The Mac Cool Factor | Simo's Sagacity

John Martellaro of MacObserver writes, “Linux just doesn’t have the cool factor to make switching worth the risk, but the Mac does. That’s why Linux works in the enterprise where cheap and boring is okay, but not with consumers who have come to expect more.”

Yes, it may be less expensive to install Linux in a “consumer desktop”, but it isn’t going to work as well, or be as intuitive, because it simply doesn’t offer the consumer the applications they want and need. It doesn’t work well with the iPhone or the iPod. And on top of all those practical reasons, Martellaro says, “it doesn’t have that hard to define cool factor.”

The suggestion is that the tipping point is also about the difference between “cool” and “lame”. Is “good enough, and cheaper” really what the consumer wants? It’s sad, really, that we’ve all come to expect little more than “good enough” from most of the companies we shell out our money to. Maybe the continuing growth in customer-shift from PC to Mac is about the fact that the average consumer no longer wants to accept ” good enough”. They want quality, they want dependability, they want design, and yes, a little bit of “cool” goes a long way when thrown into that mix.