Fandom Rivalry / Technology

• Another legendary fandom rivalry: Mac vs. Windows. Embodied and parodied in Apple's "I'm a Mac and I'm a PC" commercials. This also leads to a false conception of computer history of being mainly composed of Apple, Microsoft and Linux (much to the consternation of Commodore, Sinclair, Atari, Acorn, BSD, BeOS and UNIX fans), and idolizing their CEOs.
  • Those commercials are entirely biased towards Macs, as expected. How much Apple plays up the Mac's good qualities and exaggerates a PC's bad qualities is open to debate, though there are one or two more heavy-handed commercials in favor of the Mac.
    • Even though those commercials do have rather a Misaimed Fandom that sees the PC (played by John Hodgman in the US and David Mitchell in the UK) as a goofy, loveable underdog, while the Mac user is a posing hipster.
    • Within the Mac fandom, Apple Silicon vs. Intel Mac vs. PowerPC vs. M68K fans.
    • And the weird part? The guy who plays Mac in the commercials uses windows during his appearance as Matt Farrell in Live Free or Die Hard.
    • Even the ads themselves have recognized this and moved into Friendly Rivalry status.
  • Worth noting is that PC fans tend to see the additional complexity as an advantage, as the all-in-one, tightly integrated designs Apple has pushed for the last decade don't lend themselves well to upgrading or replacing faulty components.
    Many professional workstation users have derided the 2013 Mac Pro as an "overpriced trash can" that can't even support aftermarket graphics cards internally compared to the classic "cheese grater" Mac Pro/Power Mac G5 case design, and due to its age and unyielding price tag, have jumped ship to PC workstations. Apple even had to apologize to their creative professional userbase for the lack of Mac Pro updates and released the iMac Pro as a stopgap measure, though the all-in-one design with a $5,000 base price tag and no NVIDIA graphics options still isn't winning over the pro market.
    Then you have the "Glorious PC Gaming Master Race" types who hate Macs for similar reasons, being overpriced, underpowered machines that a custom PC build would gleefully turn into a Curb-Stomp Battle in performance terms, not to mention that macOS gets a mere fraction of the game releases that Windows does despite Valve's highly promoted port of Steam and several of their own games to the Mac. It's also worth noting that Oculus dropped Mac support for the Oculus Rift between the DK2 and first-generation consumer model because all of Apple's systems had GPUs that were too weak, and until Thunderbolt 3.0, no viable means to upgrade.
    • Things only got worse after Apple introduced their Metal graphics API and deprecated OpenGL support on its platforms. Metal, like Microsoft's DirectX, is proprietary and exclusive to Apple's own platforms, only without the large install base of gamers that makes DirectX worth it to developers, leading many developers to stop porting games to Mac. Later, open-source developers introduced a translation-layer between Metal, later version of OpenGL that Apple didn't support, and Vulkan, the more efficient successor to OpenGL, but it's still frustrating to many developers to not have any support for the industry-standard OpenGL and Vulkan from Apple.
  • Within Windows itself, Windows ME fans vs. everyone else, Windows XP vs. Windows 7 vs. Vista vs. 8 vs. 8.1 vs. 10 and now vs. 11 fans. It's that fragmented!
    • Even beta versions of Windows aren't immune to rivalry - post-reset Longhorn vs pre-reset Longhorn fans or Whistler vs. finished XP builds.
  • Earlier than that was the Amiga vs. Atari ST users.
  • And earlier than that was Apple ][ vs. TRS-80 vs. VIC-20/Commodore 64 vs. Atari 8-Bit Computers. In the UK the concurrent main rivalry was the ZX Spectrum vs. the Commodore 64
  • And within the Commodore fandom: VIC-20 vs. Commodore 64 vs. Amiga.
    • And within the Commodore 64 itself: UK/PAL vs NTSC/US fans. Aside from that there's also a rivalry between SID chips- the original 6581 vs the revised 8580, with fans of the former claiming that the latter fixed a Good Bad Bug that allowed the chip to reproduce PCM clearly and now sounds muffled when reproducing digital audio, while the latter claims that the former's bugs made game music not sound like what the original composer intended and that the ability to play digitized audio was an unofficial hack not endorsed by Commodore anyway.
  • And earlier than that was 8080/Z-80 vs. 6800 vs. 6502 vs. 1802 in homebuilt computers.
  • Linux fans are known to be very vocal about boasting their superiority towards Mac and Windows users, but Linux fans themselves are actually divided on several grounds itself. Distro wars (and by extension, package manager wars), desktop environment wars, vi vs emacs vs nano, Copyleft licenses such as GPL vs permissive licenses^note e.g. Apache, PHP, MIT and BSD licenses, initscripts (BSD vs SystemV vs systemd), X11 vs. Wayland, etc...
