I have been given two Macs to use at different workplaces over the years, and I've never found them to be any easier or cooler to use than my PC. For certain applications, which I don't use, they may be superior, but since I have no need for those capabilities, it is indeed a waste of money for me to buy a machine I don't like using. My friends with Macs constantly harp on how reliable they are, yet they crash more often than my HP - which, now that I think about it, never has. And finally, the idea that Mac files are compatible with PCs is a myth. I waste more time at work struggling with Mac files sent to me with screwed up formatting than anything else.Yet when I send my files to them, no problem.

And this is pertinent to the article....how?

Let go of your hate.

I have a hard time believing that an HP never crashes. Also, most file formats are identical between Macs and PCs now.

I have an HP desktop and a MacBook air and it's true. Firefox never crashes on my HP but it crashes several times a day on my MacBook. I also use Matlab quite a bit and I've almost given up on using Matlab on my MacBook. The only reason I use a MacBook is because I work in coffee shops and libraries a lot and it has the best weight to screen size ratio. Also, the wireless on the MacBook sucks. If I happen to sit in a coffee shop that hasn't upgraded the firmware on their wireless router, I can't get onto the Internet. I have a 6 year old Sony laptop that can connect where the MacBook can't.

As for formats, I guess the only place where it would matter is for pure text files. For some archaic reason, new lines are handled differently in Linux, Mac and Windows. If you open text files from other OSs in TextEdit in Mac or WordPad in Windows, it shouldn't matter too much. With emacs in Linux, you actually have to know the commands to convert between the formats, but if you're already a Linux user, you probably knew that already.

In terms of file formats, there are gulfs of differences between macs and PCs, as the macOS often uses propeitary means to generate files whereas PCs do not. Probably the most pertinent is related to object embedding in software like Office. Office embeds files differently on macs vs. every other machine. On a mac, office uses quicktime to compress and embed images. Unfortunately, it uses a very propietary form of quicktime that is only found on the mac. Hence, if you improperly imbed a picture into a presentation and then transfer said presentation to a PC, the images would not show up and the formatting may be screwed up.
Office on a PC embeds objects properly, so you cannot screw up the formatting by going from a PC to a mac.

In fact, pure text files are the only case in which it does not matter since you can encode text files as binary data on most systems. The only issue there may be bigendian vs. littleendian, but since most equipment uses littleendian(except Sun I believe), this is not an issue.

Hmm, guess I've just been dealing with only plain text and pdfs for too long. Still, it sounds like Microsoft Office is the one being stupid there if it doesn't keep common file formats between OS builds.