It will depend on the age, but using Windows used to require some tech literacy. As far as I’m aware, Apple has always tried to avoid this need, which also prevents learning it. Modern Windows isn’t much different than modern Mac though. I’m assuming kids on Windows today aren’t much better than kids on Mac.
Controversial opinion but the system working well doesn’t prevent learning about it—if the user wants to. Like Apple computers are still computers, they’ve always had development tools. You could always study it under the hood and learn.
I don’t think that’s controversial. However, there’s two ways people will be encouraged to learn about it. Either the system invites you to tinker, or it doesn’t function how you want and requires you to tinker. Apple, in all of their products, mostly does neither. It functions fine, and it is opinionated about how it functions and doesn’t invite you to change it.
Sure, there will be curious people who, no matter what, tinker. They don’t need to be encouraged. The OP isn’t really trying to measure them. They’ll be the baseline where there is no measurable difference. The average user is what we want to understand. The average user on Mac isn’t expected to understand anything about the system. It just works. Both Windows (historically) and Linux do some amount of inviting you to tinker, and also requiring you to (depending on distro for Linux this may not actually be required). Windows has increasingly locked things down though, and also revert any changes on update more and more frequently.
A lot of apple’s design philosophy hides the technical detail, to try and create a friction-free user experience. Android does the same thing, but apple were doing it earlier and on desktop devices to some extent. Windows back in the day was significantly more transparent, although I don’t know if I can say the same for modern windows
That’s well and good for some things, but the concern that it reduces the natural tendency to become highly tech literate is genuine.
add to that that for some time in history it was quite common to build your own pc (something that abviously went away with rise of laptops), which required whole other level of understanding.
This has been my experience and have anecdotal evidence of people who can use a Mac but don’t understand any of it. One customer we had problems with until we just cut it off was that she’d have issues with her Mac and couldn’t navigate it effectively to try troubleshooting. She didn’t understand how to install on it so we could run remote management software.
You used entirely different OSes than me then. Macs were not easy to use while windows was standard. If you were using a Mac you were learning a lot more since the majority of PCs in homes were windows and you didn’t have to do anything on them.
No. The only hard thing with macs was and is tivoization, because they want to decide what you can install and what not; that’s the reason why jailbreaks and things as brew and all that had to be created.
My school system used macs before OSX and switched to Windows almost entirely when OS 9 was still the latest thing. Sounds like another user had the same experience. OS 9 was nothing like unix and had no terminal even, to my knowledge.
your car’s main control unit may also be based on bsd (i have no idea whether that is in fact the case) but surprisingly most people would not call themselves experts on car electronic just because they drive a car.
while a lot of people considers themselves to be “it experts” just because they were raised by youtube instead of their parents since the age of 2.
I think one of the reasons is that MacOS didn’t really have any games back then, so there was no reason for a kid to be glued to their computer. And if you use something for a long time, you collect problems and ways to solve them, getting the experience and some technical knowledge along the way.
Number munchers and Oregon trail have entered the chat. Also the dozen other games on floppy disks (that my middle age mind cannot remember now) that we played on our Apple IIe’s.
There were so many more, and better games, for PCs.
The only good games on Mac were ones ported from PC.
I was my mother’s official “troubleshooter”. If a customer returned a game, she gave it to me, to test.
There were definitely a lot more PC games returned than Mac, but there was almost never anything wrong with them. Probably came down to individual setups.
Which was Mac’s strong point. There was no real diversity in hardware, so everything worked.
But all the Mac games SUCKED compared to PC.
Unfortunately, this was also when I was exposed to Ultima IV… and my homework never saw me again.
I’m not so sure but I think back THEN there were less captivating PC games as well. My perspective is from the early 00s Russia, when you had to deal with pirated games, unbelievably slow Internet, funny videos shared between friends on CDs, going with a hard drive to a friend’s house just to share your music collection, etc. Basically, we had to know how to do this kind of stuff because the alternative was so expensive. Now with LLMs you don’t even have to “google” anymore, so there’s no need to know, for example, what a file extension is.