    • And speaking of Linux's Fandom Rivalry vs. Windows, there's a subset of said rivalry regarding PC gaming, thanks to Valve's Proton: Those on the pro-Linux gaming side argue that Proton makes it pointless to stick with Windows thanks to its ability to run the vast majority of PC games, while those who do stick with Windows argue that it's not as easy to run Game Mods or anything that's not on Steam, or that the small number of PC games that don't run on Proton still makes a big difference since that small number includes some of the most popular games out there like Fortnite, Rainbow Six Siege, Valorant...
  • Similarly to how many Linux fans look down on Ubuntu either for simplifying Linux or being the most popular distro, fans of OpenBSD tend to look down upon the (relatively) more popular and easier-to-install FreeBSD.
  • Adding to this are the "Browser Wars" with the heavyweight fight being between Microsoft's Internet Explorer (though recently, Edge seems to be in position to take its' place) Mozilla's Firefox and Google Chrome; Opera and Safari have smaller fandoms who are against everyone at once.
    • Even within Mozilla, there's a large split between those who want individual programs doing specific things (ie. Firefox+Thunderbird+KompoZer) vs. those who want everything in a suite like the original Mozilla client (read: Seamonkey). Heck, even Firefox has a split fanbase and has spawned several forks!
  • Even search engines aren't immune to this. The biggest fight is between users of Google, Yahoo, and Bing, but DuckDuckGo (which advertises better privacy) and Ecosia (which plants trees for every 45 searches) are in there too. Ironically enough, all of these are powered by Bing except for Google.
• It isn't just software. There's Intel vs. AMD for x86 CPUs and AMD vs. Nvidia (and now vs. Intel as well) for GPUs with the big ones, and more than likely much smaller feuds between vendors. And then there's Hard drive rivalry, which is still pretty a big one, even with the only three groups remaining (Western Digital^note who bought over Hitachi, who bought their hard disk business from IBM. Did we mention that Hitachi is the black sheep of the hard drive world except to it's small handful of fans?. vs Seagate^note who previously bought out Conner and Maxtor, the latter who bought out Quantum, then bought over Samsung after the latter split from the Toshiba-Samsung partnership, and Toshiba Data Devices^note who previously had a partnership with Samsung, only to split later when Samsung sold their storage division to Seagate), with Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics employed throughout. And the fans of each are still rabidly vocal. God help you if you're one of those who believed that the three brands are equally good- the fandom won't have it the other way and will barbecue you alive if you don't pick sides. The rivalry with power supplies, memory, and motherboards to an extent have died off. It's usually "just pick something from these companies".
• Don't forget the IBM PowerPC vs Intel Pentium feud! Though this one pattered out a bit out once Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel chips in 2005, but not before causing several small wars in the process and causing a split in the Mac fandom itself. Even today, there are still Mac enthusiasts arguing over whether Apple should have stuck with POWER-based Macs or if the move to Intel was a good choice.
• The Amiga community parallels this schism with whether the basis on PowerPC for "next-generation" Amiga platforms, specifically AmigaOS 4, was a good move, as the hardware required is rare, increasingly expensive, and older PowerPC Macs are generally not compatible, eliminating a much more affordable source of hardware for the new OS.
  There's also the greater debate between AmigaOS 4, MorphOS and AROS being valid successors to the Classic Amiga platform or not; MorphOS actually does run on many G3 through G5 Power Macs, and AROS even runs on IBM-compatible x86 PCs, making them far more accessible. However, some would say that the lack of the Amiga's signature custom chipset makes any of these successor platforms not a true Amiga, never mind that the planned Amiga "Hombre" project was a clean break with an A1200 on a chip solely for backwards compatibility.
  Finally, there's the new Apollo Vampire FPGA accelerator line to further divide the already fragmented Amiga fanbase, which instead opts for binary compatibility with classic Amiga software with an in-house-designed 68080 core that leaves the old 68060 accelerators in the dust, ReTargetable Graphics with HDMI output, and attempts to recreate an enhanced version of the AGA chipset within the FPGA, bringing AGA compatibility to OCS/ECS systems and advantages such as Chip RAM amounts greater than 2 MB. Some prefer this approach to advancing the Amiga, as it still relies on the classic Amiga hardware (though standalone Vampire V4 boards are in the works), while others say it's missing the point of using a vintage computer in the first place.
• And now, there is a increasing fandom fight between ARM and x86 CPU architectures! Yeah, that's now because initially Intel (x86 architecture) and now AMD are targeting the same market ARM (nVIDIA, Samsung, Qualcomm, etc) is going for: tablets and smartphones. And despite both architectures performing similarly, some ARM fans says that ARM is a better solution since it costs less than x86 and is far more easily licensed out than x86, which only Intel and AMD can legally utilize, and which Intel considers a competitive advantage for being the basis of the Wintel platform and the decades of software compatibility that brings.
