I became an “Apple fanboy” while doing a film making course. The course used Macs for editing, and at the time (about 8 years ago now) they were really the most reliable editing platform. Unless you had a high end PC, your home computer would not run video smoothly enough to edit without choppyness and dropped frames. Every Mac had firewire too, making the capture smoother on that platform. When I got my own editing rig, it was a Mac.

I kinda lost sight of how I came to be an Apple user, and started believing it was the better OS, or the innovation that set them apart from their competition. I still believe OSX is miles ahead of anything Microsoft is currently selling, but recently come to realise what it was that REALLY made me proud to be a Mac user. For the last ten years they’ve kept moving.

I’m not having a go at Microsoft here, although to some degree they deserve it. I could never understand why some people perpetually bashed Apple, and stuck by Microsoft despite no new desktop products (worth mentioning) for at least 7 years. They had as many rabid fans as Apple, but for no good reason I could tell. More importantly, I couldn’t put my finger on why it irked me. Certainly I had come to realise that you could do the same work on both machines, and with a lot of new “internet based software” could almost run completely on Firefox (or Opera) on any platform and not notice the difference. Why did it bug me that people were so fanatically devoted to Microsoft when they had such boring desktop products.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced and proudly showed off their successor to Vista: Windows 7. Despite the lacklustre name, the product looks solid, and even has some new features that most people would not have seen in a Desktop Operating System before. I might even go so far as to say that I’m truly excited for it. Far more so than I was for the release of Vista.

It was at that point that I struck upon why it baffled me that people were so dedicated to XP. Why it bamboozled me that people felt the need to make excuses for Vista. I can’t understand why people are so stuck on old technology. Why they can’t see the inherent awesomeness of new technology. These people aren’t real technologists.

There. I said it.

With technology changing so fast, you can’t afford to be wedded to old technology if you want to keep up. I’m sure I’ll be accused of chasing shiny things, but I think it’s more than that. I’m not one to switch to the latest and greatest just because it’s new, unless it actually is the greatest. The balance here becomes evaluating the new technology and making a rational decision based on actual experience. A person who claims to love technology, but can’t see beyond the interface to see the inherent value in a new technology shouldn’t be saying anything.

Of course I’m not saying that you should give every new technology a free pass. This isn’t about loving something new becuase it’s new, but rather evaluating it based on it’s potential.