It’s easy to feel that culture war only ever grows and never shrinks, but there’s one culture war that I’m glad has cooled a great deal: PC vs. Mac. There’s still two major platforms for personal laptop and desktop computing. (Apologies to Linux and ChromeOS.) People still are very dedicated to their particular ecosystem. People still argue about it. Mac fans still mock viruses and instability in PC systems, while PC users still deride Mac fans as sheep who pay more for less functionality. But to a great extent, especially compared to say the mid-aughts period, there appears to be a kind of fragile detente. I am much, much less likely to encounter PC vs. Mac fights in the wild today.

I have always been a PC guy and can’t claim neutrality on this point. Certainly I maintain an old frustration that Mac fans never update their understanding of the security and stability of the Windows platform, which are both vastly improved relative to earlier iterations of the operating system. (Seriously, you have to try pretty hard to get a virus these days.) But of course I can admire Apple’s usability and design chops. Perhaps some of the fire shifted to Android vs. iOS, but even there the skirmishes seem less heated and less frequent than the old days. Perhaps that’s because Apple enjoys dominance in smartphone mindshare, if not quite market share. Either way, with my admitted bias serving as caveat - there used to be this class of Apple Guy, someone whose love for the brand transcended the regard you would ordinarily reserve for an expensive commodity and became something existential, something that defined them. And I’m not even really putting words in their mouths. There was (and still is) this whole explicit and avowed cult-of-Mac thing, where people publicly professed unhealthy devotion to their preferred computer manufacturer. For some, being into Apple products really was like a religion, a defining element of the self