  Some proponents of ARM are also playing the "ARM is RISC but x86 is CISC, and RISC is faster!" card, the same card played during the PowerPC Mac vs x86 PC era.
  On the other side, x86 fans say that they have the help of Microsoft Windows, and with that, x86 has more uses than ARM, on top of the CISC vs. RISC distinction being totally irrelevant since the Pentium Pro, which uses an internally RISC architecture with an x86 instruction decoder for backwards compatibility. Then there's the matter of how the classic "Can it run Crysis?" question can only be answered with an x86 PC...
• iOS vs. Android. The rivalry can make it hard to publicly admit having problems with your mobile device without being met with comments like "just switch to <other platform>!" In short, it's become the 2010s equivalent of the PC OS wars. Apple's keynotes in particular have turned into major chances for Android fans to rail on iPhones and their users for buying overpriced products with features that Android took up years ago.
  • Apple vs. Samsung (and to a lesser extent, Sony and other ACME Products companies).
  • And that's not all, whenever a chance arrives, both sides often take swipes with each other as much as possible.
    • Even within Android users, it's usually Google Nexus/Pixel vs. Samsung and everyone else.
      Google fans point out that they get updates well before everyone else, they have no bloatware and their phones don't lag, especially compared to Samsung. In general, it's like having an iPhone without Apple's restrictiveness. Their bootloaders are even unlockable, so long as you avoid buying from Verizon.
      Samsung fans point out that Google takes years to implement features Samsung has had years earlier, and often done worse (multi-windowing being one of the bigger examples), a lot of the alleged "bloatware" can be easily disabled and/or uninstalled, that Google's own apps can also be bloatware (some folks in the custom ROM community even opt for microG instead of Google Play Services for this reason), they still haven't removed the headphone jack, microSD slot, or added an ugly iPhone X-style screen notch, and in general, they want the Swiss Army knife of smartphones, not the iPhone of Android. This goes double for flagship Galaxy Note owners, as opposed to the more mainstream Galaxy S line.
  • And then there are the people who use Windows Phone/Windows 10....
  • Fans of Blackberry Classic vs. both Android and iOS.
    • Even within the Blackberry fandom there's a split between Blackberry Classic and Blackberry 10. However, while the Blackberry 10 fandom shares the same iOS users rivalry with Classic, they have a friendly fandom going on with Android users as Blackberry 10 devices are semi-Android friendly and can run Android apps. In other words, Fans of Blackberry 10 hate Classic for being a primitive OS lacking in functionality and it's fans for their stone-age ways of doing things and their borderline paranoid behavior, while fans of Classic consider fans of Blackberry 10 to be posers who would rather give up security for functionality, and the OS itself as yet another Android clone and is Blackberry In Name Only. This has gone completely off-rails when Blackberry announced that they're leaving the hardware market and would license out their OS to other phone manufacturers.
• Application and game programmers have sometimes arguments of what engine/code language is better. Some examples:
  • Flash vs. Game Maker. Flash and Game Maker have in common that they are both slow but easy to learn and to use. Flash exports .swf files, GM exports Javascript code that get's embedded in a <canvas> tag. It is quite easy to embed the output in webbrowsers, connect them with SQL databased and so on. But both party's do not want to see the potential of the other - Game Maker is known as being a 'engine only suitable for games like Mario'. Flash is to GM users known as 'a bugged code language that only works if you're lucky'.
  • Flash vs. HTML5, though it seems like HTML5 has won, owing to Flash's deprecation at the end of 2020.
    • Java Applets vs. Flash back in the late 90s and early 2000s. Although the acquision of Sun by Oracle and the constant exposure of exploits in the supposedly secure runtime in recent years has made Java Applets mostly relegated to corporate intranets and specific websites. Although back in the days, Java was also often criticized for being memory and CPU intensive.
  • DirectX vs. Open GL vs. Vulkan.
  • UDK (a free version of the Unreal Engine marketed towards Indie developers) vs. Unity (another free/low-cost engine that is also marketed towards Indie developers)
  • Irrlicht vs. Ogre3D
  • Kinect vs. Move vs. Wiimote.
  • Code::Blocks vs. Dev-Cpp.
  • C# vs. C++ (barely a rivalry, but it does sometimes happen - and since Unity uses C# and Unreal uses C++, it can tie into that rivalry)
    • Java/C# vs. every other language ever.
    • Java vs. C# is also quite common, too
  • Visual Basic .NET vs. people who think it is outdated.
    • Visual Basic .NET vs. classic BASIC (all caps, since it's a acronym).
