Hi, I'm a Mac. And this is so not PC.

I’m not a Mac user because I live in the inner city, grow lima beans on my balcony and hang vintage bicycles on my living room wall as post-modern installation art. I’m a Mac user because that’s who I want to be.

I straddle two worlds in that I was born into a PC dynasty and was using Microsoft DOS from the age of four and learning behaviours such as not wearing pants and sleeping in until midday.

Trying to escape the orbit of the traditional personal computer (that is, not a Mac) is not as simple as purchasing a Mac. You don’t become a computer turncoat because you feel like it, you do it because you begin to redefine your lifestyle. My epiphany came the first morning I realised I absolutely abhorred Pop-Tarts but was developing an affinity for bran.*

And this is the basic premise of the ongoing war between Mac and PC. It’s the second greatest ideological battle of our time, beaten only by the struggle between cat and dog owners as they compete for the funniest captioned pictures on the Internet. So far, the cats have it by a whisker.

This isn’t just mumbo jumbo necessarily. There is a genuine lifestyle divide between the two computer camps. A non-scientific (but still 2000 user strong) survey from Hunch confirmed the following existing stereotypes:

58% of Mac users are liberal, compared to 36% of PC users.

13% more of Mac users have completed a four-year college degree.

PC users want to fit in, Mac users want to appear to be ‘unique’.

PC users dress casually, Mac users describe their style as ‘upmarket, chic and design influenced’.

Mac users are 80% more likely than PC users to be vegetarian.

Mac users are more likely to be early adopters, PC users are 38% more likely to be late adopters (of tech).

Mac users are 95% more likely to enjoy Indie films.

This explains why almost nobody in my hometown used a Mac. After all, it’s very hard to have an ‘urban elite’ in a country town of 3000 people. I believe the technical phrase for the area was ‘peri-urban’ which is like trying to say the Year 10 kid in the school musical is Billy Joel. And it’s so not Mac.

What the survey failed to mention, of course, is that a statistically significant portion of Mac users are wankers. There, I said it. Much is made of this great cultural divide and some of it is true. It’s fair to say I like my Mac. I like the way it looks. I like the way it just works. It has some fairly intuitive features. But I fear I am turning into the type of person who spends $5000 on a lamp shade woven by Tibetan monks and couriered on the back of a gold-embossed ceremonial yak to my front door when the $25 lamp shade looks the same and does precisely the same thing.

I mean, I’m not actually an artist am I? My home is perfectly lovely but it would likely give the aesthete elite nose bleeds as their brains survey the decor and attempt to find a way to forge a compliment.

The Mac actually represents everything I am not. Classy, elegant, refined, powerful. Silver.

But nobody else need know that, right?

*I may or may not have ever eaten bran.

Update: My friend Tyson just sent me this picture on the right hand side. He’s one of my PC brethren from high school, so was naturally alarmed when he saw this article. I think this finally settles, it right?

So, are you the type of person your computer says you should be? Or is your computer a statement of who you want to be? Mac or PC?