Men are from PCs, women are from Macs

Women aren’t like men. Or so I’ve heard, because I’m not one afterall - I’m a bloke, Chris. And advertisers seem to know this about women. When you’re watching TV you know which ads are aimed at women and which at men. This difference set me wondering about Apple, Macs and women. If a woman designed a computer - including the OS -  would it be much more like a Mac than a PC? Furthermore, could Apple better leverage this advantage?

One difference between men and women - and this is a generalization, but a reliable one as generalizations go - is men seem to have an uncontrollable urge to to tinker, to know how things work. We men folk have to know how to fix things - or at least think we know. That’s why we love maps but won’t use them. We’ll read the map and learn all the different ways and means to get around but once we get behind the wheel it’s different. We don’t need the map, we know this stuff, we know how to get somewhere. Just don’t tell us to read the manual… errr… map. We take offense at that because actually we don’t mind getting lost - although won’t admit it when we are. Getting lost gives us a problem to solve. Something to fix. And then afterwards of course, we can say we never were lost.

My wife - and seemingly most other women - just want to get from A to B as simply and effortlessly as possible. And if she gets lost, she will read a map because she wants to get unlost as simply and effortlessly as possible.

It’s the same with computers. We blokes learn enough to be dangerous and then end up breaking them. But that’s cool - because we like fixing them. As a last resort we’ll look at the manual. Sometimes we might read it beforehand - well, skim it…

Guys just can’t help being geeks. Whether it’s being a computer geek or a car geek or whatever.

In my teens and early 20s I got more than a few appreciative remarks from girls about how they were glad I didn’t spend weeekends with my head under the bonnet of a car. What I didn’t admit to them though, was I spent my weekends with my head inside a computer learning programming, how to swap a CPU, tweak the BIOS and so on.

Women are the saner sex. They just want to use things. They don’t care how a car works, they just want to get from A to B. They don’t care how a computer works. They just want to get the report done for the board meeting.

Apple - and even us blokes who use them - tout that one of the greatest things about Macs are they don’t get in the way of what you are trying to do, they don’t require heaps of maintenance, they just let you get the job done as simply and effortlessly as possible.

Not to say Macs are perfect - my wife still finds things to confuse her. Apple does a fantastic job on the design of Macs and OS X but could they use even more female input?

Women seem to have better things to do with their time than learning how a carburetor works. Or how to tweak a BIOS. They want things that “just work”. Women are the ideal customers for Macs.

Should Apple be taking more advantage of this? Should they have a campaign such as “It just works”? Maybe an ad with hubby frustrated and losing his enjoyment of fixing the screwed up PC yet again and then his wife saying, “Enough of this, let’s get a Mac. They just work.”

Disclaimer: It’s hard to write this piece without possibly sounding sexist, patronizing or condescending. I promise it’s not meant that way - except maybe the dig at guys.