how many times I explain the benefits of shortcuts.

[abargnesi]

You mentioned about an xmonad for Firefox. There is at least a Tile Tabs extension for Firefox that allows
for tiling tabs within the browser.

Extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tile-tabs/

tiling window managers, ftw!

-tony

[cphite]

Yup, they're pretty much indistinguishable now except for two things.

1) Mac's cost 2-3 times more for the same hardware.

2) Macs have the better media software. Ironically, the only reason they have better media software is because companies make their media software for the Mac OS. The only reason they make their software for the Mac OS is because people want their media software to be on the Mac. The reason the people want their media software to be for the Mac is because they have the crazy idea that Mac’s have the better media software…

Your second point is more myth than reality. There isn't anything you can do on a Mac that you can't do just as well - and usually for less money - on a Windows-based PC. There are far more options for windows, both in terms of what software you can use and where you can get your support.

If you'd rather use Linux, you can still manage to do pretty much anything on your PC just as well as you could with a Mac (and usually even cheaper than with Windows) but your options are more limited, and the amount of effort on your part in terms of getting things to work might be more in some cases.

But there is nothing inherently better about the Mac when it comes to media software. It's essentially the same hardware as a PC once you go inside the case.

[jetsam]

The Apple marketing department has managed to brainwash the world into thinking a Mac isn't a PC and that PC=Windows.

You weren't around, I expect, in the days when Apple was dismissed as "not a real computer" and was excluded from the status of "a PC" by the cognescenti. It was really annoying.

[peterburk]

I'd say window management has been done well in a browser-based platform. Ever heard of WebQQ? It's Chinese MSN/Twitter/Myspace/Google Docs/Games all in one.
http://web.qq.com/

Despite that, I can't use it without desktop apps: Chrome's translator, or YouLing (http://goo.gl/MsV4D). Application scripting will keep things on the desktop for the foreseeable future, at least for me.

[SpringLoaded12]

SCREW doing everything in a browser. Without an internet connection, you're helpless.
I spend a lot of time making my computer more capable of doing things offline. I even periodically download the YouTube videos in my favorites list, saving them as .flv or .mp4.

Did somebody already post this image? No? Ok, here we go.

Crap, beat me to it.

[pbnjstowell]

My job has moved to using a specialized browser for the majority of our work. For the most part, it works great. But, if one app isn't working properly, it isn't working properly for everyone. And... if the internet goes down... (thanks for reminding me, SpringLoaded12).

And after dragging their feet for years, corporate finally upgraded us to IE8 this spring. Which we have to use for everything that doesn't run in the work browser. No updating/switching allowed, besides what corporate puts on our computers.

[Anonymously Famous]

If one app isn't working properly, it isn't working properly for everyone. And... if the internet goes down... (thanks for reminding me, SpringLoaded12).

Those are definitely two big downsides to internet applications. Usually, though, when the internet goes down, it's not for very long, at least not in my experience, and usually, if they're doing it right, developers will have tested the new versions of the application on a testing server before pushing it live. There's also the problem of the application's server going down, but like with the internet going down, it's usually fixed pretty quickly.

However, with a lot of internet applications, such as Google Docs, if your computer explodes and is reduced to a pile of ash, you can access the document that you were working on from any other internet-enabled computer and you lose maybe a few minutes-worth of work. If you're using a non-online application, then you lose the entire thing, plus anything else that you've saved on your computer (In either case, if you're too close to your computer you might lose a finger or put out an eye or something, but that's irrelevant to this example). Sure, the application's servers could also do this, but places hosting web apps usually have backups upon backups upon backups.

[Primis]

Uh, why is Chrome a Boyscout with untied shoelaces in that picture? I get the IE wearing a helmet (Mentally retarded) and that firefox has a tail, but does someone wanna clue me in on why chrome seems to be a boyscout?

[alexp]

All these comments and no one has pointed out that a Mac IS a PC?

That's actually what I was going to say, but nobody ever accepts it (even with Wikipedia's "Personal computer" article to back me up). I'm glad I'm not the only one fighting this war.

[Steve the Pocket]

<div style="control-box: all; draggable: top">Emphasis on fumblingly. Whenever I see a site trying to simulate windows inside the web page itself, it's almost always terrible. But considering people insist on doing it, they should probably just go ahead at put in the next HTML spec so people won't resort to awful javascript kludges.</div>

Keep on dreaming. I recently discovered I can't even reskin an <audio> or <video> tag's default controls with CSS; I have to literally remove them and rebuild them from scratch with new elements and JavaScript. And after I thought we were trying to move away from that bullshit, with JS-free rollover states and whatever it is that <canvas> is supposed to do.

Uh, why is Chrome a Boyscout with untied shoelaces in that picture? I get the IE wearing a helmet (Mentally retarded) and that firefox has a tail, but does someone wanna clue me in on why chrome seems to be a boyscout?

Haven't been around many Google fanboys, have ya?

[Apeiron]

Made me lol, which hadn't happened in a long time with Randall's comics.

'Bout time...

(Unless you are a gamer, in which case you get a PC because it's just easier to deal with, although having to put up with an inferior OS)

That's some mighty fine trolling, Lou.

[cjmcjmcjmcjm]

Funny, I'd say I use more native (Cocoa) applications on my Mac than I did a couple years ago.

Running right now:
..snip..
And soon enough the AlienBlue Reddit client will join that list, giving me even less to do in a browser window.

I'm kind of in between as far as my Mac goes. I use Google Reader, Docs, Calendar and Mail instead of native equivalents, but I'd never go for any of those online music options over iTunes. It's just one of those things that seems like it's supposed to run natively. Same goes for any programming IDE; I'm using Xcode and Eclipse at the moment. For general school/office use I think I could use one of those Chromebooks, but I'd still need a second machine for development so it's not really worth it.

As far as the comic goes, it's definitely targeted at average users. I could give my Mom a Mac, show her where to find the Skype and Chrome icons, and she wouldn't find it any different than Windows. The shortcut keys wouldn't even be an issue since she's one of those types who does "Edit->Copy", "Edit->Paste" no matter how many times I explain the benefits of shortcuts.

I really wish that Amarok would compile and then actually run on my mac. iTunes doesn't support FLAC, OGG, or half stars without hacks and the new update completely asploded it. The only thing I'd miss is the Genius Mixes

[bmonk]

Ahh, yes. Reminds me of the good old days back in the Middle Ages--err, just 10 years ago--when I was at a University working on a Mac computer, and needed to print out a document. But the office with the printer I could send to was closed and locked. There was a PC available nearby with a printer--but the two systems would not talk to each other.

I finally had to send an email to the PC, and reformat.

Fun times.

[dysprog]

Linux is the tomboyish girl with an ever-expanding wardrobe. And she has way too many plastic surgeries.

And she behaves differently for every task. And for some tasks, she only takes instructions in writing. And she randomly stabs you if get the spelling wrong...

[astrosteve]

I think this comic is probably spot on for 'average' users. (The kind who think "the Internet" is their web browser.) But I think it still isn't true for a lot of other people.

Like me, for example. I use TweetDeck to keep up with Twitter/Facebook (and really can't remember the last time I checked either of those through a browser), I game a lot so that isn't a browser, listen to music through Spotify (oh holy crap, do I love Spotify. Completely replaced anything else I used to use for music.) ... so yeah, really not a whole lot of browser use there, except to check xkcd, use Netflix streaming and keep up with a few blogs I read. Though I am considering getting a Tumblr account, and I don't think a 3rd party app exists for that but I've also never looked for one. So maybe that'll be another browser use.

Wow, was that as boring as I think it was?