That is also my experience based on a sample of roughly 50 people. It is around 98% because only one of the Mac users I know is a conservative. OK, so I hang around Silicon Valley. But it is a definite correlation. Apple management is a bunch of hardcore libs living in multi-multi-million dollar homes in the most exclusive enclaves of Palo Alto, Los Altos Hills, Atherton, etc, working hard to keep their exclusivity and keeping the riffraff well isolated from their exalted existences, other than letting them maintain their very impressive and large-scale landscaping.
I think that the cultural alignment with the leadership and its political perspectives is much more important than HW/SW performance, at least for the Mac aficionados that I know in the SF Bay Area / Silicon Valley. The Mac aficionados that I know in the working neighborhoods of my weekend existence in the Sacramento area spend much of our weekend get-togethers complaining about how things don't work and how their OS keeps crashing. When pressing my Silicon Valley buds I hear that yes, their Macs crash all the time, but they recover so nicely.
My samples are probably not representative of reality. For example, our video editing people use very high-end Mac platforms exclusively and what I see them do does blow me away. The home users have a lot of bad experiences, but they happily tolerate them because it's not evil Microsoft, but socially responsible Apple that's crashing their machines.
Again the Silicon Valley world is maybe not representative. What do you guys in the more normal parts of the country find?
Over here in Oklahoma 100% of the people I know using Macs are conservative. Heck, I’m probably the most liberal of the bunch, and here I am posting on the premier conservative Web site on the internet.
Moving forward the user base of Macs will move closer to the 50/50 split of the population. For so long Macs were the domain of liberals because they were best at jobs liberals were interested in. That is changing and so will the user base.
The home users have a lot of bad experiences, but they happily tolerate them because it's not evil Microsoft, but socially responsible Apple that's crashing their machines.
What a load of stinking pile of made up FUD. I have been using OSX Macs and administering several networks of OSX Macs for years. I have had maybe FIVE crashes in seven years among about 40 OS X Macs. Three of those were on my home machine when I was using OSX.1 SEVEN YEARS AGO. One of the professional medical offices I maintain has had 8 OS X Macs running 24/7/365 and has not had a single system crash in four years under very heavy use. The only time the computers are restarted is when I've installed OS updates or there has been a power failure that exceeds the battery back-up time. I will be upgrading all of them in the following week to OSX.5 Leopard.
I have attended the Sacramento Macintosh User Group meetings in the past and Macs crashing is NEVER the topic of conversation.
So, quite frankly, SFConservative, I don't believe you. What you relate is totally contrary to my experience and the experiences of many of my Mac using friends, most of whom are moderate to extreme conservatives. NONE of them complain about their Mac's "crashing." Not one.
OH, wait! Sorry. I had one client who's original 9 year old 400MHz PowerMac G4 (PCI) crashed a couple of weeks ago. This Mac had been originally been sold running MacOS 8.6 and was running OS X.4.11 Tiger when the hard drive failed. I put a new drive in and installed Leopard and it is running like a champ.
As for the political orientation of Mac users, the New York Times did a survey of Mac users among their readership about two years ago. They found that slightly more than 40% of the respondents self-identified themselves as conservative—IIRC, about 45% self identified as liberal or progressive—and that was among the readership of the New York Times, hardly a conservative bastion.
i will point out that conservative Mac users include Rush Limbaugh, President Bush, Karl Rove, Michelle Malkin, Mel Gibson, Tom Clancy, Malcolm Forbes Jr., G. Gordon Liddy, Dick Cheney...