Here’s the deal: businesses have stopped caring about customers when it comes to selling their products.

That sounds pessimistic and counter-intuitive, right?

However, it doesn’t really matter in this day and age.

Most people are so viciously loyal to their brands, they’ll buy the newest product even if it is objectively terrible, or simply no better than the previous iteration.

I’m going to bash indiscriminately, so don’t worry, everyone’s favorite brand sucks.

Let’s focus on personal computers, since they have probably the most divisive demographics, and they’re pretty commonplace now.

Let’s talk Microsoft.

Now, Apple catches a lot of flak for being “elitist” and very protective of their intellectual property, but they get their own paragraph.

People also have failed to notice that Microsoft is starting to do just that, in their own sneaky ways.

Microsoft has been creating their own lines of devices now, the Surface models, to compete with MacBooks.

Along with these, Microsoft is quietly locking down a lot of applications and software to keep them exclusively to Windows, or at least as much as they can.

If you’re a gamer, you’ve probably heard that Windows is the best for playing video games.

This is true, but not necessarily due to quality.

Microsoft owns DirectX, which is a collection of interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially gaming and video.

DirectX is used for most video games these days, and the latest versions aren’t really compatible with other operating systems, such as Mac OS or Linux, so if a game is made with it, it’s going to be exclusive to Windows.

Older DirectX games (version 9 and back) can run on other operating systems, but not as well.

Microsoft also has a history of cutthroat business decisions.

They once bought out a competing company just to shut them down.

It’s also not very widely known that the Graphical User Interface, which Windows was hailed for doing “correctly,” was stolen from Apple.

However, Apple stole it from Xerox.

Speaking of Apple, where to start?

Some of the claims about Apple’s “elitist” culture do hold some water.

They obviously appeal with aesthetic and flair (which they don’t necessarily do poorly), but their price tags are atrocious.

A common argument, that many have proven to be true, is that you can build a Windows PC with the same performance as an iMac for significantly cheaper.

The only downside of Windows versus Mac is the security and efficiency.

Apple handles this in a way that is smart development-wise, but selfish in terms of open markets.

Most people are so viciously loyal to their brands, they’ll buy the newest product even if it’s objectively terrible, or just simply no better than the previous iteration.

Apple’s OS and framework are exclusive to the company, meaning they don’t allow any other applications written without their tools to run natively.

You need to jerry-rig it to do that.

Due to this, the applications that are written with their tools and programming languages run extremely well on Apple products.

Also, developers know exactly what kind of hardware will be used to run these applications since Apple has locked down their hardware ownership as well, since they technically sell the final product themselves, whereas Microsoft only makes the operating system.

However, due to this, Apple has grown to desire control over their “gated community” of software and hardware, resulting in some pretty strict terms of service that are violated as soon as you open a Mac computer. They can even be violated by installing certain software or bypassing certain restrictions to run or install other stuff.

It’s sort of totalitarian, but it’s almost necessary for the efficiency and consistency they want to maintain across their systems.

Linux is out there, and I personally like it a lot, but it still doesn’t have much support due to the difficulty in developing for it.

I won’t talk about it much more since most average users use it or have even heard of it.

Someday someone will care about poor old Linux.

The point is: your brand sucks, my brand sucks, everyone’s brand sucks.

That being said, we all also like our brands for some reason, so try to understand why your friend uses a Mac and hopefully your friend will try to understand why you use Windows.

Meanwhile, hug your Linux friends.

They get lonely.