Mac Myths

[Koelling]

What's your favorite Myth? Here are two that I recently had to deal with to debunk some my girlfriend and her parents had.

1.) Macs have no software. Handed down from her father, she somehow thought that this was true. I asked her what she did with her computer and she said "Chat(AIM), Web browsing and Music scoring". I know I have a better chat client and there are lot's of others that do AIM better than the PC. Granted the AOL distributed Mac version is crap but in third party releases, we have the lead. Web: I don't want to talk about that Music scoring stumped me for a sec, so I opened Version tracker and found one in 10 minutes that is just as good as hers. That weekend she went to tour her soon to be college of music and guess what they used? 100% Mac labs running Finale.

2.) Macs have no memory. This one I just had to laugh at because she got it from her mom, who is a preschool teacher and knows nothing about computers. I can't forgive this tho because she is recycling the lie. There is so much brainwashing and I have no idea where it comes from. Either it is made up on the spot or someone maliciously plants it. I wouldn't be surprised of the former from her father because he is like that (we have our differences).

What myths have your run up against recently?

[simX]

I was chatting with some people who were Windows or Linux geeks, and they claimed that the Mac had no software. So I challenged them to think of something that I couldn't counter.

The next day the Linux geek came to me and said "Morpheus". I had to say that, yes, the Mac doesn't have that, but when I heard that Morpheus was transitioning to a Gnutella-based network, I just laughed! There goes his argument.

That was the only thing he could think of, too.

[dricci]

Macs are far easier to use than PCs: Guilty as charged.

[xoot]

Macs crash far more than PCs.

The opposite!

[vanguard]

The mac chat client isn't as nice a trillian. I prefer my mac but for chatting and web browsing we still have work to do.

[julguribye]

Some time ago a guy told me macs suck because the mouse is round (the time when all macs had hockey puck mice) and because it's music client was called Macster instead of Napster... Good arguments or what?

[ksuther]

Trillian is nice, but Adium seems to work just about as well. I tried fire and proteus, but they seem to be so clunky. Maybe that just comes with having multiple services...

[themacko]

Since I'm fairly new to Macs, I'll bust out all the Mac-Myths I believed in before the salesman in the bookstore told me otherwise:

• Windows can't read Mac disks (floppy/zip) and Macs can't read Windows disks.
• MS Office files on Macs are the same as Office files on Windows.
• Macs are slower than PCs.
• You can't program (C++/Java) on a Mac.
• There aren't any programs for Macintosh computers.

Well, the last one is still a bit revelant. The only thing that I've really been disappointed about is the lack of sports games available for Macs. But, I ended up getting an XBox so that's no longer an issue.