Interesting perspective. I was in the rural US and my experience was probably closer to yours than you might think. 33-48kbps modems were insanely slow, even back then. Between that and my parents banning the Internet in the house, most everything I got my hands on was pirated, and either painstakingly (secretly) downloaded over midnight hours on the unreliable modem or from a floppy disk or burned CD from a friend! This was circa 1997-2001 until I moved out and got a usable Internet connection.
Yeah, that checks out, I usually notice a 10-20 years “cultural” gap. Personal anecdote: watching The Sopranos in 2020s still felt like the topics in russian media and culture are just starting to catch up, before that no one really talked about depression as a disorder, and people taking ADs were seen as “crazy”.
In the 90s, especially early 90s, the hardware was just plain faster and more capable. Coupled with a remarkably robust shareware community, gaming was great on them. The difference between Doom II (the PC-DOS game everyone remembers) and Marathon, which was its mac contemporary, was ridiculous. Textures, resolution, gameplay complexity, the ability to actually look up and down, etc.
Then Gil Amelio tried to turn them into a business-focused company for a few years, and mac gaming never fully bounced back from that. I mean, it almost did. Halo was going to be a Mac exclusive at launch, and then Microsoft bought out Bungie right before launch to sell their new X-Box.
Mac had heaps of games in the 80s and 90s. Then from the 90s to the 2010s, it was WINDOWS TIME for games, with some being ported to OSX and Linux or run with compatibility software. Now it’s Windows/Linux hardcore and still only small or modest Mac support.
Mac did have a ton of fun games back then, though! I didn’t get a Mac of my own until Intel Core Macs came out, but I loved the Macs I used at my friends’ houses and school.
I went through an edgy “Apple is worst computers” phase in the 2000s, but I grew to like the hardware and OS after I picked one up to install Windows on to bring to LAN parties (all non-Mac laptops that could play games fuckin suuuuuucked back then and I was never at home.)
I don’t know about better, but the Mac games I had in elementary school were awesome for kids that age. Oregon trail and number munchers. I don’t think pc gaming had really taken off much at all then. That was years before doom, even.
Is the hypothesis that people in those two OS’s have no clue about other OS’s and the one thats looks like a fruit have a superiority complex?
Linux users are particularly notorious for not having superiority complex.
I use Arch btw
It isn’t a complex when it’s just actually superior
psh everyone uses arch nowadays the steam deck is huge! Now if you used nix OS that would be impressive!
Nix is just so normie. Why don’t better use Gentoo? That’s what an actual nerd with no social life does!!!1!1
Noobs not daily driving their LFS builds
Nah, all my homies build their own kernel from scratch… In Assembly. TempleOS goes brrr
I have a superuser complex
sudo drop your complex
Changing “sudo” to “please” on my terminal was the best thing I ever did, now all of my conversations with my computer look so polite
“please !!” sounds like you beg on your knees to execute the last command
You don't have permissions to do this action; next action: rm -rf /Your illness is rooted deep into your consciousness. “su” is “switch user” by the way…
Hate to be that guy, but it’s akshually substitute user
Omg it’s me
I use Arch btw (unironically lmao)
No-no-no, you love being that guy :)
deleted by creator
Sure but we do have a clue of the other two. Regularly having to act as the IT guy for family for a OS I don’t interact with…
It will depend on the age, but using Windows used to require some tech literacy. As far as I’m aware, Apple has always tried to avoid this need, which also prevents learning it. Modern Windows isn’t much different than modern Mac though. I’m assuming kids on Windows today aren’t much better than kids on Mac.
Controversial opinion but the system working well doesn’t prevent learning about it—if the user wants to. Like Apple computers are still computers, they’ve always had development tools. You could always study it under the hood and learn.
I don’t think that’s controversial. However, there’s two ways people will be encouraged to learn about it. Either the system invites you to tinker, or it doesn’t function how you want and requires you to tinker. Apple, in all of their products, mostly does neither. It functions fine, and it is opinionated about how it functions and doesn’t invite you to change it.
