From Wired - Umberto Eco, the Italian semiologist, once famously compared Macs and PCs to the two main branches of the Christian faith: Catholics and Protestants.
The Mac is Catholic, he wrote in his back-page column of the Italian news weekly, Espresso, in September 1994. It is “cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach — if not the Kingdom of Heaven — the moment in which their document is printed.”
The Windows PC, on the other hand, is Protestant. It demands “difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: A long way from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.”
Mmm… William’s Catholic infant school: all Macs. Henry’s Cetholic junior school: all Windows PCs. Go figure…
Wasn’t it Steve Jobs that said “give me a mac user for his first seven years and I will show you my new iPod”?