  • GOTO and GOSUB-RETURN vs Structured Programming. While this rivalry is rare nowadays as the latter is now universally accepted and the former is only still relevant in Assembly Language, through the 60s and 70s this was a war fought between two very vocal programmer groups^note The group backing GOTO are those who believed programming languages should be left to real men and that people who cannot grasp the concept of GOTOs, tight optimization and self-modifying code are not worthy of being called a programmer, while the latter group believes that code should be clearly written and easily debugged at the expense of processing complexity, arguing that computing power doubles every 18 months anyway. The arguments put forth by the former can be found in an essay called Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal which is widely available online. The arguments put forth by the latter can be found in the article Goto statement considered harmful.
  • SQL vs. Access
    • SQL server vs Oracle vs other paid Database server software.
    • MySQL vs PostgresQL is another common one among open source fans.
  • .NET programmers (and the Microsoft stack in general) vs various open source communities
    • Building on this, Visual Studio (Microsoft's development IDE) vs. Eclipse vs. every other IDE is quite common
  • Perl vs. Python vs. TCL vs the new kid on the block, Ruby.
• vBulletin vs Invision Power Board vs XenForo. Fans of one tend not to be fans of the others and there's quite the argument over which is better forum software. Same goes for phpBB vs MyBB vs SMF in the free forum world and free forum software vs paid forum software in general.
• With regards to instant messaging:
  • The 1990s and 2000s brought us AIM vs. MSN vs. ICQ vs. Yahoo Messenger.
  • In The New '10s, this changed into AIM vs. Skype vs. Yahoo Messenger vs. Facebook Messenger when AOL bought out Mirabillis and merged ICQ into AIM, and Microsoft bought out Skype from eBay, and then subsequently retired MSN and forcefully migrated all it's users to Skype, and then Facebook decide to enter the market. There's also Google Chat, but almost no one uses that...
  • The 2010s, with the advent of IM services tailored for mobile devices, has Kik vs. WhatsApp vs. LINE vs. KakaoTalk vs. WeChat. The former two tend to be bigger in Western countries, while the latter three are more popular in Eastern and Southeastern Asia, although WhatsApp does also have a sizable userbase in Southeastern Asia.
• Keyboards: QWERTY vs Dvorak. The most common point of contention is whether switching from the more popular QWERTY to Dvorak is worth the effort to achieve the claimed increase in typing speed.
• Vacuum tube vs. Transistor fans debating over which one has a warmer and richer overtone.
• Even formats have those moments:
  • Vinyl vs. Edison cylinder fans.
  • Vinyl vs. cassette vs. Compact Disc vs. radio vs. streaming vs. MP3 vs. WAV vs. FLAC fans.
  • VHS vs. Betamax vs. Video 2000 fans.
  • LaserDisc vs. CED vs. VHD vs. VHS fans.
  • VHS vs. DVD fans.
  • DVD-R vs. DVD+R vs. DVD-RAM fans.
  • CD-R vs ZIP drives vs. Ditto drives vs. Jaz drives vs. floppy disk vs. USB thumb vs external HDD vs. external SSD fans.
  • DVD vs. Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD vs. HD-VMD vs. streaming fans.
  • PAL vs. SECAM vs. NTSC fans. PAL fans mocked NTSC with a derogatory name "Never The Same Colour" due to NTSC's aliasing flaws, while NTSC fans fired a Take That! at the former with the similarity insulting nickname "Pay Another Licence" due to PAL's strict licensing system.
  • Analog vs. Digital television fans.
  • Mechanical vs. electronic television fans.
  • HDD vs. SSD fans.
  • USB vs. SD vs. MMC fans.
  • IMAX vs. 16mm vs. 35mm. fans.
  • 7Z vs. ZIP vs. RAR fans.
  • PNG vs. JPEG vs. GIF fans. That's right, even picture formats aren't immune to this trope.
  • TXT vs. PDF vs. XPS fans.
• Nowadays, Sharp X68000 and Amiga fans argue about which 68k computer is the most powerful. Although the former has indeed more advanced graphics, FM sound hardware and more Arcade-Perfect Port games, the Amiga has excelled in the blitter functionality, pre-emptetive multitasking and PCM audio.
• The Internet caused a peculiar fandom rivalry between Nintendo Entertainment System and Commodore 64, arguing over what 6502 system is better. NES fans claim the C64 doesn't have games such as Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc., that NES has a better colour palette, ease of use, more expansion audio chips, and parallax scrolling. While those in the Commodore 64 fandom, fans claim the NES' audio hardware is inferior to C64's SID chip, that the C64 is a computer unlike the NES, that Super Mario Bros. has been ported to the C64, the computer has more onboard RAM, the colour and scrolling limitation didn't really matter due to clever programming and the NES doesn't really have that better graphics.