I just read two articles, consecutively, that I wanted to comment on. Both are good reads which respective points are not lost on me. But both conflate nomenclature and causes serious confusion as a result.
Tim Bray in Apple App Attrition: “I’m still OK with OS X, but the number of its apps I use is down to Address Book, iTunes, iMovie, and (until the microsecond I find an alternative) iCal.”
Tim, surprisingly, thinks that “OS X” equals the operating system and all its bundled software. The only software mentioned that could be said to be part of Mac OS X as such is Address Book, to which there are hardwired links from within System Preferences, and iCal, which is updated upon Mac OS X revisions. iTunes is indeed bundled with Mac OS X, but it builds heavily on QuickTime. (There’s no iTunes plugin for the web browser, for example.)
John Gruber said it best one and a half year ago: “[F]eeling the need to switch from Safari is a far cry from feeling the need to switch from Mac OS X. Using Firefox doesn’t make you less of a Mac OS X user.”
Perhaps what Tim meant was just the marketing-offered “Mac user”, stereotypically pursuing only Apple’s alternatives for any one task. Among those as technically capable as Tim, not much of them belong to that group.
Paul Thurrott in Zunestory: “The point here is that while it may be impossible for Microsoft to dislodge the Mac faithful from their iPods, that’s a very small group of people anyway.”
Paul, on the other hand, assigns “the Mac faithful” the party line of being the kooks holding up the iPod. Does anyone for a second doubt that there are many Windows users - or even Linux or *BSD users - who did not consider anything else than an iPod when they got it? Paul’s assertion is akin to calling someone who uses Windows “a Zune faithful”. There are a lot of Mac users that are also faithful to the iPod, but those, at least, should be called “the Apple faithful”, if anything. Or hell, I don’t know, how does “the iPod faithful” sound?
(Note: Paul may be referring to the fact that Microsoft does not offer a DRM-toting music store or music software for their (DRM-toting) Zune for Mac OS X. However, it seems unlikely in context.)