First post here so hopefully not stepping on any toes.
Hi !apple I wanna talk about the weird world of talking to non-apple users about apple products. Specifically, the phenomenology of personal experience vs the weird focus on technical specs that a lot of people get hung up on.
I've been a long time computer user since I was about 6 years old. I remember getting our AOL disc at the front door and my mom booting up our PC with windows 95 for the very first time. I spent hours and even days combing through every inch of the operating system and learning all of the secrets it had to offer.
In my teenage years I became friends with some mac and ios users and become instantly jealous of how much nicer their experience was (I was on windows xp at the time). Growing up with little to nothing to our name I knew it would be out of reach for a long time. So spent time getting into gaming and building my own PC from spare parts here and there. I even learned a few lessons after killing explorer thinking it was some rogue instance of IE running in the background.
Right out of high school I got my first full-time job at a local restaurant and ended up saving for a 2015 12-inch macbook pro. I instantly became obsessed with it. I remember skipping college classes just so I could spend more time programming, more time learning how the shell worked in unison with the OS. It's the first machine I learned to program on. It's the first machine I bought myself. It's the first machine that really made using a computer feel right.
To this day that laptop sits lovingly entombed by itself in my desk. Covered in countless hack-a-thon stickers and a beat-to-hell plastic case, yet it still runs when I boot it up for nostalgic reasons.
For me this is what macOS (and being an apple user in general) is all about. It's about the personal experience. In comparison other operating systems feel fundamentally broken or half baked. When something is wrong in macOS it makes you sad, like how losing your bike as a kid would. In contract, when something doesn't work in windows it feels like it's to be expected (no hate I know plenty of people love windows, this is just imo). I've even had the pleasure of watching some of my close friends slowly come around to the idea of getting an iPad or a macbook when looking for an upgrade. Normally this has happened only because they had some expose on their own. Their significant other got an iphone, or their work offered macbooks. Never did describing the experience seem to take a hold on people.
All of that is to say I'm curious how all of you feel about discussing why apple's operating system(s) feel better, why it feels like home. Moreover I'm curious how y'all's experience has been when talking to non-apple users. For me it's largely been this weird alienating experience where you want to talk about why something fits like a glove, and instead the other party would rather talk about price points, or ram specs. To me this feels like the conversation around computers is immature. Immature in the sense that for any other hobby, enthusiasts are happy to talk about specs, but what they love is so much more important and often not grounded in the physical.
edit: I'm bad at spelling
Idk if you can even compare them when they're for entirely different vibes. Community is more witty and humourous but p&r is mostly just wholesome fun