Children use smartphones way more than "PC" computers today.
this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2024
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I am probably the only person ever to grow up with a UNIX terminal server as my home computer. any crazy IT thing i do now pales in comparison to my dad, running ethernet cables through our heating ducts in a probable building code violation
**As someone who has ran fiber and ethernet to companies post a category 5 hurricane to get network connections back online for paychecks across 7 states including the virgin Islands... I have never seen that. And we used satellite radio dishes to send signals across areas when we rewired the emergency center (police, fire, etc) under marshall law. It's fucking humbling to have all bridges shut down in the area to try to cut down on people pillaging and have them give you a badge to cross under any conditions no matter the danger because you are considered "needed.". Some other poor souls could have stood on the beach watching it come in piling shit up and running home to drag my chicken coop into the garage throw 2 dogs in the car and "evacuate" only to where the hurricane actually ended up hitting harder. I was an idiot, but the office building i was working from was on the front of the Los Angeles times or w.e the next day to show the destruction. We dug crabs and sucked water for days out of pipes to get Ethernet run in moves for months.... But yet I have never seen someone run them though heating ducts haha. (True story)
Edit: circa Hurricane Michael, Panama City 2018
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So here's a teacher's insight:
Mac:PC:Chromebook Rich---Poor
There is a very strong correlation between the wealth of the kids on my module, and the device they have.
Mac users really struggle to understand the concept of local files without being shown. PC users, alas, snort too much SharePoint these days to be considered healthy - trying to save a word document locally these days is like climbing a mountain blindfolded. As for the Chromebook kids, they do their best with what they have, and given how little compatibility those devices have with the software I teach, I'm proud of them.
Mac users really struggle to understand the concept of
For me, it was trying to explain to a Mac user that she should have a separate profile on her Mac for work vs. personal
She'd convinced her employer that she could work from home using her own Mac (the office was all Macs except for the video production suite), and he said OK. Didn't ask me, of course. Despite me saying a long time ago when someone else floated the idea, that it was poor practice from a security viewpoint.
Then three days later the call came - "I can't access work files". So I remote in, she's got links to her personal iCloud Drive directories somehow mixed up with the work Google Drive.
I started to explain about using a different profile for work and just got a blank stare.
"You log off your personal profile and log into the work profile"
"How do I do that?"
"Autistic children will be discluded from the study for skewing results"
"Autism involves a significant deviation from expected behaviour"
They have played us for absolute fools.
(I know autism describes a real cluster of traits, but it is only socially constructed norms that define those traits as aberrant, I am not saying it isn't real)
Yeah, we create the rules that decide whether or not someone is autistic, and we decide what is viewed as "weird" (honestly, everyone is weird, if you were perfectly average in every way, you would actually, in a way, be weird)
I've been a dev for 7 years. I used a PC for the first 6 years and I switched to a mac the last year.
My experience with mac has been terrible. The file explorer is just horrible to navigate. It took me ages to find the way to go anywhere except the "favorite" folders. Compability with the remote linux-servers has been awful with broken keymappings and shortcuts. Using hardware from any other manifacturer is riddled with bugs. The machine is unable to adjust volume if the audio is passed through usb-c. And I routinely encounter bugs where I'm unable to interact with apps until I restart them. Everything which seemed to work by heuristics on a PC requires a lot of attention on my mac. I don't care if I get a floaty animation and bouncy icon if I minimize a window. I just want alt + tab to actually bring back the apps I select.
I am not getting a mac the next time.
I feel the same way about any machine that isn't a Linux laptop with fully implemented hardware support. I can't stand macos or windows anymore.
In Apple's defense though, they have better accessibility than anyone else - hands down. That's about all they do right IMO.
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I don't even know which way the split would go. Many people i know studying computer science first year have a macbook, in what seems disproportionate. Maybe just general university student bias? also apple walled garden* lol *on the iPhone
They told us we should have a linux or a mac in first year comp sci and if we didn't we should use the lab machines. Probably because they are both unix like operating systems.
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As an Old, I started with an Apple ][ and learned BASIC. We did get the classic B&W Macintosh computers when I was 12-13.
Yep, this study would have to divide things up by age. As a fellow member of the Oregon Trail generation, all my early computers were also Apple ][ and b&w macs. But then eventually by young adulthood it all turned into PCs.
I enjoyed a stint with Solaris in college (that’s SUN Solaris thankyouverymuch) which I consider my true intro to Linux/posix/whatever-ix.
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Wait, if "Linux"=autistic, what does that make us GNU/Linux users?
Keep in mind that autism is a spectrum
This schism exists in my household. Mrs. Warp Core had access to a Mac and went on to do non-computer things. I had a PC and went full-ASD/ADHD HAM on (what feels like) every iteration of commercial computer tech ever since.
I dunno, maybe it depends on the age. I grew up with a G3 PowerPC and system 9, and I did spend a little time with early OSX (panther). My schools had these terrible Athlon boxes that could barely run XP without blowing up, and as I was leaving high school they were trying to get them to run Vista. That gave me the early impression that Macs were just better, until I went to a vocational school with Ivy Bridge Dell laptops running Windows 7. A friend of mine convinced me to try Linux, and I was impressed with how much easier it was to set up for development, but I ultimately stuck with Windows hosts for gaming, and Linux VMs, then Docker, then WSL for development. I'm still trying to put in the work now for moving away from Windows entirely now that AI is here and gaming on Linux is better. I think maybe it might just come down to having the resources, because if I got to try all three with at least decent hardware, I would have made that journey a lot faster.
First home family computer was a Packard Bell, windows 3.1...was forbidden from taking it apart or messing with the settings.
First computer that I was allowed to mess with was a thrift store Commodor 64...
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Too bad correlation does not imply causation.
When I was 13 I installed Linux in Virtualbox on a Mac because for some reason thought dual booting would be harder, we did not have any non-apple devices in the house, I do not recommend, the performance was terrible (I probably had something set up wrong because it was really way worse than you would expect)
I have ended up on Windows with a Linux laptop for traveling, but will probably switch to Linux as soon as either:
- I get a new VR headset
- Monado gets decent controller tracking support
- It's 2026 and Windows with WMR support has stopped getting security updates
Then I will have crossed the whole mac->windows->linux pipeline.
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