Sure, there will be curious people who, no matter what, tinker. They don’t need to be encouraged. The OP isn’t really trying to measure them. They’ll be the baseline where there is no measurable difference. The average user is what we want to understand. The average user on Mac isn’t expected to understand anything about the system. It just works. Both Windows (historically) and Linux do some amount of inviting you to tinker, and also requiring you to (depending on distro for Linux this may not actually be required). Windows has increasingly locked things down though, and also revert any changes on update more and more frequently.
Yeah, MacOS hold the users hand way too hard, in a way that is insulting in my opinion.
Totally right, I have seen it in person.
i think the hypothesis is that windows kids have general tech literacy and problem solving skills and OSX kids dont. and linux users are autustic ;-]
The most powerful things windows can do are gui based and the most powerful things macos can do are in the cli
Not saying everyone bothers going that deep but there is a reason most software engineers and other professionals would prefer mac over windows
Windows is an inconsistent mess and their terminal tools are afterthoughts
I don’t know if that’s accurate. Have you seen PowerShell? It’s so good, some people install it on Linux to use as their main shell
This just proves the world has deeply disturbed people
Nonsense, c# developers might install it on Linux but nobody who understands unix like systems considers it
No he is sorta right, powershell is actually kinda fire.
I use it daily, there is no point putting it on a unix like system
One day we will be rid of windows servers and I won’t have to use poweshell ever again
And that’ll be a sad day; powershell is one of approximately two great things that Microsoft ever did.
It’s a little verbose in its commands, but it’s very good.
Seems right (I use Linux)
That would be a very weird conclusion when Macs were generally the ones taught in school, and are also based on BSD.
Where? Not in Spain. In fact no one I know was taught computers in Mac.
A lot of apple’s design philosophy hides the technical detail, to try and create a friction-free user experience. Android does the same thing, but apple were doing it earlier and on desktop devices to some extent. Windows back in the day was significantly more transparent, although I don’t know if I can say the same for modern windows
That’s well and good for some things, but the concern that it reduces the natural tendency to become highly tech literate is genuine.
add to that that for some time in history it was quite common to build your own pc (something that abviously went away with rise of laptops), which required whole other level of understanding.
I built my laptop. Framework user fwiw
went not isn’t
First time witnessing a stroke over the internet
This has been my experience and have anecdotal evidence of people who can use a Mac but don’t understand any of it. One customer we had problems with until we just cut it off was that she’d have issues with her Mac and couldn’t navigate it effectively to try troubleshooting. She didn’t understand how to install on it so we could run remote management software.
You used entirely different OSes than me then. Macs were not easy to use while windows was standard. If you were using a Mac you were learning a lot more since the majority of PCs in homes were windows and you didn’t have to do anything on them.
No. The only hard thing with macs was and is tivoization, because they want to decide what you can install and what not; that’s the reason why jailbreaks and things as brew and all that had to be created.
My school system used macs before OSX and switched to Windows almost entirely when OS 9 was still the latest thing. Sounds like another user had the same experience. OS 9 was nothing like unix and had no terminal even, to my knowledge.
your car’s main control unit may also be based on bsd (i have no idea whether that is in fact the case) but surprisingly most people would not call themselves experts on car electronic just because they drive a car.
while a lot of people considers themselves to be “it experts” just because they were raised by youtube instead of their parents since the age of 2.
Apple hasn’t always used a Unix-like system, though. The old Mac OS on those school computers was it’s own beast.
And now it seems like schools go for either chromebooks or tablets anyway.
I think one of the reasons is that MacOS didn’t really have any games back then, so there was no reason for a kid to be glued to their computer. And if you use something for a long time, you collect problems and ways to solve them, getting the experience and some technical knowledge along the way.
There were so many games, just not AAA titles
Number munchers and Oregon trail have entered the chat. Also the dozen other games on floppy disks (that my middle age mind cannot remember now) that we played on our Apple IIe’s.
