…every problem looks like a nail.

Why the rant? Well, a new mobile phone was due and I was bored by my iPhone. So as a matter of fact I could choose between the plague or cholera… ok, after Apple owned my mobile data the last 5 years it’s just fair to let Google have its share, too. Gasp! How could i!? 🙂

It wouldn’t be me if I would not mention ‘the good old days’. So let me divagate a bit:

In the long gone past, I was a avid defender of [enter the current favorite system here] versus the rest of the world, e.g. “C64 vs. ATARI XL vs. Amstrad/Schneider vs. Sinclair vs. Apple II” or “ATARI ST vs. AMIGA vs. PC (286 that was) vs. QL vs. Mac”. We spent hours to defend “our” system against other crap-computers and the same was true later on, when it came down to the OS arm-wrestling: Windoze vs. MacOS (we’re talking 7 here) vs. RISCOS vs. OS/2 vs. Linux (v0.94ish)… not mentioning 68k vs. x86 vs. ARM vs. Transputer.
Over the time I got more relaxed and maybe wiser -did I say that?!- and chose the mantra used in the headline: “If you only have a Hammer, every problem looks like a nail”.
When you’re young and financially limited you have to chose clever, or not, and then you’re doomed to stick with it until you can afford something better/newer… and because you’re stuck, you have to defend your decision with a knife between your teeth. Later you might get the idea, that it’s quicker to open & edit that damn document with Windows than converting it 10 times wasting an hour… and it’s just clever to use 3 lines of perl/bash/python instead of Batch-file kludges or HyperCard (remember that?).

That said: I officially quit OS/System/CPU wars. I pick what fits best for the job – that does not turn me into a fanboy of that choice.
Why? If you take a closer look at my examples given in the beginning of this rant, you might get the point straight away: I was just mentioning some of the available systems at those days. So the choice was big and with its possible combinations it was a huge offering to chose from.
Today, it’s very simple, mostly A, B or C: Windows, Linux/*BSD  or MacOS. iOS; Android or “the remaining 5% of the market”; x86, ARM or, mhh, MIPS perhaps. Boring. Very Boring. Yawn.

How about you? Are you still fanboy’ing about today-tech?