Platform agnosticism and my preferred platform

The debate over ones preferred platform has for a very long time felt more like a religous discussion more than anything else. Whether it’s PC vs. Mac, iOS vs. Android, or Windows vs. Linux, proponents of the various platforms tend towards an almost religious level of zeal for their preferred platform, and against the other platform.

From my point of view, the important question is “Am I able to do what I need to do on this platform?”. If the answer to this question is yes, then which platform that happens to be is utterly irrelevant. This forms the basis of my stance of platform agnosticism.

This is not to say that I do not have a preferred platform, which I would use, given the choice to do so. I do, and long-time readers might already know what platform that is. For a number of reasons, my preferred platform is that of Apple. I prefer a MacBook to a Windows or Linux laptop, and I prefer iOS to Android. Why, then is that my preferred platform?

• Integration works excellently
• Encrypted by default
• It simply works

Douglas Adams, ever the Mac enthusiast once wrote:

An international power supply is the device which means it doesn’t matter what country you’re in, or even if you know what country you’re in (more of a problem than you might suspect) – you just plug your Mac in and it figures it out for itself. We call this principle Plug and Play. Or at least, Microsoft calls it that because it hasn’t got it yet. In the Mac world we’ve had it for so long we didn’t even think of giving it a name.

While Macs were pretty good back then (remember, Adams died in 2001), they are leaps and bounds better today. My current setup includes a MacBook Pro, an iPhone, an Apple Watch, and AirPods. All of these are well integrated, and getting that integration up and running is a simple matter. For example, when I opened my AirPods case for the first time, my iPhone immediately detected them, and asked if I wanted to connect.

A similar thing happened when I set up my Apple Watch, which is now my preferred way to unlock my Mac – which happens automatically. Similarly, handoff of work in progress, quite simply works, intuitively, natively, and automagically. There are undeniable advantages to controlling the entire ecosystem one is working in, and Apple does that better than most.

I first started using a Mac back in 2010, and going on eight years later, I am still very happy with my preferred platform. This is not to say that other platforms are bad – they are not – nor that there is no fault to be found with Apple devices – there certainly is. This is simply to say this is my preference. Your mileage may vary.