My mom worked at Software Etc in the 80’s.
There were so many more, and better games, for PCs.
The only good games on Mac were ones ported from PC.
I was my mother’s official “troubleshooter”. If a customer returned a game, she gave it to me, to test.
There were definitely a lot more PC games returned than Mac, but there was almost never anything wrong with them. Probably came down to individual setups.
Which was Mac’s strong point. There was no real diversity in hardware, so everything worked.
But all the Mac games SUCKED compared to PC.
Unfortunately, this was also when I was exposed to Ultima IV… and my homework never saw me again.
Someone clearly never played Dark Castle
Were you under the impression I don’t believe there were pc games back then? I didn’t say that, also, funny enough you say
But the only games I specifically named actually were on Mac first then later ported to DOS.
I’m not so sure but I think back THEN there were less captivating PC games as well. My perspective is from the early 00s Russia, when you had to deal with pirated games, unbelievably slow Internet, funny videos shared between friends on CDs, going with a hard drive to a friend’s house just to share your music collection, etc. Basically, we had to know how to do this kind of stuff because the alternative was so expensive. Now with LLMs you don’t even have to “google” anymore, so there’s no need to know, for example, what a file extension is.
Interesting perspective. I was in the rural US and my experience was probably closer to yours than you might think. 33-48kbps modems were insanely slow, even back then. Between that and my parents banning the Internet in the house, most everything I got my hands on was pirated, and either painstakingly (secretly) downloaded over midnight hours on the unreliable modem or from a floppy disk or burned CD from a friend! This was circa 1997-2001 until I moved out and got a usable Internet connection.
Yeah, that checks out, I usually notice a 10-20 years “cultural” gap. Personal anecdote: watching The Sopranos in 2020s still felt like the topics in russian media and culture are just starting to catch up, before that no one really talked about depression as a disorder, and people taking ADs were seen as “crazy”.
Yep. A lot of people also say that the rural US is typically about 20 years behind california in a few ways, which I also agree with.
Huh? Mac had the better games! In fact I lived in the countryside and our school was mostly Macs until I got to high school.
That’s a wild claim.
They are talking about stuff from 30 years ago and having difficulty processing that they are old now.
In the 90s, especially early 90s, the hardware was just plain faster and more capable. Coupled with a remarkably robust shareware community, gaming was great on them. The difference between Doom II (the PC-DOS game everyone remembers) and Marathon, which was its mac contemporary, was ridiculous. Textures, resolution, gameplay complexity, the ability to actually look up and down, etc.
Then Gil Amelio tried to turn them into a business-focused company for a few years, and mac gaming never fully bounced back from that. I mean, it almost did. Halo was going to be a Mac exclusive at launch, and then Microsoft bought out Bungie right before launch to sell their new X-Box.
You’re either very young, or didn’t have access to Mac’s as a kid. The games were great. Number Munchers was sick.
I don’t think 40 (how long ago Number Munchers came out) can be considered “very young.”
Yes, that’s my point. He’d have to be in his 20’s to have missed all the early Mac games.
If he’s 40 he for sure would have either played them, or just never been around Mac’s as a kid.
Mac had heaps of games in the 80s and 90s. Then from the 90s to the 2010s, it was WINDOWS TIME for games, with some being ported to OSX and Linux or run with compatibility software. Now it’s Windows/Linux hardcore and still only small or modest Mac support.
Mac did have a ton of fun games back then, though! I didn’t get a Mac of my own until Intel Core Macs came out, but I loved the Macs I used at my friends’ houses and school.
I went through an edgy “Apple is worst computers” phase in the 2000s, but I grew to like the hardware and OS after I picked one up to install Windows on to bring to LAN parties (all non-Mac laptops that could play games fuckin suuuuuucked back then and I was never at home.)
I don’t know about better, but the Mac games I had in elementary school were awesome for kids that age. Oregon trail and number munchers. I don’t think pc gaming had really taken off much at all then. That was years before doom, even.
Did it have Zoo Tycoon? No? I think we’re done here.