Those god damn operating systems.

A lot of people ask me when they first meet me "PC or Mac?"

I'm not a big fan of this question for a few reasons. For one, it's rather binary and tends to sound mutually exclusive.

Apple may produce a fine computer from time to time. Hell, I use a MacBook Air because I like having a lightweight computer with an almost solid aluminum shell to carry around with me. Not a big fan of the fact of the culture that surrounds the manufacturer (which I feel crosses into fanaticism with most) but they built a laptop that has kind of held up and carried me along, although at some cost.

Microsoft functions a lot like nVidia in that they don't produce any real product themselves, they just enable others to do so. Be it circumstance or minutiae, Microsoft holds many of the cards still.

Slowly, I see a culture un-beholden by the operating system as more and more is driven by hosted services. If most people who added those little graphic gimmicks into YouTube videos had to actually re-render their video to get that in there, we wouldn't see floating boxes in the way. Instead, it's all server-side and remarkably painless to do.

Chrome OS will probably be a damn fine thing if some of the basic user questions can be answered in relation to consumer computing today. Such as "How do I download pictures from my camera?" If they push straight into a google service from the client computer, or some similarly smooth action then I imagine no issue.

"PC or Mac?" is a null and void question, because most users don't really care what their graphical user interface looks like. So long as they meet their exact list of desired tasks, it'll do.