We’ve written a lot about what happens when an iPhone user switches to Android (and vice-versa) but it’s been a while since we’ve written about a longtime Mac user who has switched to using a Windows-based PC. Macworld’s John Moltz recently tried to buy a PC for his gamer son and he came away completely confused by all of the different options offered by Lenovo and other PC OEMs.
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“Pay a visit to [Lenovo’s] web store and try to figure out which laptop is the right one for you,” he writes. “Devices are divided into Professional, Entertainment & Gaming, and Student, because students would certainly not be interested in entertainment and/or gaming… The ThinkPad E line is described as ‘Stylish & Affordable Productivity’ while the ThinkPad L is ‘Affordable, All-Purpose Productivity’ (style is clearly at odds with all-purpose productivity). Some categories allow a touch-screen option, some don’t. Some have hinges that turn around, some don’t.”
There are two ways to look at this: The first way is to agree with Moltz’s assessment and say many Windows PCs are confusingly designed and branded and don’t give prospective buyers much of a sense of what to look for. The other is to say that having a lot of variety in the market is a good thing and Moltz just needs to do more to educate himself about what he’s looking for.
In fact, this is the same sort of argument we see among iPhone and Android fans: iPhone fans love the fact that they pretty much know what they’re getting when they buy a new iPhone and don’t have to worry about the quality of the product, whereas Android fans are more tolerant of having a wider variety of devices, even if taken together they’re of uneven quality.
Elsewhere in the essay, Moltz cites common problems with the PC user experience such as OEMs’ decision to lard up their machines with bloatware, even though he does acknowledge that Microsoft has wisely decided to start selling bloatware-free computers at its own retail outlets.
Read Moltz’s full essay on his experience trying to buy a PC by clicking the source link below.
